Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (50 page)
Read Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Online
Authors: Richard Louv
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Psychology, #Science
technology, public education and,
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–138
teen centers,
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television, watching,
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,
47
,
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,
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–65,
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,
120
,
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ADHD and,
102
in cars,
63
sensory experience of,
66
Texas Education Agency, Division of Student Assessment,
207
Theroux, Phyllis,
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–96
Thompson, Susan,
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–299
Thoreau, Henry David,
5
,
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,
275
Thunder Tree, The
(Pyle),
173
time, use of,
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–176
overly structured lives,
34
,
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,
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–122,
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–176
studies of changes in,
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–120
work demands,
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–120
TNS Intersearch,
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tobacco control movement,
310
–311
Tolkien, J. R. R.,
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Tomlinson, John,
242
–43
Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
(Howard),
284
touch deficit,
67
traffic, fear of,
124
travel, nature and,
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–64
tree houses and forts,
15
,
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,
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–234,
240
as learning experiences,
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–84
regulations prohibiting,
28
–29
Trout Unlimited,
214
Trust for Public Land,
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,
179
,
265
,
300
,
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,
311
Turner, Frederick Jackson,
2
,
4
,
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,
18
,
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U.S. Census Bureau,
18
,
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,
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,
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U.S. Department of Agriculture,
30
U.S. Department of the Interior, “National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife,”
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–197
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
218
Habitat Evaluation Process (HEP),
266
U.S. Forest Service,
103
U.S. Justice Department,
127
U.S. Youth Soccer Association,
117
University of California,
23
University of Glasgow,
35
University of Illinois, Human-Environment Research Laboratory,
105
–108,
108
–109,
179
University of Maryland,
34
University of Massachusetts,
21
University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research,
119
University of Nevada, School of Medicine,
22
green design of,
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–26,
250
–270,
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infill,
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zoopolis,
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–251,
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,
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–269,
272
Urban Corps,
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–57
Utne
,
196
Vanderhoff, Candy,
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,
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–234,
308
Van Gogh, Vincent,
201
Veblen, Thorstein,
93
Veterans Administration Hospital System,
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“videophilia,”
148
Village Homes, Davis, California,
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–256,
285
Visions of Innocence: Spiritual and Inspirational Experiences of Children
(Hoffman),
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–293
Voice of the Earth
(Roszak),
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,
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Waldorf schools,
209
walking in the woods,
170
–175,
176
Washington Post
,
18
–19
Web of Life, The
(Louv),
20
–21
Western Europe,
120
green urbanism in,
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–254
outside play and contact with nature in,
34
–35
playgrounds in,
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Western Society of Naturalists,
144
West Nile virus,
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“What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign,
302
White, Randy,
262
wildcrafting,
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wilderness adventure programs,
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Wilkins, Gregory,
45
–46
Will, George,
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Wilson, Edward O.,
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,
44
,
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,
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,
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Wilson, Frank,
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Wilson, Leslie Owen,
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–74
World Health Organization,
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World Trade Center,
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–261
Wrubel, Priscilla and Tom,
60
–61
Yankelovich, Daniel,
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Ybarra, Daniel,
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–112
Ybarra, Richard,
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–93
Zahn, Paula,
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Zaradic, Patricia,
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zoopolis,
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–251,
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,
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–269,
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Zurich, Switzerland,
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in the
WOODS
It takes a universe
to make a child, both
in outer form and inner
spirit. It takes
a universe to educate
a child, a universe
to fulfill a child
.
—
Thomas Berry
Notes from the Field
How a Movement Is Forming and How You Can Get Involved
Nature Activities for Kids and Families
Good Books for Kids and Families
Suggestions for Transforming Our Communities
Pursuits for Businesses, Attorneys, and Health Care Providers
Ways Educators, Parent-Teacher Groups, and Students Can Promote Natural School Reform
How a Movement Is Forming and How You Can Get Involved
“A back-to-nature movement to reconnect children with the outdoors is burgeoning nationwide.”
