Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (20 page)

Public education is enamored of, even mesmerized by, what might be called silicon faith: a myopic focus on high technology as salvation. In 2001, the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit organization in College Park, Maryland, released “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood,” a report supported by more than eighty-five experts in neurology, psychiatry, and education, including Diane Ravitch, former U.S. assistant secretary of education; Marilyn Benoit, president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; and primate researcher Jane Goodall. “Fool’s Gold” charged that thirty years of research on educational technology had produced just one clear link between computers and children’s learning. (On some standardized tests, “drill-and-practice programs appear to improve scores modestly—though not as much or as cheaply as one-on-one tutoring.”) The co-signers of the “Fool’s Gold” report went so far as to call for a moratorium on computer use in early childhood education, until the U.S. surgeon general can ascertain whether computers are hazardous to the health of young children. The public response was surprising. After “Fool’s Gold” was released, MSNBC conducted an online poll of subscribers, asking if they supported such a moratorium. Of three thousand people who answered, 51 percent agreed. And these were Internet users.

The problem with computers isn’t computers—they’re just tools; the problem is that overdependence on them displaces other sources of education, from the arts to nature. As we pour money and attention into educational electronics, we allow less fashionable but more effective tools to atrophy. Here’s one example: We know for a fact that the arts stimulate learning. A 1995 analysis by the College Board showed that students who studied the arts for more than four years scored forty-four
points higher on the math portion and fifty-nine points higher on the verbal section of the SAT. Nonetheless, over the past decade, one-third of the nation’s public-school music programs were dropped. During the same period, annual spending on school technology tripled, to $6.2 billion. Between early 1999 and September 2001, educational technology attracted nearly $1 billion in venture capital, according to Merrill Lynch and Company. One software company now targets babies as young as one day old. Meanwhile, many public school districts continue to shortchange the arts. Even more districts fail to offer anything approaching experiential, environment-based, or place-based education. Some legislators suggest that the public must choose between classroom-based environmental education and experiential education beyond the classroom walls. That should be viewed as a false choice; both deserve more support. Proponents of an arts revival in schools offer a good model for action. In some districts, these proponents have successfully argued that the arts and music stimulate learning in math and science, and this reasoning has helped that cause. Similarly, an argument can now be made that nature education stimulates cognitive learning and creativity, and reduces attention deficit.

Nonetheless, the school district in my own county—the sixth-largest district in America—illustrates the more common lack of synchronicity. San Diego County, larger in size and population than some states, is an ecological and sociological microcosm of America. It is, in fact, a place with more endangered and threatened species than any other county in the continental United States. The United Nations declared it one of the Earth’s twenty-five “hot spots” of bio-diversity. Yet, as of this writing, not one of the forty-three school districts within this county offers a single elective course in local flora and fauna. A few volunteers, including docents from the local Natural History Museum, do what they can. Across the nation, such neglect is the norm.

Though current waves of school reform are less than nature-friendly, individual teachers—with help from parents, natural history museum docents, and other volunteers—can do much to improve the situation without organized, official sanction. To be truly effective, however, we must go beyond the dedication of individual teachers and volunteers to question the assumptions and context of the gap between students and nature. We should do everything we can to encourage the incipient movement of what is sometimes called “experiential education.” We should also challenge some of the driving forces behind our current approach to nature, including a loss of respect for nature and the death of natural history in higher education.

A few years ago, I sat in the cluttered office of Robert Stebbins, professor emeritus at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He grew up ranging through California’s Santa Monica Mountains, where he learned to cup his hands around his mouth and “call in the owls.” For him, nature was still magical. For more than twenty years, Stebbins’s reference work,
A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians
, which he wrote and illustrated, has remained the undisputed bible of herpetology, and inspired countless youngsters to chase snakes. To Stebbins, our relationship with nature has been undermined by a shift in values.

