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

associated with Smart Growth and controlling suburban sprawl, favors the return of such traditional features as front porches, backyard garages, multi-use buildings, and housing clustered near commercial service areas.

Of course, creating new green towns, ones that directly reconnect future generations to nature, isn’t simply a town design challenge. Part of the dilemma is that such settlements, to be truly green, should be connected to employment centers by transportation mechanisms beyond just the automobile—eventually even beyond autos with hybrid engines. No single community design will suffice; numerous, simultaneous approaches will be required, including green-urban infill, green towns, increased public transit options, and greater use of telecommuting and teleconferencing.

Ebenezer Howard would recognize such a settlement as a new take on the town-country, the Garden City of the future. Plans or trial projects for such towns already exist—more rural versions of Michael Corbett’s Village Homes project in Davis, California. For example, CIVITAS, a Vancouver-based, internationally recognized, multi-disciplinary land planning company, was engaged to create a visionary concept for the long-term sustainability of 325 acres of existing agricultural land known as the Gilmore Farms within an agricultural land reserve in Richmond, British Columbia. According to CIVITAS, the plan calls for two compact villages placed on existing farmland, organized around a series of public spaces including a market street. Farmland around the villages would use intensive farming techniques and grow specialty crops. “The concept also provides an opportunity to develop nature preserve areas in the form of ecology parks, wildlife viewing, environmental studies and sanctuaries.”

Another CIVITAS project, Bayside Village, in Tsawwassen, British Columbia, calls for an “ecological village: a small-scaled housing cluster with the ambiance of a cohesive country hamlet” with smaller “and more humane” road widths “than those in standard suburban subdivisions.” Native plant species and landscaping will provide new habitat for songbirds within the residential areas. The ecological village single-family residential neighborhood will be “set within vast areas of enhanced wildlife and bird habitat including cultivated agricultural fields, pastures, a nature park, a waterfowl marsh and a songbird buffer area adjacent to the foreshore.”

A skeptic might contend that such new towns sound better on paper than they would prove to be in reality, and that they are, in fact, euphemistic Trojan-horse developments that could open the countryside to further sprawl. Considering the spotty history of planned communities and new town developments, the skeptic would have a point. But if the approach is not piecemeal, if green urbanism principles are applied with the force of law and green-town development boundaries set, the result could be positive, indeed. At the very least, such concept towns remind us that there is more than one way to build a town.

Let me return to why such futuristic thinking is important to the relationship between children and nature. In our family lives, and our schools, and in all the environments in which we now live, we can do much—right now—to encourage the nature-child reunion. But in the long run, unless we change cultural patterns and the built environment, the nature gap will continue to widen. Moreover, the goal of this prescription must be not only to maintain the current level of health, but to dramatically improve it—to create a far better life for those who follow. We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the Earth while we expand our culture’s capacity for joy. The writer Peter Matthiessen has said, “There’s an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.” Such sorrow is understandable on one level, but inappropriate given that long horizon of the possible, of the regenerative, of a new frontier.

No future is inevitable. Those children and young people who now hunger to find a cause worth a lifetime commitment could become the architects and designers and political force of the fourth frontier, connecting their own children and future generations to nature—and delight. Am I out on a limb here? Of course. But that, as the saying goes, is where the fruit is.

A.D. 2050

The girl, whose name is Elaine, passes a row of public bicycles, and ducks under the branches of the pecan trees that ring the village. And suddenly she is in another world; she runs along the path through the knolls carpeted by wild onion, Indian hemp, columbine, and sky-blue aster—she knows the names of all these plants. She looks for tracks on the sandy path, and finds them: jackrabbit and quail. She places her hand over a coyote track, and compares the size of the toe marks to her own fingers.

She climbs one of the little knolls on hands and knees, holding her breath, and peeks over the edge, pushing aside milkweed. She sits in the grass and watches the sky and wonders if the clouds are moving or if she, on the earth, is turning. She reaches into her day pack and takes out her book. She lies back in the grass, and opens it, and reads:

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief . . .”

She feels the morning wind on her skin.

She hears bees.

A half hour later she opens her eyes and the clouds are gone. She sits up.

The light is different. On a ridge to the north, she sees one, two, now three antelope. “Pronghorn,” she whispers, relishing the feel of the word. They slowly turn their heads in her direction. To the west, Elaine sees the little electric combines moving out to seed the native grain. And far to the east she sees the movement of dark shapes. “Bison,” she whispers. “Buffalo.” She decides she likes the word buffalo more, and says it again.

While she has slept, the world has changed.

PART VII

TO BE AMAZED

A child said What is the grass? fetching

it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the