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

by Louv, Richard

  Sometimes, the catalyst is a principal with vision. At Torrey Pines Elementary School, near where I live, a committed young principal and his students adopted a nearby canyon. “We get the classes down here touching, tasting, smelling, tracking. It’s hard to get twenty-six kids to be quiet, but we do it,” said Dennis Doyle, the principal. He believes that encouraging more hands-on experience with nature is a better way to introduce children to science than relying just on textbooks. In fact, he explained, during the nineteenth century, nature study, as it was called, dominated elementary school science teaching. Now that nature study has been largely shoved aside by the technological advances of the twentieth century, an increasing number of educators have come to believe that technically oriented, textbook-based science education is failing.

  At Torrey Pines Elementary, sixth-grade classes were scoring poorly on the hands-on portion of a science test given nationwide by the National Teachers Association. So Doyle and his staff decided on a radical tactic. They would restore the canyon behind the school to its natural state to create an outdoor classroom and nature trail. The idea was to help kids experience the kind of intimacy with nature that many of their parents enjoyed, and to improve science education—to make it immediate and personal.

  On their forays into the canyon, work teams of kids, teachers, and parents ripped out the plants not native to the area, including pampas grass and Hottentot fig (commonly known as ice plant). Spanish sailors probably brought Hottentot fig to California. It is an edible and hardy plant rich in vitamin C, useful in the prevention of scurvy, explained a docent from nearby Torrey Pines State Park, who had teamed up with the school. Many people believe the Hottentot fig, a ground cover, prevents soil erosion, but, because of weighty water content in finger-like leaves, the plant can pull down a steep embankment. In this canyon, for this fig, the jig was up. The students returned the canyon habitat to native plants, including Torrey pines, yucca, cacti, and chaparral. The schoolchildren grew seedlings in their classes for later replanting.

  One weekend, thirty parents worked in the canyon alongside the kids. Half of the parents were from wealthy nearby neighborhoods, the other half from the less affluent neighborhoods from which some of the students were bused. They hacked away at the pampas grass with machetes, all pushing and pulling together. “That kind of experience binds people together more than any formal integration program,” Doyle said.

  Doyle tries to keep the kids’ canyon forays as relaxed as possible, and his adult view of nature minimized. As we walked through the canyon behind the school one day, he asked the kids questions, but didn’t give the answers.

  “Look at these twigs,” said a boy named Darren. “It looks like one twig is dead, but one is alive.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Doyle.

  Darren launched into an elaborate and erroneous theory.

  “That’s an interesting theory.”

  Darren trailed after Doyle, excitedly checking other twigs. In this special classroom, imagination was more important than technical precision.

  IN 1999, I MET a remarkable woman named Joan Stoliar. She lived in Greenwich Village with her husband, appeared to be in her sixties, had battled two types of cancer, and often traveled the streets of New York, with her high heels and fish-shaped earrings, astride her Lambretta motor scooter. A few months before cancer finally claimed her life, I accompanied her on a visit to a classroom at Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, where a cluster of seventh-graders attended four hundred trout fingerlings. The students hovered over the aquarium, set up to replicate a piece of trout stream.

  For decades, Stoliar was one of the grande dames of the tweedy, traditional New York fly-fishing culture. She was probably the first woman to join the old, distinguished Theodore Gordon Flyfishers club. She talked the club into sponsoring New York State’s trout-in-the-classroom program—with the help of Trout Unlimited, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Hudson River Foundation, and Catskill Watershed Corporation.

  Such programs—which began in California—have been springing up around the nation over the past decade. Their goal: to enliven biology and to connect kids to nature. The New York effort matches city kids with country kids, in what Stoliar called “a social experiment in creating sensitivity at both ends of the water tunnel.” Several hundred students in ten inner-city New York schools and eight upstate schools work together to raise the trout and replant streams.

  “This program gives city kids an appreciation for nature, but also teaches them about the source of their drinking water. They become watershed children,” she said. In October, each school received several hundred fertilized brown trout eggs from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation; the hatchery director even gave the kids his home number in case anything went wrong. Students placed the eggs in tanks designed to re-create the habitat of a trout stream.

  In Brooklyn’s eight-foot piece of stream, a pump pushed water over rounded rocks and aquatic plants, and routed it through a chiller to keep it at a steady forty-nine degrees. Above the water, in a canopy of screening, insects hatched, rose, and fell. A “trout-cam” sent magnified images of the fish to an adjacent TV. The students cared for the trout and checked water temperature and pH level and other factors that can kill the eggs or fish. Stoliar called what the kids were learning “instant parenting.”

  In January of that year, the kids reported their progress on their class Web page: “We saw caddis fly larvae eating a dead trout [and] we found a large fry with a trout tail sticking out of its mouth—it probably ate a smaller fish. Lot of dining action! About 42 fish have died in 1999 but we still have over 400 fish.” As the trout grew, the rural and urban kids traded letters and e-mail about their progress. “We hope they remain friends for years, and maybe even fish in the same streams together someday,” Stoliar said.

