Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (13 page)

Conventional memory holds that, in past decades, tree-house building and other nature-based engineering escapades were conducted mainly by boys; those girls who did participate were considered tomboys—when you think about it, a strange, ambivalent term. But the fact is, we don’t know that girls were so demure. In the absence of good longitudinal studies of how kids have experienced nature, we can’t assume that girls—in some significant number—weren’t building tree houses or underground forts or conducting any number of similarly muddy experiments in physics. Janet Fout, for example, didn’t build tree houses, but she wove elaborate weed houses within the hollowed confines of brush and bushes.

When I mentioned my own recollections to Elizabeth Schmitt, a clinical social worker, that tree-house building was something boys did, she bristled and offered a different memory:

My parents married the day after my dad, a navy pilot from WWII, graduated from Columbia on June 2, 1948. As New Yorkers, they were thrown into the life of rural Pennsylvania where my dad, a mining engineer, was employed by Bethlehem Steel Company. In a small company town we called “Toy Town” because the company houses all looked the same, I roamed and played with all the kids. We played baseball together, and built huts and tree houses. Boys and girls did this together. I was as active as any boys there and
not
a tomboy.

One positive trend is that outdoor opportunities are expanding for women, and therefore for girls. By 2005, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association reported that females comprised 45 percent of tent campers and 36 percent of backpacking campers. If kid-built tree
houses were as common today as when Elizabeth Schmitt or Janet Fout were girls, I wonder what the gender balance of the construction crews would be.

As it turns out, Alberto Lau’s daughter, Erin, a University of Southern California student, grew up building tree houses in a Scripps Ranch canyon. Later, the local community association made a practice of tearing down tree houses and forts there. Even so, in her tree house and canyon, Erin grew a dream:

The quiet wisdom of nature does not try to mislead you like the landscape of the city does, with billboards and ads everywhere. It doesn’t make you feel like you have to conform to any image. It’s just there, and it accepts everyone.

Living where I did allowed me to be outside building forts from age five to fourteen. And to jump to a large conclusion, it influenced the way in which I saw the built world. I am a landscape architecture major because of the pressing need in this world for the reintroduction of the natural landscape into the unwelcoming built environment. Why can’t mini-ecosystems be introduced into the middle of the city? Can we design parks so that they are as chaotic as nature, yet safe for an evening walk?

Idealistic? Let’s hope so, considering the alternative. Which brings us back to Ben Franklin. As H. W. Brands tells the story, Ben and his friends liked to hunt small fish in Mill Pond. But their shuffling through the water stirred up mud, clouding the water, which didn’t help the fishing. Their solution: to build a jetty extending into the marsh. Ben, with his eye on stones piled at a nearby building site, told his gang to wait until the masons had gone. “The boys waited, the men departed, and the construction commenced,” writes Brands. “After several hours and much struggling, the jetty was completed, to the boys’ satisfaction and pride. The foreman of the building crew, arriving next morning, was less admiring. A cursory investigation revealed the whereabouts of the
missing stones, from which the foreman deduced the identity of those responsible for their removal. The boys were remanded to their parents’ custody and chastisement. . . .” Though young Ben “pleaded the civic usefulness of the construction,” his father pointed out that the first civic virtue was honesty.

Whether the boy learned more about civic honesty or practical rebellion is unclear. But for Ben, as for Erin, nature was a place to use all the senses—and to learn by doing.

I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing
. . .

—W
OODY
G
UTHRIE

A
RT CRITIC
B
ERNARD
B
ERENSON
, echoing the words of the psychologist Erik Erikson, father of human developmental theory, theorized that creativity begins “with the natural genius of childhood and the ‘spirit of place.’” Berenson once described how, as he looked back on his seventy years, and recalled his moments of greatest happiness, they were usually times when he lost himself “all but completely in some instant of perfect harmony”:

In childhood and boyhood this ecstasy overtook me when I was happy out of doors. . . . A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember . . . that I climbed up a stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one. Surely most children are like that. I have retained that faculty through the years.

Robin Moore would agree with Berenson. As an expert in the design of play and learning environments, Moore has written that natural settings are essential for healthy child development because they stimulate all the senses and integrate informal play with formal learning. According to Moore, multisensory experiences in nature help to build “the cognitive constructs necessary for sustained intellectual development,”
and stimulate imagination by supplying the child with the free space and materials for what he calls children’s “architecture and artifacts.” “Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity observable in almost any group of children playing in a natural setting,” says Moore.

Early theoretical work in this field was done by Cambridge architect Simon Nicholson, the son of two of Britain’s most prominent twentieth-century artists, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. In a 1990 obituary for Nicholson, the
Guardian
of London described Nicholson’s contention that everybody is innately creative but that modern society suppresses the creative instinct, while promoting artists as a gifted elite, “who, as it happens, have all the fun.” Nicholson’s “loose-parts” theory has been adopted by many landscape architects and child’s-play experts. Nicholson summed up his theory this way: “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” A “loose-parts” toy, as Nicholson defined it, is open-ended; children may use it in many ways and combine it with other loose parts through imagination and creativity. A typical list of loose parts for a natural play area might include water, trees, bushes, flowers, and long grasses; a pond and the creatures within it, along with other living things; sand (best if it can be mixed with water); places to sit in, on, under; structures that offer privacy and views. Go beyond that play area, to woods, fields, and streams, and the parts become looser and even more potent to the imagination.

