Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (11 page)

Not surprisingly, as the young grow up in a world of narrow yet overwhelming sensory input, many of them develop a wired, know-it-all state of mind. That which cannot be Googled does not count. Yet a fuller, grander, more mysterious world, one worthy of a child’s awe, is available to children and the rest of us. Bill McKibben, in
The Age of Missing Information
, argues that “the definition of television’s global village is just the contrary—it’s a place where there’s as little variety as possible, where as much information as possible is wiped away to make ‘communications’ easier.” He describes his personal experience with a nearby mountain: “The mountain says you live in a particular place. Though it’s a small area, just a square mile or two, it took me many trips to even start to learn its secrets. Here there are blueberries, and here there are bigger blueberries . . . You pass a hundred different plants along the trail—I know maybe twenty of them. One could spend a lifetime learning a small range of mountains, and once upon a time people did.”

Any natural place contains an infinite reservoir of information, and therefore the potential for inexhaustible new discoveries. As naturalist Robert Michael Pyle says, “Place is what takes me out of myself, out of the limited scope of human activity, but this is not misanthropic. A sense of place is a way of embracing humanity among all of its neighbors. It is an entry into the larger world.”

During my visits with middle school, high school, and college students, a discussion of the senses would inevitably come about when we talked about nature. Sometimes I would ask directly, other times the students would raise the subject in the classroom or later, through essays. Their verbal answers were often hesitant, searching. This was apparently not a subject that many, if any, had confronted before. For some young people, nature is so abstract—the ozone layer, a faraway rain forest—that it exists beyond the senses. For others, nature is simple
background, a disposable consumer item. One young man in a Potomac, Maryland, classroom described his relationship with nature as shaky, at best. “Like most I exploit what it gives and I do with it what I please,” he said. He thought of nature “as a means to an end or a tool; something made to be used and admired, not something to live. Nature to me is like my house or even like my cluttered room. It has things in it which can be played with. I say play away, do what you want with it, it’s your house.” He made no mention of the senses, saw or understood no complexity. I admired his honesty.

Yet other young people, when prompted, did describe how experiences in nature excited their senses. For example, one boy recalled his sensory experience when camping, “the red and orange flames dancing in the darkness, the smoky fumes rising up, burning my eyes and nostrils. . . .”

The experience of irrepressible Jared Grano, a ninth-grader whose father is a middle-school principal, sends a positive message to parents who worry that they might be alienating their kids from nature by taking them on the sometimes-dreaded family vacation. He complained that, although vacations are supposed to be for getting away from it all, “Unfortunately, I had to take them all with me! My parents, younger brother, and younger sister would all be traveling with me in an oven on wheels for over a week. The Grand Canyon? I was in no hurry to see the canyon. I figured it would be there for me later.” When the family arrived, Jared gazed at “the massive temples of the canyon.” His first thought was, “It looks like a painting.” He was impressed by the beauty and majesty of the surroundings. “But after seeing the canyon from several different vantage points, I was ready to leave. Although the canyon was magnificent, I felt that I was not part of it—and without being part of it, it seemed little more than a giant hole in the ground.” But the vacation was young, and the know-it-all state of mind penetrable. After the Grand Canyon, his family drove to smaller Walnut Canyon
National Monument, near Flagstaff, Arizona. Jared assumed that Walnut Canyon would be similar to the Grand Canyon, “interesting to look at, but nothing to hold my attention.”

Nine hundred years ago, the Sinagua people built their homes under cliff overhangs. Twenty miles long, four hundred feet deep and a quarter mile wide, the canyon is populated with soaring turkey vultures, as well as elk and javelina. Life zones overlap, mixing species that usually live apart; cacti grow beside mountain firs. Jared described details of the path they walked, how the bushes were low and straggly and looked as though they had been there for many years, and the shape of the tall green pines across the gap. “As we followed the path down into the canyon, the skies grew suddenly dark. It began raining and the rain quickly turned to sleet,” Jared wrote. “We found shelter in one of the ancient Indian caves. Lightning lit up the canyon and the sound of thunder reverberated in the cave. As we stood waiting for the storm to end, my family and I talked about the Indians who once lived here. We discussed how they cooked in the caves, slept in the caves, and found shelter in the caves—just as we were doing.” He looked out across the canyon through the haze of rain. “I finally felt that I was a part of nature.” The context of his life shifted. He was immersed in living history, witnessing natural events beyond his control, keenly aware of it all. He was
alive
.

Surely such moments are more than pleasant memories. The young don’t demand dramatic adventures or vacations in Africa. They need only a taste, a sight, a sound, a touch—or, as in Jared’s case, a lightning strike—to reconnect with that receding world of the senses.

The know-it-all state of mind is, in fact, quite vulnerable. In a flash, it burns, and something essential emerges from its ashes.

B
EN
F
RANKLIN LIVED
a block from Boston Harbor when he was a boy. In 1715, when Ben was nine, his eldest brother was lost at sea, but Ben was not deterred. “Living near the water, I was much in and about it, learned early to swim well, and to manage boats, and when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of difficulty,” he wrote later.

This love of water and his bent toward mechanics and invention merged and led to one of his earliest experiments.

One windy day, Ben was flying a kite from the bank of the Mill Pond, a holding area for water from high tide. In a warm wind, Ben tied the kite to a stake, threw off his clothes and dove in.

“The water was pleasantly cool, and he was reluctant to leave it, but he wanted to fly his kite some more,” biographer H. W. Brands writes. “He pondered his dilemma until it occurred to him that he need not forgo one diversion for the other.” Climbing out of the pond, Ben untied the kite and returned to the cool water. “As the buoyancy of the water diminished gravity’s hold on his feet, he felt the kite tugging him forward. He surrendered to the wind’s power, lying on his back and letting the kite pull him clear across the pond without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.”

