Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

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Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Page 16

by Louv, Richard


  I was glad to find a group of kids who seemed to enjoy nature as much as I had, but as they spoke, it became clear that, for nearly half of them, their favorite interaction with nature was vehicular, on small four-wheel ATVs, or “quads.” “My dad and me ride in the desert and most of the time we don’t follow the tracks. My dad races off-road cars. He says it’s cool to go out there even if you’re on a track because you can still see animals—and also it’s fun to race.” Another boy: “Every August we go to Utah, and my mom’s friend up there has three quads; we ride for the fun of it but mostly to see animals like deer and skunk at night, and if you leave fish guts and go out at night you’ll see, like, five black bears come out. It’s cool.” A third boy: “We go to the desert every weekend and they have races, there’s one hill that nobody rides on because it’s rocky, so we changed it so you go up, then jump off these cliffs; and up there we’ll see snake holes and snakes. On hot days we go out and hunt for lizards.” And a girl, displaying no sense of irony, added: “My dad had a four-wheel-drive truck and we go out in the desert, not out in nature or anything.”

  After the bell rang and the students left, Jane Smith, a teacher at the school for five years, and a social worker before that, raised her hands in exasperation. “It always amazes me. Most of these students don’t make the connection that there’s a conflict between ATVs and the land. Even after this project we did a week on energy conservation, and they didn’t get it. Just didn’t see it—and they still don’t. Every weekend, Alpine empties out. Families head for the desert and the dunes. And that’s the way it is.”

  Some of these young people, and their parents, are more likely to know the brand names of ATVs than the lizards, snakes, hawks, and cacti of the desert. As my friend, biologist Elaine Brooks, has said, “humans seldom value what they cannot name.” Or experience. What if, instead of sailing to the Galápagos Islands and getting his hands dirty and his feet wet, Charles Darwin had spent his days cooped up in some office cubicle staring at a computer screen? What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew its biological name? Did it exist?

  “Reality is the final authority; reality is what’s going on out there, not what’s in your mind or on your computer screen,” says Paul Dayton, who has been seething for years about the largely undocumented sea change in how science—specifically higher education—perceives and depicts nature. That change will shape—or distort—the perception of nature, and reality, for generations to come. Dayton is a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. He enjoys a worldwide reputation as a marine ecologist and is known for his seminal ecological studies, which he began in the 1960s, of the benthic (sea bottom) communities in the Antarctic. The Ecological Society of America has honored Dayton and colleagues with the prestigious Cooper Ecology Award—marking a first for research of an oceanic system—for addressing “fundamental questions about sustainability of communities in the face of disturbance along environmental gradients.” In 2004, the American Society of Naturalists presented him with the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award.

  Now, he sits in his office on a rainy spring day staring at the Pacific Ocean, dark and cold beyond the Scripps Pier. He has a terrarium in the room, where he keeps a giant centipede named Carlos, to whom Dayton feeds mice. Dayton approaches nature with a sense of awe and respect, but he doesn’t romanticize it. When he was growing up in snow-clogged logging camps, the family didn’t eat if his father didn’t hunt. A compact, athletic man with graying hair, an infectious smile, and skin burnished by cold wind and hot sun, Dayton must sometimes feel as if he has slept through a long, hard Arctic night, and awakened in a foreign future in which nothing is named and nature is sold in stores or deconstructed into pure math. He tells me that most of his elite graduate students in marine ecology exhibit “no evidence of training in any type of natural history.” Few upper-division ecology majors or undergraduates in marine ecology “know even major phyla such as arthropods or annelids.”

  Sitting a few feet away from him (and farther from Carlos), Bonnie Becker, a National Park Service marine biologist at Cabrillo National Monument, says Dayton’s view is accurate. Recently, she realized that—despite her prior training—she could identify few of the more than one thousand marine invertebrate species that live off Point Loma. So she set up an informal tutoring group, mostly students teaching other students. “Word has gotten out,” she says. “You know, have a beer and teach me everything you know about limpets.” The people who name the animals, or even know the names, are fast becoming extinct. In San Diego and Orange counties, no more than a handful of people can come close to naming a significant number of marine invertebrates, and these are mainly museum workers and docents, and a few local government workers who monitor wastewater treatment and sewage outfalls. These people have little opportunity to pass on their knowledge to a new generation. “In a few years there will be nobody left to identify several major groups of marine organisms,” Dayton says. “I wish I were exaggerating.”

