Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (38 page)

Several years ago, I visited Wes Jackson at the Land Institute on the
Kansas prairie near Salina. An admiring
Atlantic
profile once described him as an intellectual descendant of Thoreau, and possibly as important. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called genius award—Jackson established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University–Sacramento. Restless by nature, and increasingly dismayed by what he considered the dead-end, anti-environment direction of agriculture, he and his wife, Dana, came home to Kansas and created the Land Institute, a research institution linked to the nation’s Land Grant agricultural colleges and surrounded by hundreds of acres of native prairie grasses and plant-breeding plots. For over two decades, Jackson has been one of the most prominent voices arguing for the resettling of the Great Plains, albeit in an entirely new way. Some consider Jackson outrageously radical, the John Brown of rural America. (His great-grandfather rode with the abolitionist Brown.) He wants to emancipate the land and the rest of us along with it. His vision describes a world where families would return to a more natural existence, but avoid the mistakes of past back-to-the-land movements.

He claims that agriculture as we know it is a grand mistake, a “global disease,” and that the plowshare may have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword. In his office overlooking rolling hills and fields of prairie grasses, he leans forward and says, “I’m trying to build a new agriculture that’s based on the model of the prairie.” Jackson, a large and imposing figure (described by one writer as a cross between the prophet Isaiah and a bison) adds, “But we can’t stop there: we need a human economy based on the prairie, on nature.” According to Jackson, the natural prairie of perennial grasses that once held the top-soil tight is now tilled regularly, loosening the soil, and as a result the nation’s legacy of precious topsoil is floating downstream and turning to sediment. Streams and rivers throughout the Midwest run unnaturally muddy. Erosion is ripping away soil at a rate twenty times natural replenishment, even faster than during the Dust Bowl. By one estimate,
Iowa has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years. Kansas has lost a quarter. He sees much of the current emphasis on crop rotation as wishful thinking.

At the Land Institute, Jackson and his researchers are conducting ecological and genetic research to create prairie-like grain fields, what he calls a “domestic prairie for the future.” Modern agriculture relies on annuals such as corn or wheat, which must be seeded every year, after the land is tilled, with resulting erosion. By contrast, the native prairie, with its perennial plants and deep sod and spreading root systems, doesn’t lose topsoil; it builds it. The only problem is, the original prairie isn’t particularly edible for humans.

Jackson’s new domestic prairie would be a mix, a polyculture, of hardy perennials, some of them offspring of the natural wild grasses of the original prairie, which would produce edible grain. He hopes to produce high-yielding grains that will reproduce through their roots, and thereby withstand harsh winters and hold the soil in place. Jackson has little faith in genetic engineering; one mistake, he says, and we could suffer a disaster on the scale of ozone depletion. Through slower, traditional genetics research—the kind done in the larger world, not by physically manipulating DNA—he estimates it will take fifty years, maybe longer, to produce plants for a sustainable agricultural prairie. But some day, he suggests, this domestic prairie could yield nearly as much grain nourishment per acre as the average acre of Kansas wheat now produces, once energy costs are factored in. He can imagine this new prairie flourishing over most of the nation’s cultivated land sometime later in this century, or perhaps the one after that.

But here’s the catch: If the domestic prairie is really to sustain us, we’ll eventually have to redistribute the population out across the country and live a kind of life that few of us can imagine today, a more radical life than back-to-the-land hippies had in mind. In Jackson’s view, our great-grandchildren will live in farms or villages spread out across the land. Their distribution will be based on intricate ecological formulas,
employing technologies at once familiar yet radically different from those of the 1990s—or the 1890s. Whether you view this future as a new Utopia or a rural gulag depends, he says, “on the limits of your imagination.” He believes that no form of solar energy, including the domestic prairie, will produce enough energy to sustain us unless the population is redistributed. Later in this century, in his analysis, American settlement patterns will be determined by how many people the land in each particular bioregion can sustain. Cities will still exist, but will be downscaled, most with about forty thousand citizens. Outside the cities, the rural population will be triple what it was in 1990, but this population will be carefully distributed. For example, the plains of central Kansas will support about one family for every forty acres. In Iowa and some of the West, including the Sacramento Valley, each family will be supported by as few as ten acres. (Considering this possibility, a friend of mine says, “I know this place. It’s called ‘France.’”)

These rural areas will sustain a new kind of farm and village life. People will live within square-mile communities; farm families will live on their own land but near each other, just outside the village, which is located at the center of this square. Several hundred to several thousand people (not everyone would be a farmer) would live in these new communities. The farmers working the domestic prairie will provide most of the protein and carbohydrates. Animals (including a winter-resistant cross between buffalo and cattle) will be raised in mobile pens wheeled around the unfenced landscape. This will eliminate the cost of repairing thousands of miles of fencing and allow wild species to migrate freely. People who live in the villages will spend part of their days raising vegetables, fruits, and animals in solar bioshelters. Energy needs will be provided by a variety of technologies, from passive solar installations to wind-powered generators to old-fashioned horsepower. For children, what an extraordinarily different environment—both futuristic and ancient—this would be.

The possibility of a return to wild prairie has precedent. As farming became concentrated in the Midwest and West, the small farms of New England faded. Between 1850 and 1950, thousands of square miles in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine that once were cropland became woodland. Like the remnants of an ancient civilization, forgotten stone farm fences disappeared into an overgrowth of pines and maples. Jay Davis, editor of the
Republican Journal
in Belfast, Maine, calls this period New England’s “sleeping century.” In a history of his county, Davis wrote, “As the fences of Waldo County knelt and fell and the trees stepped out to reclaim what had been theirs, and the mills decayed into the streams and the ridges were deserted, as people left and the survivors worked hard for a living, what emerged was, at least relatively, a twentieth-century wilderness.”

