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

by Louv, Richard

  Don’t Give Up

  The legal tangle of outdoor play will be one of the most difficult challenges in the fourth frontier. But to encourage a host of other positive changes to take place, the barriers of a litigious society must be lowered.

  “In the past, if a child or teen broke an arm on the sidewalk, in a neighbor’s yard, or at the school yard, Dad’s insurance would pay the bills,” says Jim Condomitti, a father who lives in Escondido, California. “Our parents accepted responsibility for our accidents, careless behavior, or deliberate actions. Today, as seven-figure monetary awards dance in our heads, we open the Yellow Pages and search for attorneys who can fish in the deep pockets of a school district, a city, or an insurance company.”

  Indeed, in many cases, the litigious bark may be worse than the bite. Condomitti found this out when his community began to crack down on playing ball in the street. (Such play may not involve nature, but at least it’s based on direct rather than simulated experience and it’s outdoors.) Condomitti pored over the vaguely worded legal codes of several municipalities, and found few if any legal grounds to ban such play, unless children actually block or impede the flow of traffic. “Parents and kids shouldn’t give up so easily,” he says. The good news is that they don’t have to.

  Bad law can be rewritten; protections from litigation strengthened; new types of natural recreational areas invented—and even new kinds of cities and towns created, where nature is welcome and natural play the norm—for children and adults.

  19. Cities Gone Wild

  WHEN JULIA FLETCHER, Janet Fout’s daughter, moved from West Virginia to Washington, D.C., to attend George Washington University, she operated a refreshment cart at the Kennedy Center and sometimes took it to the roof terrace, where she found the view of the Potomac River calming. Early one evening, she noticed a man there with his two young children. The girl and boy were paying close attention to their father, who was watching a circling raptor.

  “It’s not a turkey vulture,” he said, “but you’re close. What else could it be?” The kids looked heavenward again.

  “A hawk,” pronounced the boy.

  “Warmer,” replied Dad, “but what kind of hawk?”

  “A white-headed hawk?” inquired the daughter.

  “Nope. What kinds of hawks are near the water?”

  As Julia tells this story, she was about to burst with the answer when the son said:

  “One that eats fish?”

  “Exactly. It’s an osprey,” their father said. “Now, how can you identify it next time?”

  At this point, Julia moved on with her work, but continued to think about the conversation. Because her mother took time to explore nature with her, she identified with the children and their questions. “And I was heartened that even in a city like Washington, there were other children who would grow up like I did,” she says. “Until that moment, all evidence of this had been to the contrary, since no one I know at the university can identify an osprey. Nature in the city is nature at her most tenacious—in some ways that makes it my favorite kind of nature.”

  Today, a growing number of ecologists and ethicists are challenging the assumption that cities have no room for wildlife. Some would have you imagine your city as a “zoopolis.” That’s the word—rhymes with “metropolis”—that Jennifer Wolch, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the Sustainable Cities Project, uses when she imagines areas in cities transformed into natural habitats through land-planning, architectural design, and public education.

  To most people, that would seem like a stretch. Just listen to our language: We talk about “empty land” at the urban fringe (far from empty, it teems with non-human life), and “improving” land (grading and filling and topping it with Jiffy Lubes). Most urban theory ignores non-human species. So do even the most progressive architecture schools, even as those graders keep scraping the hills. Yet, says Wolch, a zoopolis movement, though poorly documented, is emerging in many U.S. cities, often for practical reasons. For example, conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, water-dependent environments. This has led some cities in arid regions to encourage native plant species, which need less maintenance and contribute to wildlife habitat.

  Central to this notion is the psychological need for biophilia—the life-enhancing sense of rootedness in nature. Daniel Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment, in Santa Barbara, asserts: “Without the recognition that the city is of and within the environment, the wilderness . . . that most of us think of as natural cannot survive.” John Beardsley of the Harvard Design School expresses the same hope for a new kind of urban and suburban landscape in which our children and our children’s children could one day grow up:

  We need to hold out for healthy ecosystems in the city and the suburbs; we need to insist that culture—however much it might flirt with simulation—retain a focus on the real world, its genuine problems and possibilities. At the mall or the theme park, what does this mean? Can we imagine a mall that is also a working landscape, that is energy self-sufficient, that treats its own wastewater, and that recycles its own materials? Can we imagine a theme park that is genuinely fun and truly educational and environmentally responsible all at once? I don’t see why not. We have created the “nature” we buy and sell in the marketplace; we should certainly be able to change it.

  Preserving islands of wild land—parks and preserves—in urban areas is not enough, according to current ecological theory. Instead, a healthy urban environment requires natural corridors for movement and genetic diversity. One can imagine such theory applied to entire urban regions, with natural corridors for wildlife extending deep into urban territory and the urban psyche, creating an entirely different environment in which children would grow up and adults could grow old—where the nature deficit is replaced by natural abundance.

  Growing the Zoopolis Movement

  The notion of zoopolis is not as new or utopian as it might sound. In the 1870s, the “playground movement” valued urban nature more than swing sets or baseball fields; nature was presented as a health benefit for working-class Americans, particularly their children. This movement led to the nation’s largest urban parks, including New York’s Central Park. Closely associated was the “healthy cities” movement in the early twentieth century, which welded public health to urban design, even codifying how many feet parks and schools should be from a home.

  Then other forces interceded. Cities continued to build a few large urban parks in post–World War II development, but usually only as an afterthought—and these were increasingly less natural and more attuned to organized sports and the threat of litigation. Neither children nor wildlife have been of much concern to urban planners in recent decades. Arguably both were given more consideration in the early part of the twentieth century. Since then, playgrounds and parks have not kept up with population growth in most cities (in terms of acreage covered). At the same time, these public spaces have become increasingly domesticated, flat, lawyered, and boring—and designed without taking wildlife into consideration. Wolch has noted how the debate about sprawl does not concern itself with wildlife; the new urbanism tends to define sustainability as a question mainly of energy resources, transportation, housing, and infrastructure.

  In the recent past, even nature writers ignored the nature within urban or suburban realms. “As recently as 1990, you could read all 94 writers and 900 pages collected in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and barely comprehend that most people spent most of their lives in cities,” reported the Los Angeles Times, in a glowing article about one of the prophets of this urban-nature movement, naturalist Jennifer Price, author of Flight Maps. In that book, Price argues that, “You cannot expect to preserve wilderness or endangered species unless you think about how to make the places where most people live sustainable.” This movement goes far beyond the traditional focus on parks and reaches toward a new definition of urban planning, architecture, and th
e restoration of that which has been lost. The Times describes a “vast and probably unstoppable conglomeration of community groups, architects, urban planners, engineers, writers, bureaucrats and politicians that is now out to restore the river [the Los Angeles River system] to something more than a ditch.”

  Times are changing. Wolch talks about “re-enchanting the city” by bringing animals back in. Her views are steeped in a philosophy of animal rights; in fact, she may view the primary beneficiaries of a renaturalized city as being the animals themselves. “Agreement about the human/animal divide has recently collapsed,” she writes. “Critiques of post-Enlightenment science have undermined claims of human-animal discontinuity, and exposed the deeply anthropocentric and androcentric roots of modernist science. Greater understanding of animal thinking and capabilities now reveals the astonishing range and complexity of animal behavior and social life, while studies of human biology and behavior emphasize the similarity of humans to other animals. Claims about human uniqueness have thus been rendered deeply suspicious.”

  Some of us, myself included, are less comfortable with a total rearrangement of the relationship. We’re not quite ready to pass laws requiring equal housing for possums. Nonetheless, we do acknowledge that a de-natured urban or suburban environment is not good for children or the land. Rather than some kind of polemical realignment, what we seek is simply a reattachment. Even a truce would be progress.

  Cities and suburbs are still wilder than we think, with deeper roots than we know. In 2002, the New York Times reported that remnants of virgin forests still stand in the Bronx and Queens—a 425- to 450-yearold, 75-foot tulip tree in Queens is the oldest living thing in New York City; in Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx, according to the Times, “rare birds and vegetation flourish among trees that have been growing since the 1700s.” Just as we, counterintuitively, must now plan unstructured time and supervise opportunities for solitude for the young, we must now also manage our urban regions as if they were wildlife preserves. “Where we have a large opportunity for gain is to see that people and animals coexist in a lot of areas. The largest unmanaged ecosystem in America is suburbia,” writes wildlife biologist Ben Breedlove, a noted designer of sustainable communities.

  Indeed, the peculiar and growing proximity of wild animals and urban/suburban dwellers is one of the defining characteristics of the time, ironic because this is occurring even as young people disengage from nature. The urban/suburban influx of wild animals could stimulate a rethinking of who lives in the city, and why. Wolch writes: “The fast-expanding metropolitan edge brings a wide range of species—including predators—into back yards and public spaces, much to the consternation of residents unfamiliar with their behavior and unprepared for their presence. . . . The presence of wild animals thus often triggers public debate and conflict, lawsuits over wildlife-related injuries, contested hunts and extermination efforts. In short, what do you do with a mountain lion in the middle of Santa Monica?” As she points out, the destruction or domination of nature is unpopular or unacceptable with much of the public, “yet the arts of coexistence with wild animals remain unfamiliar.”

