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

collected from children indicate (as do Coles’s studies) that a variety of exalted or transcendent experiences are possible during childhood. Among the triggers are heartfelt prayer or more formalized religious moments; the result can be “a visionary episode, a dream experience, or simply an ordinary moment of daily life that suddenly became an entry point to bliss.” Aesthetics can be a gateway, too: witness child composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. Most interesting, however, is Hoffman’s finding that most transcendent childhood experiences happen in nature.

Testaments

Nature was the seed of Janet Fout’s spirituality, and she has replanted it for her daughter. When Janet looks back on her childhood in nature, she sees it not only as the source of her environmental activism—her work protecting the mountaintops of West Virginia—but also as nourishment for her own spirit. Her favorite place to visit was a dairy farm run by her aunt and uncle. There, her imagination and spirit took flight.

Off she would dash—to the barn, the henhouse, a hillside, meadow, or creek to explore the rich, natural treasure trove that lay before her. Whether she was watching the birth of newborn kittens or mourning the loss of a baby bird found featherless and cold on the ground, nature provided Janet with ample opportunity to feed her curiosity about life—and taught her about the inevitability of death.

“I still am awed by celestial happenings like comets, eclipses, and meteor showers,” she says. “And as I gaze on these heavenly wonders, I somehow connect to the countless humans or human-like others who did the same eons before my birth. The infinite cosmos and its mysteries help me keep my life in perspective. More than ever, the commonplace of nature fills me with amazement—every bird feather with its one million parts. As a child, I found unfettered joy in nature and still connect with my deepest joy beside a flowing stream or beneath a canopy of stars.” Janet says she senses something in nature beyond adequate description: “God longing for Him/Herself,” she says. Her grown daughter, though she lives in a far more urban environment, senses this presence, too.

Joan Minieri worked for several years for an interfaith environmental organization in New York City. Nature informs her spiritual life and her commitment to others, even though she lives in a busy city. Minieri’s testament underscores the need for urban nature, and more of it. Also a parent, she understands the necessity of parental enthusiasm for nature, and the need to be “intentional about nourishing it,” as she says. Her spiritual life is rooted in Catholicism, though in recent years she has also been practicing Buddhist-inspired meditation, which cultivates refuge in silence. “As parents, Frank and I see it as our responsibility to bring our children to nature, just as my parents saw it as their responsibility to bring me to church,” she says. “We teach our daughter, Alin, to pray. But connecting her with nature offers such an important touchstone and a context for her prayer, a place to learn about love and respect for all of life—to see, touch, and smell where it all comes from, and to understand why she’ll be called to do her part to take care of things.”

Minieri smiles and adds, “I hope that, as she grows, she will continue to so clearly and truly love bugs.”

For other parents, the spiritual importance of nature is best described as an ethical issue. Some parents see an experience in nature as essential to their children in that regard. For example, fishing is a controversial topic to some people, but others see it as one way to introduce their children to ethical questions about conservation, our relationship with other animals, and life and death.

This certainly rings true for Seth Norman, one of the country’s best fly-fishing writers. Norman introduced his stepson to fishing, an activity that offered a context for amazement—but at the same time taught his son not to romanticize or deify nature. When I asked him to describe his spirtual life in nature, he turned the question on its head. “Here’s one idea I wish that I had encountered a lot sooner: the more often I see savagery in the wild—mixed in, of course, with everything beautiful—the more I appreciate people,” he said. “Forests and deserts, I discovered to my vast confusion, were nothing like the Garden of Eden. Wild things killed wild things, and there was no justice in the way this happened. To my surprise, people couldn’t control much of this: it took me years to understand that my all-powerful father really couldn’t save some of the orphans I brought home.”

He also remembers asking some hard questions of God, as a child in nature. “I still do. Grasping the Grand Scheme is demanding for adults; for kids raised on Disney, it’s simply shocking to discover that it takes a bunch of Bambis to feed a Lion King, and that Mowgli’s wolves would eat Thumper and all his sibs. Eventually, most of us figure out that it’s people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics—and even the idea that nature itself is something worth preserving. We choose to be shepherds and stewards, or we don’t. We will live wisely—preserving water and air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we’re only beginning to understand—or we won’t, in which case Nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite, and utterly indifferent.”

Nature introduces children to the idea—to the knowing—that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist alongside their own. John Berger, who was born in London in 1926 and now lives in the French countryside, is known as an art and film critic who writes eloquently about how human beings experience reality, how we see. In About Looking, he writes that our fellow animals first entered the human imagination as messengers and promises, with magical, sometimes oracular, functions. Living parallel lives, animals “offer man a companion different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it