He applied a scientist’s mind to the lessons of the senses, and used his direct experience with nature to solve a problem. Today, of course, we have moved much scientific experimentation to the electronic ether. But surely the foundation of such experimentation remains the kind of direct experience that Ben enjoyed as he surrendered to the wind’s power.

Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University, developed his influential theory of multiple intelligences in 1983. Gardner argued that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, was far too limited; he instead proposed seven types of intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These included: linguistic intelligence (“word smart”); logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart”); spatial intelligence (“picture smart”); bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart”); musical intelligence (“music smart”); interpersonal intelligence (“people smart”); and intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart”).

More recently, he added an eighth intelligence: naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”). Charles Darwin, John Muir, and Rachel Carson are examples of this type. Gardner explained:

The core of the naturalist intelligence is the human ability to recognize plants, animals, and other parts of the natural environment, like clouds or rocks. All of us can do this; some kids (experts on dinosaurs) and many adults (hunters, botanists, anatomists) excel at this pursuit. While the ability doubtless evolved to deal with natural kinds of elements, I believe that it has been hijacked to deal with the world of man-made objects. We are good at distinguishing among cars, sneakers, and jewelry, for example, because our ancestors needed to be able to recognize carnivorous animals, poisonous snakes, and flavorful mushrooms.

Gardner’s monumental work, which has helped shape public and private education, used findings from neurophysiology research to pinpoint
parts of the brain that correlate to each identified intelligence; he showed that humans could lose one of the specific types of intelligence through disease or injury. Naturalist intelligence is not as clearly linked to biological evidence.

“Were I granted another lifetime or two, I would like to rethink the nature of intelligence with respect to our new biological knowledge, on the one hand, and our most sophisticated understanding of the terrain of knowledge and societal practice, on the other,” he wrote in 2003.

The Montessori movement, along with other education approaches, has made this connection for decades. However, the impact of nature experience on early childhood development is, in terms of neuroscience, understudied. Gardner’s designation of the eighth intelligence suggests another rich arena for research, but his theory has immediate application for teachers and parents who might otherwise overlook the importance of natural experience to learning and child development.

Professor Leslie Owen Wilson teaches courses in educational psychology and theories of learning in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin. Her university offers one of the premier graduate programs in environmental education. She, for one, awaits more definitive biological evidence. Nonetheless, she offers a list of descriptors for children with the eighth intelligence. Such children, she writes:

1. Have keen sensory skills, including sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

2. Readily use heightened sensory skills to notice and categorize things from the natural world.

3. Like to be outside, or like outside activities like gardening, nature walks, or field trips geared toward observing nature or natural phenomena.

4. Easily notice patterns from their surroundings—likes, differences, similarities, anomalies.

5. Are interested in and care about animals or plants.

6. Notice things in the environment others often miss.

7. Create, keep, or have collections, scrapbooks, logs, or journals about natural objects—these may include written observations, drawings, pictures and photographs, or specimens.

8. Are very interested, from an early age, in television shows, videos, books, or objects from or about nature, science, or animals.

9. Show heightened awareness of and concern for the environment and/or for endangered species.

10. Easily learn characteristics, names, categorizations, and data about objects or species found in the natural world.

Some teachers, as we will see later, are making good use of their knowledge of the eighth intelligence. However, the problem with such a helpful list of indicators is that some adults may incorrectly use it to interpret naturalistic intelligence as a separate intelligence, one somehow relegated to a stereotype: Nature Boy or Nature Girl, the kids who collect snakes or hover over the classroom aquarium (if the classroom is lucky enough to have one). It’s unlikely that Ben Franklin’s teachers thought of him as a Nature Boy, but surely his intensified senses and ability to see natural connections were related to his transcendent experiences in nature. Children are able to attune themselves to all kinds of learning if they have appropriate developmental experiences.

Gardner has drawn needed attention to the fact that intelligence should not be narrowly defined as linguistic or logical-mathematical. Further, he emphasizes that children may have several of the eight intelligences, or all, in different degrees. Wilson’s first descriptor is “keen sensory skills.” Certainly all the intelligences teach children to pay attention, but as we will see in a later chapter, there is probably something peculiar to experiences in nature that work particularly well in attuning attention—and not only because nature is interesting.

Janet Fout, a West Virginia environmental activist, told me that when her daughter was small she encouraged her to note the details, to detect them with all of her senses. Janet’s own affinity with the natural world began early. Now in her early fifties, Janet was raised in her
grandmother’s house in town. Her grandmother had moved there after forty years of harsh living in rural West Virginia. The simple white house was fronted by one of the few remaining dirt roads in Huntington. Day and evening, she and the other kids in her neighborhood spent hours playing hide-and-seek or freeze-tag. A water maple in the front yard offered her a branch low enough to grab, wrap a leg around, and pull herself up, and served as her personal hideout and escape, “a place where I could contemplate my life and future, undisturbed, and feed my wild, wild dreams.” Her recollections are rich with sensory learning, with paying attention:

My Grandma generally had to threaten a switching to get me to come inside, and the sinuous willow tree in our neighbor’s yard provided her with all the fine keen switches she needed to coerce me—even when the weather turned “bad.” What we call “bad” weather now was seen by me as an opportunity. I never judged the weather then but took advantage of the shifting winds. Summer rains sent me charging inside in search of a swimsuit and back outside to drench myself, fully clothed if my swimsuit wasn’t found. Rain on the dirt road at Twelfth Street had a smell all its own—different as it hit the gray dirt instead of asphalt, bricks, or concrete.