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

Mountaintop removal and valley-fill strip mining have decapitated five hundred square miles of mountains, buried one thousand miles of streams, and destroyed communities. Coal companies maintain that such mining is essential to the local and national economies, but many West Virginians and Kentuckians believe otherwise. Such mining often leaves behind denuded lunar-like plateaus. Coal slurry, composed of mountain debris and chemicals used in coal washing and processing, mixes with rain in these impoundments.

On October 11, 2000, one impoundment near Inez, Kentucky, failed, spilling 250 million gallons of slurry and wastewater (more than twenty times the amount of oil lost by the Exxon Valdez in the nation’s worst oil-tanker spill) to pollute and kill all aquatic life in more than seventy miles of West Virginia and Kentucky streams. My friend Janet Fout, one of the leaders of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), is fighting mountaintop removal. She is hopeful about the future of the environment, because of some recent OVEC successes and evidence of growing concern—as expressed by so many people in this book—about the connection of children to nature. She points to the adults she knows “who aren’t afraid to get a little mud on their shoes—new back-to-the-landers who have chosen to tread lightly on their own little piece of earth.” They live in very rural areas where they home-school their children. “The kids learn about the web of life because it’s tied to their own well-being. It’s not an occasional hike in the woods with these folks—it’s their life. The children are taught to value and care for the earth as though their very lives depend on it, because that is the truth of their lives.”

Most encouraging to her is that her daughter, like many of her generation, is also being exposed, “in a way that I never dreamed possible,” to global society. “Young people are traveling far beyond this country’s boundaries, being exposed to not only different cultures, but also, they are learning how our lavish, throw-away lifestyles in the United States are wreaking havoc outside our borders. These firsthand experiences, at the height of their youthful idealism, will undoubtedly spark new leaders, who will not only do battle to save more of our natural world, but also take a stand for greater justice for all people.

“While my personal social and environmental consciousness was fueled by experiences in the natural world and reading biographies of people who made a difference, I believe that a passion to save the Earth and its people will spring from these global experiences. Young people are connecting more and more with others across the globe. My daughter can already speak directly to a young person in Buenos Aires or Katmandu via the Internet—without intermediation. She can get the truth straight from the horse’s mouth in a matter of seconds. So, I’m hopeful.”

I hope Janet is right, but I believe that her optimism will prove valid only with a far greater societal commitment to the bond between our young and the natural world—a commitment that goes beyond today’s environmentalism. While she fights mountaintop removal in West Virginia, strip miners of a different sort are at work in my backyard. Mammoth, rumbling graders slice away the natural curves of the land; this is, in effect, the strip-mining of San Diego. In larger building projects, several earthmovers typically remove ninety thousand cubic yards in a day. Stack this dirt, in cubic yards, and the result would be a tower reaching fifty-one miles into the air; all in a day’s work, all for one development. This stripping of the landscape is the first stage in the creation of a new kind of urban place in which everything is graded and riveted by human hands. Unless a different road is chosen, these are the neighborhoods in which generations of American children will grow up.

Speaking with college students during the research for this book did give me hope. When the issue of nature’s role in health—physical, mental, and spiritual—was introduced into the conversation, the tone changed; what often began as a fatalistic, intellectual discussion about the hole in the ozone layer quickly turned personal. Some students approached me to say they had never thought about the fate of the environment in such a personalized, direct way. I sense that these young people, who belong to what could be considered the first de-natured generation, hunger for a greater purpose. Some of these students wrote me later to describe how the conversation with their classmates about children and nature had moved them. Even dormant, the seed of nature grows with just a little water.

Perhaps, as the years go by, these young people will realize their sense of purpose in this cause, and dedicate their career skills to it. Not just as a matter of ideology, or even survival, but because they see the potential joy that they and their own children could share someday, as could many of us—if we act quickly.

23. While It Lasts

IT SEEMS LIKE just the other day . . .

The boys are small. We’re staying in a three-room cabin beside the Owens River on the east slope of the Sierras. We can hear the October wind move down from the mountains. Jason and Matthew are in their beds, and I read to them from the 1955 juvenile novel Lion Hound, by Jim Kjelgaard. I have had this book since junior high. I read: “When Johnny Torrington awoke, the autumn dawn was still two hours away.

“For five luxurious minutes he stretched in his warm bed, the covers pulled up to his chin while he listened to the wind blowing through the bedroom’s open window. Though the wind was no colder than it had been yesterday, it seemed to have a quality now that had been lacking then.” My younger son’s eyes, made larger by strong, round glasses, widen. The older boy, Jason, tucks his face under the blanket, where he can surely see the lion circling.

The next evening, after Matthew goes into town with