For a decade, he and his students drove to the California desert to record animal tracks in areas frequented by all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs. Stebbins discovered that 90 percent of invertebrate animal life—insects, spiders, and other arthropods—had been destroyed in the ATV-scarred desert areas. While I spoke with him, he dropped scores of slides into an old viewer. “Look,” he said. “Ten years of before-and-after photos.” Grooves and slashes, tracks that will remain for centuries. Desert crust ripped up by rubber treads, great clouds of dirt rising high into the atmosphere; a gunshot desert tortoise, with a single tire track
cracking its back; aerial photographs taken near Blythe, California, of ancient and mysterious Indian intaglios, carved images so large that they can only be perceived from the air. Across the flanks and back and head of a deer-like intaglio were claw marks left by ATVs. “If only these people knew what they were doing,” said Stebbins.

What upset him most was not the destruction that had already occurred, but the devastation yet to come and the waning sense of awe—or simple respect—toward nature that he sensed in each successive generation. “One time, I was out watching the ATVs. I saw these two little boys trudging up a dune. I went running after them. I wanted to ask them why they weren’t riding machines—maybe they were looking for something else out there. They said their trail bikes were broken. I asked them if they knew what was out there in the desert, if they’d seen any lizards. ‘Yeah,’ one of them said, ‘But lizards just run away.’ These kids were bored, uninterested. If only they knew.”

Even among children who participate in nature activities, a conservation ethic is not assured. In a classroom in Alpine, California, I visited elementary-school pupils who reported spending far more time outside than I had heard reported in most settings across the country. Some of the students in this science class had watched bobcats play on the ridges; one boy had watched a mountain lion thread its way across his parents’ acreage. Many of these young people were growing up in this far exurb in the mountains because their parents wanted them to be exposed to more nature. One boy said, “My mom didn’t like the city because there was hardly any nature, so Mom and Dad decided to move here to Alpine. We live in an apartment. My grandma lives even farther out and she has huge property—most of it is grass, but part of it is just trees. I like to go there, because she has a baby mountain lion that comes down into her yard. When I was there on Sunday, we were going out to feed the goats and we saw a bobcat trying to catch birds. It’s really cool.”

I was glad to find a group of kids who seemed to enjoy nature as much as I had, but as they spoke, it became clear that, for nearly half of
them, their favorite interaction with nature was vehicular, on small four-wheel ATVs, or “quads.” “My dad and me ride in the desert and most of the time we don’t follow the tracks. My dad races off-road cars. He says it’s cool to go out there even if you’re on a track because you can still see animals—and also it’s fun to race.” Another boy: “Every August we go to Utah, and my mom’s friend up there has three quads; we ride for the fun of it but mostly to see animals like deer and skunk at night, and if you leave fish guts and go out at night you’ll see, like, five black bears come out. It’s cool.” A third boy: “We go to the desert every weekend and they have races, there’s one hill that nobody rides on because it’s rocky, so we changed it so you go up, then jump off these cliffs; and up there we’ll see snake holes and snakes. On hot days we go out and hunt for lizards.” And a girl, displaying no sense of irony, added: “My dad had a four-wheel-drive truck and we go out in the desert, not out in nature or anything.”

After the bell rang and the students left, Jane Smith, a teacher at the school for five years, and a social worker before that, raised her hands in exasperation. “It always amazes me. Most of these students don’t make the connection that there’s a conflict between ATVs and the land. Even after this project we did a week on energy conservation, and they didn’t get it. Just didn’t see it—and they still don’t. Every weekend, Alpine empties out. Families head for the desert and the dunes. And that’s the way it is.”

Some of these young people, and their parents, are more likely to know the brand names of ATVs than the lizards, snakes, hawks, and cacti of the desert. As my friend, biologist Elaine Brooks, has said, “humans seldom value what they cannot name.” Or experience. What if, instead of sailing to the Galápagos Islands and getting his hands dirty and his feet wet, Charles Darwin had spent his days cooped up in some office cubicle staring at a computer screen? What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew its biological name? Did it exist?