  What we can’t name can hurt us. “A guy in Catalina sent me photos of a snail he found,” Dayton says. “The snail is moving north. It’s not supposed to be where the guy found it. Something is going on with this snail or with its environment.” Global warming? Maybe. “But if you don’t know it’s an invasive species, then you detect no change.” It’s easy enough to blame the public schools for a pervading ignorance, but Dayton places much of the responsibility on the dominance of molecular biology in higher education. Not that he has anything against molecular biology, and not that he doesn’t encounter professors who buck the trend. But, he says, the explicit goal of the new philosophy of modern university science education is to get the “ologies”—invertebrate zoology, ichthyology, mammalogy, ornithology, and herpetology—“back in the nineteenth century where they belong.” Shortly after I spoke with Paul Dayton at his Scripps office, he presented a paper, now in high demand as a reprint, at the American Society of Naturalists Symposium. In it he underscores the greater threat:

  The last century has seen enormous environmental degradation: many populations are in drastic decline, and their ecosystems have been vastly altered. . . . These environmental crises coincide with the virtual banishment of natural sciences in academe, which eliminate the opportunity for both young scientists and the general public to learn the fundamentals that help us predict population levels and the responses by complex systems to environmental variation. . . . The groups working on molecular biology and theoretical ecology have been highly successful within their own circles and have branched into many specialties. These specialists have produced many breakthroughs important to those respective fields. However . . . this reductionist approach has contributed rather little toward actual solutions for the increasingly severe global realities of declining populations, extinctions, or habitat loss. . . . We must reinstate natural science courses in all our academic institutions to insure that students experience nature first-hand and are instructed in the fundamentals of the natural sciences.

  What specifically, I asked Dayton, can be done to improve the situation? His answer was not hopeful. “Not only is there a huge elitist prejudice against natural history and for microbiology, [but] simple economics almost rule out a change, because good natural history classes must be small.” Nonetheless, he hopes that greater public knowledge about the generational nature deficit will encourage politicians to “start demanding that universities teach the fundamentals of biology and explicitly define these fundamentals to include real natural history.”

  Unfortunately, finding anybody with enough natural history knowledge to teach such classes will be difficult. Dayton suggests that higher education “offer the courses and hire young professors eager to do the right thing” and organize the older naturalists, fading in number, to mentor the young students “never offered the opportunity to learn any natural history.” At least one organization, the Western Society of Naturalists, has come forward with support for the training of you
ng naturalists. If education and other forces, intentionally or unintentionally, continue to push the young away from direct experience in nature, the cost to science itself will be high. Most scientists today began their careers as children, chasing bugs and snakes, collecting spiders, and feeling awe in the presence of nature. Since such untidy activities are fast disappearing, how, then, will our future scientists learn about nature?

  “I fear that they will not,” says Dayton, staring out at that lost horizon. “Nobody even knows that this wisdom about our world has been driven from our students.”

  RASHEED SALAHUDDIN, A high school principal who heads my local school district’s one-week outdoor-education program, sees the corrosive effect of nature-fear. “Too many kids are associating nature with fear and catastrophe, and not having direct contact with the outdoors,” he says. Salahuddin brings sixth-graders to the mountains and shows them the wonder. “Some of these kids are from Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. They view the outdoors, the woods, as a dangerous place. They associate it with war, with hiding—or they view it in a solely utilitarian way, as a place to gather firewood.”

  Inner-city kids of all ethnic backgrounds show similar responses, he says. Some have never been to the mountains or the beach—or the zoo, even though it’s within sight of their homes. Some of them spend their entire childhood inside an apartment, living in fear. They associate nature with the neighborhood park, which is controlled by gangs. “What does this say about our future?” asks Salahuddin. “Nature has been taken over by thugs who care absolutely nothing about it. We need to take nature back.”

  12. Where Will Future Stewards of Nature Come From?

  [What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

  —NATURALIST ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE

  RECENTLY, I ASKED A committed and effective environmentalist—a person active in the creation of Southern California’s ocean-to-mountains San Dieguito River Park—this question: When the park is completed, and the vast stretches of land and water are preserved, how will kids play in it?

  “Well, they’ll go hiking with their parents . . .” He paused.

  Would a kid be able to wander freely on this land, and, say, build a tree house? My friend became pensive.

  “No, I don’t think so—I mean, there are plenty of more constructive ways to experience nature.” When asked how he first interacted with the outdoors, the environmentalist answered, sheepishly, “I built forts and tree houses.”

  He understands the paradox here, but does not know quite what to do about it. Many of the traditional activities in nature are destructive. To some people, building a tree house or a fort in the woods is not much different than running quads across the dunes. The difference is one of degree: one way of experiencing joy in nature excites the senses, the other way drowns the senses in noise and fumes, and leaves tracks that will last thousands of years.

  Working through such distinctions is not easy, but as the care of nature increasingly becomes an intellectual concept severed from the joyful experience of the outdoors, you have to wonder: Where will future environmentalists come from?

  If environmental groups, along with Scouting and other traditional outdoors-oriented organizations, wish to pass on the heritage of their movement, and the ongoing care of the earth, they cannot ignore children’s need to explore, to get their hands dirty and their feet wet. And they must help reduce the fear that increasingly separates children from nature.