One might argue that a computer, with its near-infinite coding possibilities, is history’s deepest box of loose parts. But binary code, made of two parts—1 and 0—has its limits. Nature, which excites all the senses, remains the richest source of loose parts.

The loose-parts theory is supported by studies of play that compare green, natural play areas with blacktop playgrounds. Swedish studies
found that children on asphalt playgrounds had play that was much more interrupted; they played in short segments. But in more natural playgrounds, children invented whole sagas that they carried from day to day to day—making and collecting meaning.

Meanwhile in Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the United States, studies of children in schoolyards with both green areas and manufactured play areas found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas. One of these studies found that a more natural schoolyard encouraged more fantasy and make-believe play in particular, which provided ways for boys and girls to play together in egalitarian ways; another reported that children showed a greater sense of wonder. The researchers defined creative play widely: playing with action figures and dolls; role-playing on imaginary battlefields and planets, and in mythical landscapes with fairies and queens; elaborate jump-rope routines; constructing buildings or objects from loose materials; and exploring the environment. In Denmark, a more recent study compared two groups of children, one in a traditional kindergarten, the other from a “nature kindergarten,” where children remained outside all day long, throughout the school year. Children in the nature kindergarten were found to be more alert, better at using their bodies, and significantly more likely to create their own games.

Researchers have also observed that when children played in an environment dominated by play structures rather than natural elements, they established their social hierarchy through physical competence; after an open grassy area was planted with shrubs, the quality of play in what researchers termed “vegetative rooms” was very different. Children used more fantasy play, and their social standing became based less on physical abilities and more on language skills, creativity, and inventiveness. In other words, the more creative children emerged as leaders in natural play areas.

And, in their review of the earlier studies, Andrea Faber Taylor and Frances E. Kuo at the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at
the University of Illinois, cautioned that in some of them children were self-selecting the spaces in which they played. Children, when given a choice, may choose green spaces when they intend to engage in creative play. Taylor’s and Kuo’s research demonstrated that children have greater ability to concentrate in more natural settings. In their study, children also selected where they wanted to play. The Denmark study focused on only forty-five children and a relatively extreme setting. These studies, therefore, do not necessarily prove a direct link between nature play and creativity. Nonetheless, the possibility that creative children prefer natural areas for their play raises its own crucial question: What happens when creative children can no longer choose a green space in which to be creative?

Curious about the influence of nature in the early development of the famously creative, I asked my teenage son, Matthew, to spend some summer library time searching through biographies for examples. He took on this job with enthusiasm. I offered to pay him for his time, but he declined money, as is his way. Realizing how much work he was in for, I persisted. Would any other kind of compensation do?

“How about StarCraft, Dad,” he said.

“A video game?”

“Computer game.”

I acquiesced. He headed for the library and hauled back the first stack of biographies. Excited, he brought me the first passage he found, from a biography of the great science-fiction author—the man who also originated the principles of the geostationary communication satellite—Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke grew up in Minehead, England, a coastal town on the Bristol Channel, with boyhood “vistas of the Atlantic Ocean that created the illusion of infinite space,” as biographer Neil McAleer tells it. On that shore, McAleer wrote, the young Clarke “built battlements of sand and explored the tidewater pools.”

During the winter months [Clarke] often cycled home in the dark, with the stars and moon illuminating his route in clear weather. Such starry evenings influenced Clarke’s budding cosmic consciousness. The silent night sky above him stirred his imagination and brought forth images of the future. Men would walk on the moon someday, he knew, and later they would leave their boot prints on the red sands of Mars. Even the gulf between our sun and other stars would be bridged eventually, and their planets explored by the descendants of our species.

In his later years, Clarke admitted that the only place where he was ever completely relaxed was by the edge of the sea, or weightless within it.

I added Matthew’s collection to other examples I had found. Joan of Arc first heard her calling, at age thirteen, “toward the hour of noon, in summer, in my father’s garden.” Jane Goodall, at two years of age, slept with earthworms under her pillow. (Don’t try this at home.) John Muir described “reveling in the wonderful wildness” around his boyhood home in Wisconsin. Samuel Langhorne Clemens held down an adult job as a printer at fourteen, but when his working day ended at three in the afternoon, he headed to the river to swim or fish or navigate a “borrowed” boat. One can imagine that it was there, as he dreamed of becoming a pirate or a trapper or scout, that he became “Mark Twain.” The poet T. S. Eliot, who grew up alongside the Mississippi River, wrote, “I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to those who have not.” And the imagination of biophilia’s patron, E. O. Wilson (whose boyhood nickname was “Snake”), was ignited while exploring the “woods and swamps in a languorous mood . . . [forming] the habit of quietude and concentration.”

In
Edison: Inventing the Century
, biographer Neil Baldwin tells how “Little Al,” as Edison was nicknamed, wandered away one day while visiting his sister’s farm. Her husband found him sitting in a box of straw. The little boy explained, “I saw baby chickens come out of eggs the old
hen was sitting on so I thought I could make little gooses come out of the goose eggs if I sat on them. If the hens and geese can do it, why can’t I?” Later, seeing the egg stain on Al’s pants, and that he was upset, his sister comforted him, reportedly saying, “It’s all right, Al. . . . If no one ever tried anything, even what some folks say is impossible, no one would ever learn anything. So you just keep on trying and maybe some day you’ll try something that will work.”

Or consider Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the more creative public figures in American history. In
Eleanor and Franklin
, Joseph P. Lash tells how, “as she passed from childhood to adolescence, the beauty of nature spoke to her awakening senses.” He goes on: