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

by Louv, Richard

  Gary Paul Nabhan, who is director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and author of The Geography of Childhood, believes that his fellow ecologists are moving toward a deeper appreciation of the cohesiveness of living communities and beginning to recognize that science and religion share a core characteristic: both are humbling to human experience. Says Nabhan, “Science is the human endeavor in which we are frequently reminded how wrong we can be.” If scientists rely only on reason, then “our work has no meaning. It needs to be placed in some spiritual context.”

  So does the environment. Children are the key. In 1995, the MIT Press published the results of one of the most extensive surveys of how Americans really think about environmental issues. The researchers were stunned by what they discovered. They noted an increased environmental consciousness observed in language (for example, a patch of land once referred to as a swamp was more likely to be called wetlands) and a core set of environmental values. “For those who have children, the anchoring of environmental ethics in responsibility to descendants gives environmental values a concrete and emotional grounding stronger than that of abstract principles,” according to the MIT report. That environmental values are already intertwined with core values of parental responsibility was, the researchers asserted, “a major finding.” A substantial majority of people surveyed justified environmental protection by explicitly invoking God as the creator, with striking uniformity across subgroups. “What is going on here? Why should so many nonbelievers argue on the basis of God’s creation?” the researchers asked. “It seems that divine creation is the closest concept American culture provides to express the sacredness of nature. Regardless of whether one actually believes in biblical Creation, it is the best vehicle we have to express this value.” If the MIT report is correct, spiritual arguments for the environment, seldom used by the environmental movement, will be far more effective than utilitarian arguments. In other words, arguing for the protection of a particular toad is less potent than calling for the protection of God’s creation (which includes the toad). The consideration of the right of future generations to God’s creation—with its formative and restorative qualities—is a spiritual act, because it looks far beyond our own generation’s needs. This spiritual argument, made on behalf of future children, is the most emotionally powerful weapon we can deploy in defense of the earth and our own species.

  God and Mother Nature

  The coming decades will be a pivotal time in Western thought and faith. For students, a greater emphasis on spiritual context could stimulate a renewed sense of awe for the mysteries of nature and science. For the environmental movement, an opportunity arises to appeal to more than the usual constituencies, to go beyond utilitarian arguments to a more spiritual motivation: conservation is, at its core, a spiritual act. After all, this is God’s creation that is being conserved for future generations. For parents, this wider conversation will intensify the importance of introducing their children to the biological and the spiritual value of green pastures and still water.

  Our families and institutions need to listen carefully to young people’s yearning for what can only be found in nature. Psychologist Edward Hoffman believed that children under age fourteen do not have the capacity or language skills to describe their early spiritual experiences in nature. But my experience has taught me that children and young people have much to tell us about nature and the spirit, if we care to listen. Consider the tale one ninth-grader shared with me, about The Spot, as he called it, where he found his moment of amazement:

  As long as I can remember, every time I heard the word “nature” I thought of a forest surrounded by mountain peaks seen off in the distance. I never thought too much of this until one year when I was on a family vacation at Mammoth Mountain. I decided I would try and find a place that was similar to the place I have thought about since I was a kid. So I told my parents I was going to go on a walk. I grabbed my coat and I left.

  To my surprise, it only took about five or ten minutes to find The Spot. I stood there in awe; it was exactly how I imagined it. Dozens of massive pine trees were visible. Maybe one hundred feet from where I stood, snow lightly covered the ground; pine needles were scattered about. Out in the distance above the trees was a breathtaking view of the mountaintop. To my side was a small creek. The only sound I could hear was the trickling of the water (and the occasional car on the highway not too far behind me). I was in a star-struck daze for what seemed to be five or ten minutes, but that turned out to be two and a half hours.

  My parents had been looking for me because it was getting dark. When we finally met up, I told them I had gotten lost, for how could I share such an experience, such an overwhelming religious experience? This episode really made me think about the real meaning of nature. I have come to the conclusion that one’s idea of nature is also their idea of a paradise or a heaven on earth. In my case, I felt perfect when I was at The Spot.

  Fred Rogers knew how to listen. A few years before he died, I interviewed him for my newspaper column. I took my son Matthew, who had just turned six. My son has always been ebullient and outgoing, but on this day, he was tense and silent. As I introduced him to Mister Rogers, I noticed that my son’s upper lip was quivering. Rogers smiled and shook his hand. Later, he interrupted his conversation with the adults and sat down next to Matthew, who had pulled a book about rocks out of his little backpack.

