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

1993, is an alliance of major Jewish and Christian faith groups and denominations. Its four founding partners include the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network. Gorman describes a growing, faith-based environmental movement—one that defies liberal or conservative stereotypes.

This coalition isn’t new. In 1986, I visited Whatcom County, Washington, a heartbreakingly beautiful farming region steeped in Dutch religious traditions. There, Concerned Christian Citizens, a non-profit group, campaigned against abortion and for the environment. “We have the ethic of Christian stewardship,” the organization’s director, Henry Bierlink, told me. “The American attitude toward the environment has been shaped by the Biblical edict to ‘subdue the Earth.’ But we believe that God gave us the responsibility to care for the land, not subdue it, that we are only visitors on the land, and that we need to pass it on with care.” Whatcom County’s culture religiously walked its ecological talk. Many farmers there refused to sell their land to developers, and instead worked with the Trust for Public Land to protect their green pastures forever. In a cover essay for the magazine Nature Conservancy, Gorman describes how this ethic is spreading, especially since 1990, when Pope John Paul II suggested that Christians were morally responsible for the protection of God’s creation.

Today, in Arkansas, when a synagogue celebrates Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish New Year of Trees, kids plant the seeds of native grasses. Meanwhile, Catholic bishops of the Pacific Northwest issue a pastoral letter declaring the Columbia River watershed a “sacred commons . . . a revelation of God’s presence . . . [that] requires us to enter into a gradual process of conversion and change.”

Some religious traditions might consider such talk blasphemous animism—nature worship. But in Raleigh, North Carolina, the News and Observer reports how one Baptist church’s “environmental mission group” sells worm-composting bins at the church’s alternative Christmas fair and holds a “kids and nature connect” camp. Places of worship around the country now offer courses in biblical ecology, where they teach the lessons of biodiversity to be found in Genesis. “The debate has moved on,” Gorman says. “It would be understandable for some people to hear the language of dominion and see it as causal of a rapacious attitude. But human beings didn’t need scripture to rape the natural world. Yes, it’s important to think in terms of stewardship instead of domination, but I have always made the point that given the power of human agency over nature now, we have dominion whether we like it or not.”

Just as many places of worship are going green, environmental organizations are increasingly likely to evoke the spiritual. The Nature Conservancy, for example, describes its land purchases as acts of redemption. The Trust for Public Land says it translates “the soul of the land into the soul of the culture.” Bill McKibben, author of the 1989 environmentalist classic, The End of Nature, has since suggested an imaginary newspaper headline that would sum up our age perfectly: “‘Humans Supplant God; Everything Changes.’” So what does it mean when Sunday school begins to sound like Ecology 101 and environmentalists (many of them church-allergic) begin to sound like street preachers? Good news for both.

We should not underestimate the power of this new synergy to shape the relationship between the next generation and nature.

Faith-based environmentalism can create strange bedfellows and powerful unions. In 2003, Gorman and a group of evangelicals launched the now-famous “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign, directed against gas-guzzling SUVs. In 2002, the National Council of Churches and the Sierra Club sponsored a joint TV ad opposing oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (That same year, the Senate narrowly rejected drilling in the refuge.) Potentially, places of worship could be more important institutions than schools in connecting the young with the natural world. “More and more people of faith, as they grow in their awareness of the connection between nature and religion, are bringing nature into the discussion,” says Gorman. “But you have to start with parents. First and above all is for parents to understand this connection itself. The future is not about designing curriculum. It’s about awakening to creation. Kids have to feel that this connection is vital and deep in their parents. They see through us all the time. They know what is fake and feigned. As the connection becomes more vivid to us, our commitment to it becomes more authentic, and children respond to that authenticity. The most important thing is the awakening. That joy of awakening and discovery is what it’s like to be a child.” The recommitment to the spirit-nature connection must be that kind of process. “And it can be. And it’s wonderful.”

What would Gorman say to Suzanne Thompson about her fear of children worshiping nature instead of the God who created it? Reflect on Genesis: “The purpose of creation really is to bring us—children and all of us—closer to the creator. As a parent, you don’t encourage children to experience nature because it’s pretty, but because your children are exposed to something larger and longer standing than their immediate human existence,” he says. Through nature, the species is introduced to transcendence, in the sense that there is something more going on than the individual. Most people are either awakened to or are strengthened in their spiritual journey by experiences in the natural world. “This is particularly true of personal spirituality, as opposed to theology—which is the work of churches, synagogues,” says Gorman. “And certainly the Bible uses the language of nature. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He lead-eth me beside clear waters. He restoreth my soul.”

The reconnection of spirit and nature is not solely the work of faith-based organizations. Many scientists argue that the practice and teaching of science must rediscover or acknowledge the mystery of nature, and therefore its spiritual aspect. In 1991, thirty-two Nobel laureates