  According to Wolch, the growing public awareness that “conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, resource-intensive environments, [is] leading some cities to pass regulations emphasizing native species to reduce resource dependence and create habitat for wildlife.” She also points out that there is a growing number of grass-roots struggles in urban regions focused on the protection of specific wild animals or animal populations, and on the preservation of urban canyons, woodlands, wetlands, and other wildlife habitats. Even as science commodifies the bodies of humans and other animals, Wolch and others have detected a growing public sensitivity to wild animals as beings in their own right.

  Landscape urbanism is one conceptual framework for such thinking. Ruth Durak, director of the Kent State University Urban Design Center, offers this definition:

  Landscape urbanism is a call to turn urban design inside out, starting with open spaces and natural systems, to structure urban form instead of buildings and infrastructure. . . . The idea of landscape urbanism reorders the values and priorities of urban design, emphasizing the primacy of the void over built form and celebrating indeterminacy and change over the static certainty of architecture. It recalls nature’s restorative cycles and tries to put them back to work in the city.

  Another, more popular term gaining cachet is green urbanism, an approach that goes beyond the current American vogue of the “new urbanism”—which has, until recently, focused less on urban ecology than on building somewhat better suburbs—even beyond the sustainable-cities movement, which is focused more on energy concerns. In fact, a green urbanism movement is growing quickly, particularly in Western Europe.

  Green Urbanism: The Western European Example

  Huck Finn has left the territories and gone to the Netherlands. That must be him in the photograph, that boy on a wooden raft, poling his way down a stream-like canal with banks of reeds and willows in Morra Park, an ecovillage in the city of Drachten.

  You won’t often see that kind of scene in today’s America. Here, people still “tend to think that true nature can only be found on the pristine, remote extremities of civilization and that these places have little to do with the everyday human world,” writes William McDonough, a visionary architect from Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leading American proponent of sustainable, regenerative community design. Oddly, such thinking raises hives on both the thick hide of mass developers and the prickly skin of some environmentalists. Mass developers want to give us one option and call it choice. Some environmentalists grump: Why, if people start thinking they can regenerate nature in cities, they’ll use that as an excuse for suburban sprawl. That may be a legitimate concern but, as McDonough puts it, dominant urban/suburban design is “so impermeable to nature [that] it is all too easy to leave our reverence in the parking lots of national parks.”

  By contrast, cities and suburbs in parts of Western Europe are becoming more livable and loveable by protecting regenerating nature. There’s Huck, happily on the water, in Morra Park, as evidenced in Timothy Beatley’s book Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities, cited earlier. In Morra Park’s closed-loop canal system, storm-water runoff is moved by the power of an on-site windmill, and circulated through a manufactured wetlands where reeds and other vegetation filter the water naturally—making it clean enough for residents to swim in.

  A similar Dutch development called Het Groene Dak (The Green Roof) incorporates a communal inner garden, “a wild, green, car-free area for children to play and residents to socialize,” writes Beatley. At a similar suburban ecovillage in Sweden, “large amounts of woodland and natural area have been left untouched.” To minimize impact on nature, homes are built on pillars and designed “to look as though they had been lowered out of thin air.”

  He describes an astonishing array of European green-city designs: cities with half the land areas devoted to forest, green space, and agriculture; cities that have not only preserved nearby nature, but reclaimed some inner-city areas for woods, meadows, and streams. These neighborhoods are both denser and more livable than our own. Nature, even a suggestion of wildness, is within walking distance of most residences. In contrast to “the historic opposition of things urban and natural,” he writes, green cities “are fundamentally embedded in a natural environment. They can, moreover, be re-envisioned to operate and function in natural ways—they can be restorative, renourishing and replenishing of nature.”

  “Greenroofs” are increasingly common. Covered by vegetation—native grass or even trees—such roofs provide protection from UV rays, clean the air, control storm-water runoff, aid birds and butterflies, and cool homes in summer and insulate them in winter. The higher initial cost of such a roof is outweighed by its longevity. From above, the green looks like an expanse of fields. Increasingly, architects incorporate construction requirements for “greenwalls” of ivy
and other plants, which naturalize a building and prevent graffiti.

  Designers are creating “often quite wild and untamed” green spaces, says Beatley, while increasing human population densities. This is promoted not only by architects, but also at the urban-planning level. In Helsinki, Finland, for example, an extensive system of green space extends in a mostly unbroken wedge from the center of the city to an area of old-growth forest north of the city.

  About one-quarter of the land area in Zurich, Switzerland, is in forests. Granted, much of this space was grandfathered into these cities by the conversion of old royal estates to public use, but green urban activists didn’t stop there. Many cities are restoring streams and creeks previously tamed by concrete or routed underground. Zurich’s goal is to uncover and restore forty kilometers of urban streams and line them with native trees and vegetation.

  A web of bikeways and lanes connects all neighborhoods and major destinations in the city of Delft, Netherlands. One plan in the Netherlands calls for capping a two-kilometer stretch of highway with an eco-roof for pedestrian, bicycle, and wildlife connections.