Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (42 page)

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 Taylor 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.

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.”

Most encouraging to her is that her daughter, like many of her generation, is also being exposed, “in a way that I never dreamed possible,” to global society. “Young people are traveling far beyond this country’s boundaries, being exposed to not only different cultures, but also, they are learning how our lavish, throw-away lifestyles in the United States are wreaking havoc outside our borders. These firsthand experiences, at the height of their youthful idealism, will undoubtedly spark new leaders, who will not only do battle to save more of our natural world, but also take a stand for greater justice for all people.

“While my personal social and environmental consciousness was fueled by experiences in the natural world and reading biographies of people who made a difference, I believe that a passion to save the Earth and its people will spring from these global experiences. Young people are connecting more and more with others across the globe. My daughter can already speak directly to a young person in Buenos Aires or Katmandu via the Internet—without intermediation. She can get the truth straight from the horse’s mouth in a matter of seconds. So, I’m hopeful.”

I hope Janet is right, but I believe that her optimism will prove valid only with a far greater societal commitment to the bond between our
young and the natural world—a commitment that goes beyond today’s environmentalism. While she fights mountaintop removal in West Virginia, strip miners of a different sort are at work in my backyard. Mammoth, rumbling graders slice away the natural curves of the land; this is, in effect, the strip-mining of San Diego. In larger building projects, several earthmovers typically remove ninety thousand cubic yards in a day. Stack this dirt, in cubic yards, and the result would be a tower reaching fifty-one miles into the air; all in a day’s work, all for one development. This stripping of the landscape is the first stage in the creation of a new kind of urban place in which
everything
is graded and riveted by human hands. Unless a different road is chosen, these are the neighborhoods in which generations of American children will grow up.

Speaking with college students during the research for this book did give me hope. When the issue of nature’s role in health—physical, mental, and spiritual—was introduced into the conversation, the tone changed; what often began as a fatalistic, intellectual discussion about the hole in the ozone layer quickly turned personal. Some students approached me to say they had never thought about the fate of the environment in such a personalized, direct way. I sense that these young people, who belong to what could be considered the first de-natured generation, hunger for a greater purpose. Some of these students wrote me later to describe how the conversation with their classmates about children and nature had moved them. Even dormant, the seed of nature grows with just a little water.

Perhaps, as the years go by, these young people will realize their sense of purpose in this cause, and dedicate their career skills to it. Not just as a matter of ideology, or even survival, but because they see the potential joy that they and their own children could share someday, as could many of us—if we act quickly.

I
T SEEMS LIKE
just the other day . . .

The boys are small. We’re staying in a three-room cabin beside the Owens River on the east slope of the Sierras. We can hear the October wind move down from the mountains. Jason and Matthew are in their beds, and I read to them from the 1955 juvenile novel
Lion Hound
, by Jim Kjelgaard. I have had this book since junior high. I read: “When Johnny Torrington awoke, the autumn dawn was still two hours away.

“For five luxurious minutes he stretched in his warm bed, the covers pulled up to his chin while he listened to the wind blowing through the bedroom’s open window. Though the wind was no colder than it had been yesterday, it seemed to have a quality now that had been lacking then.” My younger son’s eyes, made larger by strong, round glasses, widen. The older boy, Jason, tucks his face under the blanket, where he can surely see the lion circling.

The next evening, after Matthew goes into town with his mother, Jason and I walk a stretch of the Owens to fish with barbless flies. As we fish, we watch a great blue heron lift effortlessly, and I recall another heron rising above a pond in woods long ago, and I feel the awe that I felt then. I watch my son lift the fly line in a long loop above his head. Under the cottonwoods, he tells me with firmness that he wants to tie
his own leader. And I understand that it is time for me to put some distance between us on the river.

When it is too dark to see into the water, we walk toward home in the cold. We hear a noise in the bushes and look up to see seven mule deer watching us. Their heads and long ears are silhouetted against the dark lavender sky. We hear other sounds in the bushes. We reach the gravel road, and an Oldsmobile rolls up behind us and an old man cranks down his window and asks, “Do you need a ride or are you almost there?”

“We’re almost there,” I say.

We can see the light in our cabin. Matthew and his mother are waiting, and tonight I’ll read a few more pages of
Lion Hound
before they sleep.

J
ASON IS A MAN NOW
, and on his own. Matthew is in college. I feel a sense of pride and relief that they have grown well, and a deep grief that my years as a parent of young children is over, except in memory. And I am thankful. The times I spent with my children in nature are among my most meaningful memories—and I hope theirs.

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children’s memories, the adventures we’ve had together in nature will always exist. These will be their turtle tales.

8   
We attach two meanings to the word nature
Gary Snyder,
The Practice of the Wild
(Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 8.

15   “
The smallest boys can build . . . simple shelters”
Daniel C. Beard,
Shelters, Shacks and Shanties
(Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1992), xv.

17   
The passing, and importance, of the first frontier
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West,”
Atlantic Monthly
, September 1896.

18   
the federal government dropped its long-standing annual survey of farm residents
Barbara Vobejda, “Agriculture No Longer Counts,”
Washington Post
, October 9, 1993.

20   
“When Nick’s children were small”
Richard Louv,
The Web of Life: Weaving the Values That Sustain Us
(York Beach, ME: Conari Press, 1996), 57.

23   
how some nonhuman animals compose music
Patricia M. Gray, Bernie Krause, Jelle Atema, Roger Payne, Carol Krumhansl, and Luis Baptista, “The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music,”
Science
, January 5, 2001, p. 52.

25   
new dialectic between the “wild” and “urban”
Mike Davis,
The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
(New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 202.

25   
“An important lesson from many of these European cities”
Timothy Beatley,
Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000).

30   
Each year, 53,000 acres of land are developed in the Chesapeake Bay watershed
Natural Resources Inventory Report, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2002.

33   
first charted the shrinkage of natural play spaces
Robin C. Moore, “The Need for Nature: A Childhood Right,”
Social Justice
24, no. 3 (fall 1997): 203.

33   
In Israel, researchers revealed
Rachel Sebba, “The Landscapes of Childhood: The Reflection of Childhood’s Environment in Adult Memories and in Children’s Attitudes,”
E&E
23, no. 4 (July 1991): 395–422.

33   
Even accounting for romanticized memories
L. Karsten. “It All Used to Be Better?: Different Generations on Continuity and Change in Urban Children’s Daily Use of Space,”
Children’s Geographies
3, no. 3 (2005): 275–290.