  “I love rocks, too,” Mister Rogers said. He owned a lapidary machine, he said, which he kept in an outbuilding on his property because of its constant whirring. Matthew’s eyes widened, because his own birthday present had been a lapidary machine to roll and polish the most beautiful rocks he collected. Rogers and Matthew leaned together over one of the pages of his book, whispering the secrets of stone.

  I remembered that Rogers was an ordained minister, so I mentioned to him Matthew’s theological question about God and Mother Nature. “Are they married, or just good friends?” When my son had asked this, I had involuntarily laughed. Mister Rogers did not.

  “That’s a very interesting question, Matthew.” He thought about it for a long moment. “Your mom and your dad are married and they’ve had two fine boys, and they’re mighty important to those two boys, and I think that’s one way we get to know what God and Nature are like, by having a mom and a dad who love us.”

  Maybe the statement wasn’t exactly politically correct (what about single parents?), but it worked for Matthew. Then Mister Rogers said something so quietly that only my son could hear, and Matthew smiled.

  Later, as everyone prepared to leave, Mister Rogers sat down next to Matthew and said to him, “Will you let me know, as time goes by, what answer you find to your question?”

  22. Fire and Fermentation: Building a Movement

  AT FIRST LIGHT, my wife, Kathy, woke up and walked outside to get the paper. She felt a wave of heat and looked up. The sky was amber and black and foul.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said, shaking my shoulder.

  Four hours later, we were driving out of Scripps Ranch as a blazing orange thing with its single burning eye stared down at our cul-de-sac. Our van was packed with the past—photo albums and children’s drawings, our kids’ baby clothes, pictures pulled from the walls. Binkley the Cat, in a cardboard box, harmonized with the sirens. “How can this be happening? The rug pulled out like this,” Matthew, our then-teenage son, said, the words choking in his throat. He was stunned, incredulous. He was sure that his world would end in flames. “It’s okay,” I answered, in a poor attempt to reassure him, “Think of it as an adventure. Hey, I grew up with tornadoes. We did this kind of thing every spring.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” he said. And he was right to say that.

  We drove west and north, keeping the rising cloud of smoke in our rearview mirror. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper. Forty minutes later, we pulled into a parking lot at a freeway-side Hampton Inn, near the ocean. The hotel was offering price breaks
to evacuees. The lobby was filled with dazed San Diegans and their pets. People gathered around a large-screen television, holding their hands to their mouths in disbelief.

  Three blocks from our house, the fire stopped and reversed; the wind blew it back over the backcountry.

  By the time the largest fire in Southern California history was over, in October 2003, two dozen people had died, more than two thousand homes were burned to the ground, and the Cuyamaca forest—the place in my county to which I was most attached—was gone. The fire burned so hot that boulders the size of houses exploded. Trees estimated to be eight hundred years old were turned to charcoal.

  Some of the special places offering nature programs for children that you have read about in these pages were destroyed or damaged as well. Candy Vanderhoff, the architectural designer who for two years had devoted herself to the establishment of Crestridge Ecological Reserve—the mountainous land where high school students confronted the wonders and peculiarities of the backcountry—reported that most of the reserve was burned away.

  Vanderhoff and other Crestridge volunteers had spent weeks constructing an educational kiosk at the entrance to the preserve. The kiosk, designed by artist James Hubbell and made primarily of biodegradable straw bales, was also destroyed as the firestorm roared through Crestridge. All that remained were twisted fingers of burnt oak and blackened boulders pocked with the acorn-grinding holes of ancient Kumeyaay.

  Hubbell’s family compound, nestled in the chaparral and oak thirty miles to the east, was burned as well. He had spent forty years creating structures—sculptures, really—of concrete, adobe, stone, wood, wrought iron, and glass. Over the decades he added a flourish here, a piece of glass that caught the light there. The buildings weren’t built as much as grown from the land. Over the years, thousands of visitors came for day visits to soak up the spirit of Hubbell’s creation. The fire incinerated much of the compound; the deer that moved like ghosts are gone.

  Still, Hubbell—a gentle, aging man whose hands shake with palsy—believes in seeds, in rebirth.

  A few weeks after the fire, he and his wife, Anne, were back on their land, planting possibilities and reattaching themselves. Later, I received a letter from Jim that perfectly described poet Gary Snyder’s reference to the spirit of natura—birth, constitution, character, course of things—and beyond natura, nasci—to be born:

  This year good work will grow out of the ashes, just as green grass grows out of the ashes of the burnt chaparral, for along with the destruction came something unexpected. As we looked at our land, we discovered an emptiness that held a beauty not previously perceived. Boulders, once hidden, were revealed, placed as if in a garden. There were quiet places for reflection. The hard soil, scorched by the fire, was now soft and yielding to the foot. The undulations of the land were all visible. This emptiness, this new space, holds an excitement for us. It is a gate into a world only partly glimpsed. Our task is to walk through and discover where the gate leads.