  Each year, if the delicate trout survive until spring, the kids are bused north to a stream in the Catskills, where they meet the rural students, and together they release the fish into the wild. An eighth-grader named LaToya told me, “Up there you don’t smell anything like toxic waste. I never saw a reservoir before. It was so beautiful, so clean.”

  ONE MORNING I visited the private Children’s School in La Jolla, where teachers, parents, and kids were hard at work on a garden, following the guidelines of a famous expert on gardening who would visit shortly. As the students waited for Mel Bartholomew’s arrival, I asked the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in teacher Tina Kafka’s class what they thought of gardening.

  “I think the lettuce you buy at the store tastes better than the lettuce you get from a garden,” said James, a skeptical eleven-year-old. “At the store they wash it real well. They’ve got those spray nozzles going all the time.” James is new to gardening; the school’s is his first. Matt, ten, offered his own critique of gardening. “The problem I have with gardening is it’s not improving, not like technology, not like TVs and computers. All these old wood gardening tools haven’t changed in decades.” Speaking like a true child of the twenty-first century, he added, “Tools should improve.” James and Matt are typical of many youngsters today, particularly the ones who live in Southern California housing tracts with their square-foot backyards. It’s tough for a garden to get a kid’s attention, unless the experience is digital.

  In an effort to change that, Kafka and her co-teacher, Chip Edwards, helped their students create a garden based on Bartholomew’s approach. Bartholomew, now a retired civil engineer and efficiency expert, wrote Square Foot Gardening several decades ago. The best-selling book was the basis for a long-running Discovery Channel series on cable TV. People who use his system eschew traditional rows, which made sense for plowing, in favor of square-foot blocks, which lend themselves to more personal care. Gardeners can easily reach the plants in each cluster for planting or weeding. This approach also seems to make more sense for kids, whose arms and reach are shorter. It reduces gardening to a more manageable scale and increases the
chance for success. “I ate some lettuce from our school garden,” said Brandon, ten. “I washed it and put some salad dressing on it, and it tasted better than the lettuce you get from the store.”

  A classmate, Ben, eleven, added, “I like the radishes out of our garden a lot better. The ones from the store are too spicy.” And Ariana, ten, reported how a gopher attacked a turnip she grew in the school garden. “He hollowed it out!”

  I turned to James. “Would any turnip that touched a gopher’s lips touch yours?” “No!” he answered in horror.

  Just then, Bartholomew arrived. Bartholomew, who lives in Old Field, New York, is a tall, lanky man with a mustache, thinning hair, and the kindest of eyes; he was accompanied by his sister, Althea Mott, of Huntington Beach. The two of them founded the Square Foot Gardening Foundation, which promotes the therapeutic value of gardening. They visit libraries, nursing homes, churches, and schools.

  “Our goal is to have gardening included in every school curriculum,” he explained. “We’re writing programs for all grade levels and all seasons. We want kids to communicate with other gardening kids around the country, first by letter, but eventually through the Internet. We also hope they’ll take gardening home and involve their families.” Wearing jeans and ready to garden, Bartholomew headed out back to the class garden. The kids (including James and Matt, who now seemed particularly eager) moved confidently to their tasks, to weeding and watering. Bartholomew hovered over them, smiling, asking them gently about their crops.

  Kafka, who stood to one side, said, “For us, the garden has been much more than simply planting vegetables and taking care of them. It’s been a bonding experience. When we go to the garden as a class at the end of the day, there is a strong feeling of shared joy and peace no matter how hard the day has been.” She described how, one drizzly Monday morning, the students arrived to find that skateboarders had vandalized their garden. “We decided to focus on renewing our garden rather than on whodunit,” said Kafka. After the vandalism, the students named their garden “Eve’s Garden,” after one of their fellow students, who had left the school and whom they missed.

  Bartholomew looked proudly at the students working together. “It’s so important for kids to understand where their food comes from,” he said. Suddenly James announced, “My turnip is ready. It’s a big one.”

  “James and the Giant Turnip,” someone said.

  “Drum roll!”

  James grunted and pulled on the turnip until it came loose from the soil. He held it up proudly for all to see, and brushed the dirt from it. Then he held the turnip close to his ear. He knocked on it to see if it was hollow. And he grinned.

  Ecoschools

  Ideally, school nature programs will go beyond curriculum or field trips: they will involve the initial, physical design of a new school; or the retrofitting of an old school with playscapes that incorporate nature into the central design principle; or, as described earlier, the use of nature preserves by environment-based schools.

  The schoolyard habitat movement began in the 1970s, stimulated by environmental education programs, such as Project Learning Tree and Project WILD, and a successful national program in Great Britain called Learning through Landscapes. At least one-third of Britain’s thirty thousand schoolyards have been improved by this program, inspiring a similar program in Canada called Learning Grounds, and a major Swedish program, Skolans Uterum. By 1996, more than forty organizations were involved in natural school-grounds enhancement, according to a survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, one of several major agencies with traditional wildlife conservation missions working in this area. Some organizations, which originated in environmental education, have also forged links with science and education departments of universities, museums, and conservation organizations. The National Wildlife Federation, with its Schoolyard Habitats certification program, is a leader in encouraging the creation of hands-on, outdoor learning opportunities that cannot be duplicated in the traditional classroom setting.