How similar that sounds to the current condition of the Great Plains. In a 2004
National Geographic
description of the depopulating of that region, John G. Mitchell described how, in some communities, the median age of residents is already creeping into the sixties. “In fact, grass appears to be staging a comeback on some public lands, too,” Mitchell reports. “Fifteen national grass-lands embracing more than three and a half million acres are scattered across the Great Plains from North Dakota into Texas—a legacy acquired by the government after bankruptcies and foreclosures evicted thousands of unlucky homesteaders in the 1930s. It’s enough to make a person wonder: When grass returns to the Great Plains, can buffalo be far behind?” In fact, the number of bison—now seen as a reasonable ranching alternative to cattle—has grown dramatically. In the northern Plains, banks now help ranchers switch from cattle to bison. Such change, as
National Geographic
points out, offers a “sweeping perception of what the Great Plains used to be—and might in some ways be again.”

Could a new generation of settlers follow? We have seen at least one
false start. In the mid-1970s, for the first time since 1820, rural areas began to grow faster, proportionately, than cities. Rapid growth is still occurring in small towns, especially those that have been anointed by major employers—say, an automobile manufacturing plant—or, more commonly, those on the metropolitan fringe, meaning within an hour’s drive of a city. Housing is cheaper there, so gas prices be damned. But it’s also true that in great stretches of rural and small-town America, the city-to-rural migration of the 1970s did not last. Economics was one reason; another was the fact that human beings are social animals. The buckshot urbanization of rural areas was simply too isolating. So today, sprawl rules, but the great migration to the farther reaches of America has yet to occur, and perhaps—as of now—that’s for the best. Too often, small towns invaded by urban expatriates lose their character and physical beauty to overdevelopment.

Still, history is full of false starts, and it is shaped by waves that came and receded and then returned in greater force. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, opening millions of acres to settlement. As of this writing, Congress is entertaining several bills similar in spirit; instead of offering land, one of the bills, which calls for a New Homestead Act, offers incentives for people willing to start businesses in those rural areas that have lost population over the past decade. The act provides tax and savings credits, seed money for startups, and repays up to half of recent graduates’ college loans—no small offering to the 40 percent of student borrowers who leave college with debt payments higher than 8 percent of their monthly income. Other incentives to move out of major population centers will likely be more powerful, such as the spread of wireless computer services (currently, the country’s largest regional wireless broadband network covers a 600-square-mile rural county, where the largest town has a population of only 13,200); the creation of a spate of regional airports serving smaller cities and towns; and a rising concern about terrorism in the larger cities.

Given these developments, families with children will continue to have several choices. They can, right now, move to a smaller city, such as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “The single best thing about living here is that everything is easy,” says sociologist Rosemary Erickson, who moved back to her native South Dakota from California in 2004. This was her second return; the first time was in the 1980s, when she operated her business from Davis, a hamlet a few miles outside of Sioux Falls. Sioux Falls is no small town, but it’s far quieter and arguably much closer to nature than the heaving megalopolises on the coasts, and the prairie and farms Rosemary loved as a girl surround it. Sioux Falls, she points out, has become “amazingly diverse, with Sudanese refugees and all the rest,” she says. “When I was a girl in Davis, there was only one black student.” People in Sioux Falls by no means feel isolated from the world. While retirees comprise much of the migration back to her area of the country, Rosemary does know families that have moved to South Dakota so that their children could experience a quieter upbringing, including a more direct experience of nature.

Weather is probably the greatest disincentive, but surmountable through more sophisticated insulation—some of it being perfected by green engineers—and better weather forecasting, along with the new popularity of manufactured residential storm rooms. “We have tornado shelters in all big malls. A lot of people say, ‘There’s a tornado warning; lets go to the mall!’” Rosemary says, laughing.

So we have a choice about the kind of cities and towns we will build, about the way population is distributed, about the values we bring to such political and personal decisions. We could, in fact, someday create a smaller-scale way of life in those parts of America that are now losing population.

The dream of green towns in the countryside is rooted in a rich tradition. Ebenezer Howard, the most important historical figure in urban
planning, was born in 1850, grew up in small towns in England, immigrated to America as a young man, and failed as a Nebraska farmer. Arriving in Chicago in 1872, the year after the great Chicago fire, he witnessed the rebuilding of that city. During his years in America, his reading of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American utopians helped shape his views on how a better life might be achieved through town planning. In 1898, he published
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
, later retitled
Garden Cities of Tomorrow
. His vision of what he called “town-country” remains valid. The three magnets of social organization, he wrote, were the town, the country, and the town-country, the latter combining the best social and economic features, and avoiding the downsides, of the first two. Thus came the Garden Cities movement, in its various versions.

Howard’s key idea was that groups of citizens would create a joint company to buy land in economically depressed agricultural areas and establish new towns with a fixed population of thirty-two thousand residents living on one thousand acres. Each town would be surrounded by five thousand acres of green belt. He expanded this idea into what he called the Social City: several Garden Cities linked by rail lines or highways. In the following decades, Howard’s theories were sometimes put into practice, mainly in England and America, and influenced suburban development. The problem now is that many of the elemental green influences were lost along the way; instead of garden cities, we got gated cities. From the developers’ viewpoint, fear sold better than green. Howard’s “town-country” concept never really blossomed, but in recent applications of New Urbanist thinking, the idea’s time may have arrived. New Urbanism, a community design philosophy often associated with Smart Growth and controlling suburban sprawl, favors the return of such traditional features as front porches, backyard garages, multi-use buildings, and housing clustered near commercial service areas.