  I relate this story as metaphor. When we contemplate the unraveling relationship between children and nature, we might consider it a fire going through, and only that. We look forward to renewal.

  Time to Plant

  Healing the broken bond between children and nature may seem to be an overwhelming, even impossible, task. But we must hold the conviction that the direction of this trend can be changed, or at least slowed. The alternative to holding and acting on that belief is unthinkable for human health and for the natural environment.

  We can be encouraged by the recent past.

  Those of us who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s remember a time when people thought little of tossing an empty soda can or a cigarette butt out a car window. Such habits are now the exception. The recycling and anti-smoking campaigns are perhaps the best example of how social and political pressure can work hand in hand to effect societal change in just one generation. We can apply the lessons of these earlier campaigns. One perspective comes from Michael Pertschuk, co-founder of the Advocacy Institute in Washington, D.C., former Federal Trade Commission chairman under President Carter, and among the most important figures associated with the launch of the anti-smoking campaign in the early 1960s. Pertschuk is currently a leader in efforts to oppose market expansion into developing countries by the transnational tobacco industry. He has written four books on citizen advocacy. And he is eager to see a movement to reestablish the link between nature and future generations of young people.

  Unlike the civil rights and labor movements, the tobacco control movement developed top-down, stemming from scientific research and public statements of concern by health authorities; simultaneously, but unconnected at first, the anti-smoking movement was also bottom-up, born out of the pain and shortened lives from passive smoking—breathing the tobacco smoke from others’ smoking habits.

  “It was only when the science of passive smoking’s threat to the lives of involuntary smokers—now scientifically labeled ETS, Environmental Tobacco Smoke—was proved beyond question that these two half-movements came together,” says Pertschuk. “And it was only the combination of potent scientific authorities and the passionate outcry of organized community neighbors, in small groups operating out of attics and garages challenging the accepted norms that gave smokers ownership of the air they polluted, that a movement that would radically change social norms took root.” National groups, including the lung, heart, and cancer health voluntary associations, joined the movement, organizing and lobbying for laws to create smoke-free environments, backed by massive public education campaigns on the health benefits of smoke-free air. “Just so, the budding movement to reconnect childhood to nature draws potent support from the science of the health risks of nature-parched childhoods, and the growing passion of parents and others who see their children shuttered up on their couches and computer stands.” And just so, this movement will rise from the awareness and determination of individuals as well as organized, national networks.

  Good works are already taking root. We see the steady if gradual growth of the environment-based education movement, the schoolyard habitat movement, and the simple-living movement; the awakening of environmental organizations and places of worship; the schoolyard greening efforts in the United States and Europe; growing realization that both our physical and mental health are linked to the natural environment. We also see a growing interest in lightening our litigious load by reforming our legal system. Although tort reform is controversial, and its interpretation in the eye of the lawyer, legal reforms must begin to ease the fear of lawsuit felt by so many families. Several national groups are also working for community design changes that connect walking and nature, including the Rails to Trails Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land (TPL), and Active Living by Design. TPL’s goal is to ensure a park within reach of every American home. Active Living by Design, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and part of the UNC School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, devises approaches to increase physical activity through community design and public policies; one of its components focuses on nature in the city.

  We also see the potential convergence of several trends and campaigns: New Urbanism, Smart Growth, Livable Communities, Green Urbanism, and a neo-agriculture movement. Many of these groups are moving in the same direction. They are pushed by a growing distaste for dependence on Middle East oil, or any fossil fuels, along with concern about global warming and other environmental pressures; they are pulled by a yearning for alternatives to the cities and towns in which they now live. The individuals in these organizations share a sharpened knowledge that our built environment directly affects our physical and emotional health, and a deep sadness at the widening gap between nature and everyday life. When they focus on the young, each of these movements takes on special meaning—and power.

  Deeper knowledge will also bring more power. The greatest need is for controlled experimental studies, according to the University of Illinois researchers Tay
lor and Kuo. Such research could show that nature not only promotes healthy childhood development, but does it more effectively than the methods commonly used in place of nature. Although expensive to gather, such knowledge could have enormous influence in the fight to preserve and ultimately increase the amount of nature available to children, and to us all.

  More Reasons for Optimism

  In West Virginia and Kentucky, where coal is still king, mountain-leveling machines are lowering horizons. 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.”