  Until recently, most environmental organizations offered only token attention to children. Perhaps their lack of zeal stems from an unconscious ambivalence about children, who symbolize or represent overpopulation. So goes the unspoken mantra: We have met the enemy and it is our progeny. As Theodore Roszak, author of The Voice of the Earth, has said: “Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people. . . . I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely . . . [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don’t shame them further.”

  That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident—but more often than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world. One often overlooked value of children is that they constitute the future political constituency, and their attention or vote—which is ultimately based more on a foundation of personal experience than rational decision-making—is not guaranteed.

  Take, as just one example, our national parks.

  Welcome to Matrix National Park

  To a new generation, the idea of camping at Yosemite is a quaint notion and brings to mind those ancient reruns of Lucy, Desi, Fred, and Ethel banging around in their Airstream trailer. Some of the largest parks are reporting a peculiar drop-off in attendance over the past few years—a trend that predates the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Such a decrease would seem to be good news for overcrowded parks choking on exhaust fumes. But there’s a hidden, long-term danger.

  First, the numbers. Overall visits to the national park system, which had grown steadily since the 1930s, dropped approximately 25 percent between 1987 and 2003. With 3.4 million visitors in 2006, Yosemite National Park drew nearly 20 percent fewer people than its peak attendance ten years earlier, this despite California adding 7 million people in that period. The number of visitors topped out at the Grand Canyon in 1991, Yellowstone in 1992, and Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park in 1995. Mount Rainier National Park attendance dropped from 1.6 million visitors in 1991 to 1.3 million in 2002. Since the late 1980s, the number of Carlsbad Caverns National Park visitors plummeted by nearly half.

  The most important reason for the decline, I believe, is the break between the young and nature—the transition from real-world experience to virtual nature. In 2006, Oliver Pergams, a conservation biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Patricia Zaradic, a research associate, analyzed the falling numbers. They reported that 97.5 percent of the drop in attendance is due to the increased time Americans spend plugged into electronics. They found that, in 2003, the average American devoted 327 more hours to electronic pursuits than he or she did in 1987. Pergams and Zaradic warn of what they call “videophilia”—a shift from loving streams (biophilia) to loving screens. But a Northern Arizona University study of the nation’s parks names two central barriers: shortage of family time and a widely held perception that parks are for viewing scenery, period. Other reasons include shorter vacations; the shrinking American road trip (from 3.5 to 2.5 days); a decline in park budgets and services; and increased entrance fees, as of this writing as high as twenty-five dollars per car.

  The idea of working at a national park once conjured up rustic romanticism in the hearts of young Americans. That perception may have changed. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported a new phenomenon: “Concession managers in Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks bring in hundreds of foreign workers annually from Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Southern Africa because, they say, they cannot recruit American youths to fill the dirtiest jobs in the parks kitchens and hotels.”

  What park officials call “windshield tours” are replacing camping. In 2001, the number of visitors who camped in national parks dropped by nearly a third, to its lowest point in a quarter century. The drop-off in camping is especially evident among people younger than thirty, possibly because no one took them camping when they were kids. Consequently, they’re not taking their own kids camping. One California survey, cited by Oregonian reporter Michael Milstein, found that more than eight of ten campers became interested in the outdoors when they were children—but more than half of the camping parties surveyed had no children with them.

  But are parks for kids anymore? For the Matrix generation, much of the natural mystery and risk
of the outdoors has been surgically removed. As park officials work to make parks safer and more accessible, the outdoors often ends up feeling more like Disneyland than wilderness. Some kids end up disappointed that the parks aren’t more Disneyesque. When middle school students sent me their reflections on nature, one boy reported visiting Utah’s Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the world’s largest natural bridge, which was carved out of the cliffs above modern-day Lake Powell over thousands of years. “The bridge was somewhat disappointing. It was not as perfect as in the brochure,” the boy wrote. His parents enhanced the family vacation by renting Jet Skis.

  Here’s the hidden danger. If park and forest attendance stagnates as the visitor age rises, what happens to the future political constituency for parks and national forests? Not much, if visitor drop were the only change at hand. But that phenomenon appears to be occurring at the exact moment when development and energy interests are rapidly ratcheting up their pressure on the natural environment.

  The Endangered Environmentalist

  The broader issue involves the future of the stewardship ethic, in particular the shrinking genetic pool of environmentalists, conservationists, and other stewards.

  In 1978, Thomas Tanner, professor of environmental studies at Iowa State University, conducted a study of environmentalists’ formative influences. He probed what it was in their lives that had steered them to environmental activism. He polled staff members and chapter officers of major environmental organizations. “Far and away the most frequently cited influence was childhood experience of natural, rural, or other relatively pristine habitats. But for some reason, you don’t hear many environmentalists expressing much concern about the intimacy factor between kids and nature,” says Tanner. For most of these individuals, the natural habitats were accessible for unstructured play and discovery nearly every day when they were kids.

 

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