—USA Today,
November 2006
Not long after the first publication of
Last Child in the Woods
in 2005, I found myself wandering down a path toward the Milwaukee River, where it runs through urban Riverside Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At first glance, nothing seemed unusual about the young people I encountered. A group of inner-city high school students, they dressed in standard hip-hop fashion. I expected to see in their eyes the cynicism so fashionable now in urban, suburban, and even rural communities, the jaded look of what D. H. Lawrence long ago called the “know-it-all state of mind.” But not today.
As they cast their fishing lines from the muddy bank, they laughed with pleasure, delighted by the lazy brown river and the landscape of the surrounding park. Ducking a few backcasts, I walked through the woods to the two-story Urban Ecology Center, made of lumber and other material recycled from abandoned buildings.
When this park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the
founder of American landscape architecture, and established in the late nineteenth century, it was a tree-lined valley with a waterfall, a hill for sledding, and places for skating and swimming, fishing and boating. But in the 1970s, topography was flattened to create sports fields. Pollution made the river unfit for human contact, park maintenance declined, families fled, violent crime and drug dealing moved in. Riverside Park became associated with blight, not beauty. Then, in the 1990s, a remarkable chain of events occurred. A dam on the river was removed, and natural water flow flushed out contaminants. A retired biophysicist started a small outdoor-education program which evolved into the nonprofit Urban Ecology Center, annually hosting more than eighteen thousand student visits from twenty-three area schools.
The center’s director, Ken Leinbach, a former science teacher, gave me a tour. We climbed to the top of a wooden tower, overlooking the park. “No serious violent crime has occurred in the park in the past five years,” he told me. “We see environmental education as a great tool for urban revitalization.” The center welcomes kids and their families from the surrounding neighborhoods so they can begin to associate the woods with joy and exploration, as memories of danger fade.
In Riverside Park, nature was not the problem; it was the solution.
For decades environmental educators, conservationists, naturalists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature, usually with inadequate support from policy-makers. Now a number of convergent trends—including intensified awareness of the relationship between human well-being, the ability to learn, and environmental health; concern about child obesity; and media attention to nature-deficit disorder—are bringing the concerns of these veteran advocates before a broader audience. While some may argue that the word “movement” is hyperbole, we do seem to have reached a tipping point. Now comes the greatest challenge: deep, lasting, cultural change.
In 2006 a handful of like-minded people formed the nonprofit Children & Nature Network, for which I now serve as chairman, to track
and encourage this movement. By the time you read this, much more will have occurred, but as of spring 2008, in the United States, Canada, and abroad, we see progress among state and national legislatures, conservation groups, schools and businesses, government agencies and civic organizations.
At this writing, we have identified more than forty regional campaigns, sometimes called Leave No Child Inside, that have formed or are being assembled—in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Connecticut, Florida, Colorado, Texas, British Columbia, and elsewhere. For the most part, these campaigns, each with distinctive regional characteristics, have emerged independently, with support from civil society and the business community, from political and religious leaders, liberal and conservative. (For more information about how to create a regional campaign, see below or see the Children & Nature Network Web site at
www.cnaturenet.org
.)
Leadership has emerged in nearly every sector. In September 2006, the National Conservation Training Center and the Conservation Fund hosted the National Dialogue on Children and Nature in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The conference drew more than 350 leaders from around the country, from education, health care, the outdoor recreation industry, residential development, urban planning, conservation, and the academic world. Witnessing a precipitous drop in public use of many national and state parks, the leadership of the National Park Service and the National Association of State Park Directors signed a joint Children and Nature Plan of Action. In 2007, the U.S. Forest Service launched More Kids in the Woods, funding local efforts to bring children outdoors. That same year, the new U.S. secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, challenged Interior’s three hundred top managers to determine what their departments could do to turn around the nature-deficit trend. At least ten governors—Democrats and Republicans—have launched statewide conferences or campaigns, including Connecticut’s pioneering program to encourage families to visit
the underused state parks. Replicable in every state, the effort was the first formal program to call itself No Child Left Inside.
