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

Could a new generation of settlers follow? We have seen at least one false start. In the mid-1970s, for the first time since 1820, rural areas began to grow faster, proportionately, than cities. Rapid growth is still occurring in small towns, especially those that have been anointed by major employers—say, an automobile manufacturing plant—or, more commonly, those on the metropolitan fringe, meaning within an hour’s drive of a city. Housing is cheaper there, so gas prices be damned. But it’s also true that in great stretches of rural and small-town America, the city-to-rural migration of the 1970s did not last. Economics was one reason; another was the fact that human beings are social animals. The buckshot urbanization of rural areas was simply too isolating. So today, sprawl rules, but the great migration to the farther reaches of America has yet to occur, and perhaps—as of now—that’s for the best. Too often, small towns invaded by urban expatriates lose their character and physical beauty to overdevelopment.

Still, history is full of false starts, and it is shaped by waves that came and receded and then returned in greater force. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, opening millions of acres to settlement. As of this writing, Congress is entertaining several bills similar in spirit; instead of offering land, one of the bills, which calls for a New Homestead Act, offers incentives for people willing to start businesses in those rural areas that have lost population over the past decade. The act provides tax and savings credits, seed money for startups, and repays up to half of recent graduates’ college loans—no small offering to the 40 percent of student borrowers who leave college with debt payments higher than 8 percent of their monthly income. Other incentives to move out of major population centers will likely be more powerful, such as the spread of wireless computer services (currently, the country’s largest regional wireless broadband network covers a 600-square-mile rural county, where the largest town has a population of only 13,200); the creation of a spate of regional airports serving smaller cities and towns; and a rising concern about terrorism in the larger cities.

Given these developments, families with children will continue to have several choices. They can, right now, move to a smaller city, such as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “The single best thing about living here is that everything is easy,” says sociologist Rosemary Erickson, who moved back to her native South Dakota from California in 2004. This was her second return; the first time was in the 1980s, when she operated her business from Davis, a hamlet a few miles outside of Sioux Falls. Sioux Falls is no small town, but it’s far quieter and arguably much closer to nature than the heaving megalopolises on the coasts, and the prairie and farms Rosemary loved as a girl surround it. Sioux Falls, she points out, has become “amazingly diverse, with Sudanese refugees and all the rest,” she says. “When I was a girl in Davis, there was only one black student.” People in Sioux Falls by no means feel isolated from the world. While retirees comprise much of the migration back to her area of the country, Rosemary does know families that have moved to South Dakota so that their children could experience a quieter upbringing, including a more direct experience of nature.

Weather is probably the greatest disincentive, but surmountable through more sophisticated insulation—some of it being perfected by green engineers—and better weather forecasting, along with the new popularity of manufactured residential storm rooms. “We have tornado shelters in all big malls. A lot of people say, ‘There’s a tornado warning; lets go to the mall!’” Rosemary says, laughing.

So we have a choice about the kind of cities and towns we will build, about the way population is distributed, about the values we bring to such political and personal decisions. We could, in fact, someday create a smaller-scale way of life in those parts of America that are now losing population.

Green Towns in the Countryside

The dream of green towns in the countryside is rooted in a rich tradition. Ebenezer Howard, the most important historical figure in urban planning, was born in 1850, grew up in small towns in England, immigrated to America as a young man, and failed as a Nebraska farmer. Arriving in Chicago in 1872, the year after the great Chicago fire, he witnessed the rebuilding of that city. During his years in America, his reading of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American utopians helped shape his views on how a better life might be achieved through town planning. In 1898, he published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, later retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow. His vision of what he called “town-country” remains valid. The three magnets of social organization, he wrote, were the town, the country, and the town-country, the latter combining the best social and economic features, and avoiding the downsides, of the first two. Thus came the Garden Cities movement, in its various versions.

Howard’s key idea was that groups of citizens would create a joint company to buy land in economically depressed agricultural areas and establish new towns with a fixed population of thirty-two thousand residents living on one thousand acres. Each town would be surrounded by five thousand acres of green belt. He expanded this idea into what he called the Social City: several Garden Cities linked by rail lines or highways. In the following decades, Howard’s theories were sometimes put into practice, mainly in England and America, and influenced suburban development. The problem now is that many of the elemental green influences were lost along the way; instead of garden cities, we got gated cities. From the developers’ viewpoint, fear sold better than green. Howard’s “town-country” concept never really blossomed, but in recent applications of New Urbanist thinking, the idea’s time may have arrived. New Urbanism, a community design philosophy often