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

born plastic-wrapped. This is not the kind of experience I would have wanted for my children, but I have had a different life.

Few of us miss the more brutal aspects of raising food. For most young people, however, memory supplies no experience for comparison. More young people may be vegetarians or consume food from the health food store, but fewer are likely to raise their own food—especially if the food is an animal. In less than a half century, the culture has moved from a time when small family farms dominated the countryside—when Nick’s way of understanding food was dominant—to a transitional time when many suburban families’ vegetable gardens provided little more than recreation, to the current age of shrink-wrapped, lab-produced food. In one way, young people are more aware of the sources of what they eat. The animal-rights movement has taught them about the conditions within, say, poultry factory farms. It’s probably no coincidence high school and college students are adopting vegetarianism in increasing numbers. Such knowledge, however, does not necessarily mean that the young are personally involved with their food sources.

• The end of biological absolutes. Are we mice or are we men? Or both?

The young are growing up in an era without biological absolutes. Even the definition of life itself is up for grabs.

One morning in 1997, people around the world opened their newspapers to see a disturbing photograph of a live, hairless mouse with what appeared to be a human ear growing from its back. The creature was the product of a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had introduced human cartilage cells into an earlike scaffold of biodegradable polyester fabric implanted onto the back of the mouse. The scaffold nourished the ersatz ear.

Since then, one headline after another has announced some potential blending of machines, humans, and other animals. The implications have evaded the public for two decades, according to the International Center for Technology Assessment, a nonprofit, bipartisan organization that assesses technological impacts on society. Human genes—including those for human growth and nerves—have been inserted into rats, mice, and primates to create creatures called chimera. These new creatures are to be used primarily for medical research, but some scientists seriously discuss the possibility of chimera someday existing outside the lab. In 2007, the chairman of the Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and his colleagues created the world’s first human-sheep chimera, which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs. This line of research may lead to the common use of animal organs for human transplant surgeries.

Think what it means for children to grow up now, and how different their experience of nature and definition of life is, or soon will be, from the experiences of us adults. In our childhood, it was clear enough when a man was a man and a mouse was a mouse. Implicit in some of the newest technologies is the assumption that there’s little difference between living and nonliving matter at the atomic and molecular level. Some see this as one more example of turning life into a commodity—the cultural reduction that turns living bodies into machines.

As the twenty-first century dawned, scientists at Cornell University reported building the first true nanomachine—near-microscopic robot—capable of movement; the minuscule robot used a propeller and motor and drew power from organic molecules. This development opened “the door to make machines that live inside the cell,” one of the researchers said. “It allows us to merge engineered devices into living systems.” At Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, a scientist predicted that a system of “massively distributed intelligence” would vastly increase the nanorobots’ ability to organize and communicate. “They will be able to do things collectively that they can’t do individually, just like an ant colony,” he said. Around the same time, an entomologist in Iowa created a machine combining moth antennae and microprocessors that sent signals of different pitches when the antennae picked up the scent of explosives. Researchers at Northwestern University created a miniature robot equipped with the brain stem of a lamprey eel. And a Rockville, Maryland, company engineered bacteria that could be functionally attached to microchips; the company called this invention “critters on a chip.”

We can no longer assume a cultural core belief in the perfection of nature. To previous generations of children, few creations were as perfect or as beautiful as a tree. Now, researchers flood trees with genetic material taken from viruses and bacteria to make them grow faster, to create better wood products, or to enable trees to clean polluted soil. In 2003, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded researchers to develop a tree capable of changing colors when exposed to a biological or chemical attack. And the University of California promoted “birth control for trees,” a genetically engineered method of creating a “eunuch-tree that spends more of its energy making wood and not love.”

For baby boomers, such news is fascinating, strange, disturbing. To children growing up in the third frontier, such news is simply more hair on the dog—an assumed complexity.

• A hyperintellectualized perception of other animals

Not since the predominance of hunting and gathering have children been taught to see so many similarities between humans and other animals, though now those similarities are viewed in a very different, more intellectualized way.

This new understanding is based on science, rather than myth or religion. For example, recent studies reported in the journal Science describe how some nonhuman animals compose music. Analyses of songs of birds and humpback whales show they use some of the same acoustic techniques, and follow the same laws of composition, as those used by human musicians. Whale songs even contain rhyming refrains, and similar intervals, phrases, song durations, and tones. Whales also use rhyme in the way we do, “as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material,” the researchers write. According to their study, whales physiologically have a choice: they could use arrhythmic and