“Reality is the final authority; reality is what’s going on out there, not
what’s in your mind or on your computer screen,” says Paul Dayton, who has been seething for years about the largely undocumented sea change in how science—specifically higher education—perceives and depicts nature. That change will shape—or distort—the perception of nature, and reality, for generations to come. Dayton is a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. He enjoys a worldwide reputation as a marine ecologist and is known for his seminal ecological studies, which he began in the 1960s, of the benthic (sea bottom) communities in the Antarctic. The Ecological Society of America has honored Dayton and colleagues with the prestigious Cooper Ecology Award—marking a first for research of an oceanic system—for addressing “fundamental questions about sustainability of communities in the face of disturbance along environmental gradients.” In 2004, the American Society of Naturalists presented him with the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award.

Now, he sits in his office on a rainy spring day staring at the Pacific Ocean, dark and cold beyond the Scripps Pier. He has a terrarium in the room, where he keeps a giant centipede named Carlos, to whom Dayton feeds mice. Dayton approaches nature with a sense of awe and respect, but he doesn’t romanticize it. When he was growing up in snow-clogged logging camps, the family didn’t eat if his father didn’t hunt. A compact, athletic man with graying hair, an infectious smile, and skin burnished by cold wind and hot sun, Dayton must sometimes feel as if he has slept through a long, hard Arctic night, and awakened in a foreign future in which nothing is named and nature is sold in stores or deconstructed into pure math. He tells me that most of his elite graduate students in marine ecology exhibit “no evidence of training in any type of natural history.” Few upper-division ecology majors or undergraduates in marine ecology “know even major phyla such as arthropods or annelids.”

Sitting a few feet away from him (and farther from Carlos), Bonnie Becker, a National Park Service marine biologist at Cabrillo National Monument, says Dayton’s view is accurate. Recently, she realized
that—despite her prior training—she could identify few of the more than one thousand marine invertebrate species that live off Point Loma. So she set up an informal tutoring group, mostly students teaching other students. “Word has gotten out,” she says. “You know, have a beer and teach me everything you know about limpets.” The people who name the animals, or even know the names, are fast becoming extinct. In San Diego and Orange counties, no more than a handful of people can come close to naming a significant number of marine invertebrates, and these are mainly museum workers and docents, and a few local government workers who monitor wastewater treatment and sewage outfalls. These people have little opportunity to pass on their knowledge to a new generation. “In a few years there will be nobody left to identify several major groups of marine organisms,” Dayton says. “I wish I were exaggerating.”

What we can’t name can hurt us. “A guy in Catalina sent me photos of a snail he found,” Dayton says. “The snail is moving north. It’s not supposed to be where the guy found it. Something is going on with this snail or with its environment.” Global warming? Maybe. “But if you don’t know it’s an invasive species, then you detect no change.” It’s easy enough to blame the public schools for a pervading ignorance, but Dayton places much of the responsibility on the dominance of molecular biology in higher education. Not that he has anything against molecular biology, and not that he doesn’t encounter professors who buck the trend. But, he says, the explicit goal of the new philosophy of modern university science education is to get the “ologies”—invertebrate zoology, ichthyology, mammalogy, ornithology, and herpetology—“back in the nineteenth century where they belong.” Shortly after I spoke with Paul Dayton at his Scripps office, he presented a paper, now in high demand as a reprint, at the American Society of Naturalists Symposium. In it he underscores the greater threat:

The last century has seen enormous environmental degradation: many populations are in drastic decline, and their ecosystems have been vastly altered. . . . These environmental crises coincide with the
virtual banishment of natural sciences in academe, which eliminate the opportunity for both young scientists and the general public to learn the fundamentals that help us predict population levels and the responses by complex systems to environmental variation. . . . The groups working on molecular biology and theoretical ecology have been highly successful within their own circles and have branched into many specialties. These specialists have produced many breakthroughs important to those respective fields. However . . . this reductionist approach has contributed rather little toward actual solutions for the increasingly severe global realities of declining populations, extinctions, or habitat loss. . . . We must reinstate natural science courses in all our academic institutions to insure that students experience nature first-hand and are instructed in the fundamentals of the natural sciences.