  Mary Rivkin, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and one of the most thoughtful and prolific academics working in this arena, cites the biophilia hypothesis, as well as the work of attention-restoration researchers Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, particularly their work on “nearby nature” and its wide range of benefits for children and adults. Many preschools “have excellent outdoor play spaces because early childhood teachers have a long and sturdy tradition of having plants and animals accessible to children and incorporating outdoor play into their daily activities,” according to Rivkin. She describes the typical greening efforts and the ideal: “Schools usually start with small projects, although some schools do major work, especially in new construction.” They might begin with butterfly gardens, bird feeders and baths, tree planting, or native plant gardens. Moving on to larger projects, they can create ponds, nature trails, or restore streams. Ecologically valuable projects are valued over beautification. Pump-operated or natural streams can offer water play. “Dirt and sand must be for digging as well as planting; clay can often be found for making things. Some plants must be for picking,” she advises. “Seeing such things is only part of learning about them. Touching, tasting, smelling, and pulling apart are also vital. Shrubs and trees for climbing are the real thing . . .” Assuming a secure perimeter around the schoolyard, children also need private spaces: bushes, tall grass, a cluster of rocks. “A circle of 6-foot pines is a forest to young children.”

  As Rivkin points out, the task of helping the 108,000 schools in the United States “green their grounds” is daunting, even with the widening web of institutional support, including conferences sponsored by the American Horticulture Society, the North American Association for Environmental Education, the Society for Ecological Research, the Brooklyn and Cleveland Botanical Gardens, and others. Increasingly, preschools and child-care facilities are housed in office buildings, a trend that undermines the burgeoning schoolyard habitat movement. And in public-school settings, “the bleakness of asphalt and close-mown grass in outdoor areas presents a major challenge to outdoor nature experiences.” Nonetheless, the schoolyard habitats movement “is literally gaining ground.”

  Numerous studies document the benefits to students from school grounds that are ecologically diverse and include free-play areas, habitat for wildlife, walking trails, and gardens. Two major studies, “Gaining Ground” and “Grounds for Action,” were conducted in Canada, one in the Toronto school district, the other in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. Researchers there found that children who experience school grounds with diverse natural settings are more physically active, more aware of nutrition, more civil to one another, and more creative. The greening of school grounds resulted in increased involvement by adults and members of the nearby community. The Canadian researchers also found that green school grounds enhanced learning, compared with conventional turf and asphalt school grounds; that the more varied green play spaces suited a wider array of students and promoted social inclusion, regardless of gender, race, class, or intellectual ability; and they were safer.

  Another benefit of the green school grounds is their impact on teachers. The Canadian researchers found that teachers expressed renewed enthusiasm for teaching. “When I am teaching outside, I feel excited again. . . . I realize that I still have a lot of passion for teaching,” said one teacher. In an era of increased teacher burnout, the impact of green schools and outdoor education on teachers should not be underestimated. Teachers, too, deserve exposure to the restorative qualities of nature.

  There is another movement that tends to ebb and flow during bad and good economic times: the ecoschool, which is a school initially designed for and dedicated to using nature studies as a touchstone in its curriculum. The concept has been popular for decades in Europe. There are 2,800 ecoschools in the United Kingdom and Scotland. The concept attracts Dave Massey, regional coordinator of the California Regional
Environmental Education Community, a new state office. Massey says school districts should protect every square inch of natural landscape adjacent to schools, not only for environmental reasons, but also for educational gain. He recommends, “We [need to] put some thought into the planning of every new school so that the surrounding nature is available and used.” As an elementary-school principal, Massey prized a stream near his school as an outdoor lab: “I had kids out there twice a week, studying the cottonwoods, planting native plants.”

  At the cutting edge of ecoschool thinking are foundation-to-roof “green” schools, constructed with, say, compacted straw bales and plaster, an increasingly popular low-cost alternative for building highly insulated walls. The school itself becomes a lesson in ecology.

  Schools, zoos, botanical gardens, natural history museums, and other educational facilities may lack the space or staffing to become ecoschools, but they could farm out the job. What if farms and ranches were to become the new schoolyards, offering lessons and hands-on experience in ecology, culture, and agriculture? The Montessori education movement has revived the idea of “farm schools” by tapping into the founder’s original vision of adolescent students spending part of their year operating a working farm. A government-sponsored program in Norway suggests the potential of a larger-scale approach. Since 1996, Norwegian farmers and public school teachers have worked together to create new curricula taught in classrooms and on farms. “Our purpose has been mainly to get children out of the classrooms and into the experience of caring for nature. Norway is a land of incredible, unspoiled natural beauty, but the children aren’t out there,” says Linda Jolly, an educational researcher at the Norwegian Lifescience University, associated with the national Living School and regional projects called the Farm as a Pedagogical Resource. “Our other main purpose is to maintain living farms.” Working with children gives Norwegian farmers “new purpose, connection with the community, respect and some income.” Progress has been slow, but impressive, she adds. “At one school, 93 percent of the parents voted to have their children taught on a farm one day a week, for the entire year.”