Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

of that original migration remain, the 1960s agrarian movement neither succeeded nor failed, but, instead, evolved: into environmentalism, into a focus on sustainable communities, and into the simplicity movement.

In the early 1980s, another trend seemed to be on the verge of changing the face of rural America. The 1980 Census showed that the nation’s population was less concentrated; in addition to the sprawl of the suburbs, more Americans were moving to rural areas than to high-density older cities. With the advent of the personal computer, both farmers and upscale information workers could suddenly imagine themselves living in a new Eden, where the best of the rural and urban worlds could be linked by modem. Some Americans realized that dream, but two realities intruded: one was that when people moved to small towns, they generally brought their urban expectations and problems, including suburban sprawl, with them; second, the city-to-small-town movement proved to be a demographic blip. A few small towns were transformed, but most continued to lose population—particularly in the Great Plains. Certainly no back-to-the-land rush followed.

Yet, all the elements of desire remain, and a new literature of sustainable community design has since emerged. A new back-to-the-land movement may be possible, considering the densification of suburbia and its failure to deliver on its original promise of increased natural surroundings; new research showing the necessity of nature to health; and a new realization that dramatic, visionary change will be necessary if tomorrow’s children are to experience a direct connection to nature. The green urbanism of Western Europe and parts of the United States helps to point the way, by showing that the improbable is possible. We are no longer talking about retreating to rural communes, but, rather, about building technologically and ethically sophisticated human-scale population centers that, by their very design, reconnect both children and adults to nature.

Brave New Prairie

The girl is glad that her family moved here from Los Angeles. Her memories of that city and its congestion and the smell of the air are beginning to fade. She did not even mind the long winter, when the snow built up in drifts and the wind blew the snow dry, so that even after the snow stopped falling from the clouds, the blizzard continued. She loved watching that from the window of her bedroom, surrounded by her books and drawing paper.

One night, her father woke her in the middle of the night and led her outside under the stars, and said, “Look.” She saw lightning on the horizon, and the great river of light above. “Lightning and the Milky Way,” said her father. His hands were on her shoulders. “Amazing.” She liked the way he said that word, softly, without saying anything else until she was tucked back in bed.

Now she is up moving again, to the edge of the village . . . .

PROFESSOR DAVID ORR describes what he believes is a paradigm shift in “design intelligence” comparable to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He calls for a “higher order of heroism,” one that encompasses charity, wildness, and the rights of children. As he defines it, a sane civilization “would have more parks and fewer shopping malls; more small farms and fewer agribusinesses; more prosperous small towns and smaller cities; more solar collectors and fewer strip mines; more bicycle trails and fewer freeways; more trains and fewer cars; more celebration and less hurry . . .” Utopia? No, says Orr. “We have tried utopia and can no longer afford it.” He calls for a movement of “hundreds of thousands of young people equipped with the vision, moral stamina, and intellectual depth necessary to rebuild neighborhoods, towns, and communities around the planet. The kind of education presently available will not help them much. They will need to be students of their places and competent to become, in Wes Jackson’s words, ‘native to their places.’”

Several years ago, I visited Wes Jackson at the Land Institute on the Kansas prairie near Salina. An admiring Atlantic profile once described him as an intellectual descendant of Thoreau, and possibly as important. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called genius award—Jackson established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University–Sacramento. Restless by nature, and increasingly dismayed by what he considered the dead-end, anti-environment direction of agriculture, he and his wife, Dana, came home to Kansas and created the Land Institute, a research institution linked to the nation’s Land Grant agricultural colleges and surrounded by hundreds of acres of native prairie grasses and plant-breeding plots. For over two decades, Jackson has been one of the most prominent voices arguing for the resettling of the Great Plains, albeit in an entirely new way. Some consider Jackson outrageously radical, the John Brown of rural America. (His great-grandfather rode with the abolitionist Brown.) He wants to emancipate the land and the rest of us along with it. His vision describes a world where families would return to a more natural existence, but avoid the mistakes of past back-to-the-land movements.

He claims that agriculture as we know it is a grand mistake, a “global disease,” and that the plowshare may have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword. In his office overlooking rolling hills and fields of prairie grasses, he leans forward and says, “I’m trying to build a new agriculture that’s based on the model of the prairie.” Jackson, a large and imposing figure (described by one writer as a cross between the prophet Isaiah and a bison) adds, “But we can’t stop there: we need a human economy based on the prairie, on nature.” According to Jackson, the natural prairie of perennial grasses that once held the top-soil tight is now tilled regularly, loosening the soil, and as a result the nation’s legacy of precious topsoil is floating downstream and turning to sediment. Streams and rivers throughout the Midwest run unnaturally muddy. Erosion is ripping away soil at a rate twenty times natural replenishment, even faster than