Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (9 page)

Herrmann’s own experience helped him encourage his fourteen-year-old daughter—who is dyslexic—to employ nature to balance her life and reduce her stress. Finding solace raising lambs in a 4-H program has, he says, “really turned her around in school.”

Elsewhere, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the Institute for Child and Adolescent Development’s Therapeutic Garden won the President’s Award for Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects. In an interview with the online professional journal the
Massachusetts Psychologist
, Sebastiano Santostefano, director of the institute, explained his view that nature has power to shape the psyche, and that it can play a significant role in helping traumatized children. He found that playing outdoors, whether along a river or in an alleyway, “is how a kid works through issues.” “We have a small hill, a mound—and for one kid at a certain point in therapy it was a grave; for another, it was the belly of a pregnant woman,” he said. “The point is obvious: children interpret and give meaning to a piece of landscape, and the same piece can be interpreted differently. Usually, if you [use] traditional puppets and games, there are limits. A policeman puppet is usually a policeman; a kid rarely makes it something else. But with landscape, it’s much more engaging, and you’re giving the child ways of expressing what’s within.”

With a sense of urgency, some health professionals say that we should act now on the available knowledge. For example, the CDC’s Howard Frumkin suggests that public-health experts expand their definition of environmental health beyond concern about, say, toxic dumps, to encompass how the environment can heal. He recommends that
environmental-health research be done in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, landscape architects, pediatricians, and veterinarians. Others argue that increased awareness of nature’s power to improve physical and emotional health should also guide the way classrooms are conceived, houses built, and neighborhoods shaped. And, as the coming chapters explain, the evolving research can help us rediscover the link between human creativity and experiences in nature, and could offer a new branch of therapy for such syndromes as attention-deficit disorder.

Elaine Brooks taught her community college students that each of us—adult or child—must earn nature’s gift by
knowing
nature directly, however difficult it may be to glean that knowledge in an urban environment.

How ironic it is, Brooks told me one day, that the reality of life in beautiful California “is that we rarely experience any of these natural settings directly and intimately, but rather live our lives in large, sprawling urban areas.” Even when we drive to mountains and deserts, “it is not unusual to make a day trip, stopping only for coffee or a snack along the way. The entire experience occurs within an automobile looking out.” Yet, “the look, feel, odor, sounds of a landscape surround every individual from the very beginning of life. The landscape is the place where we exist, where our real daily world is bounded.” As a species, we crave the very shapes we now allow to be scraped away.

Brooks’s students are grateful for what she taught them. So am I. She would have been the first person to point out that the natural world offers us no warranties. Elaine passed away in 2003. As she lay dying from a brain tumor, drifting in and out of a deepening sleep, her friends pinned snapshots of Fay Avenue Extension to the walls around her bed, and took turns sitting beside her. Perhaps, as she traveled a topology of dreams, she saw the future from the branches of that imaginary tree, high above the savanna of La Jolla.

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more
.

—J
OHN
B
URROUGHS

C
HILDREN NEED NATURE
for the healthy development of their senses, and, therefore, for learning and creativity. This need is revealed in two ways: by an examination of what happens to the senses of the young when they lose connection with nature, and by witnessing the sensory magic that occurs when young people—even those beyond childhood—are exposed to even the smallest direct experience of a natural setting.

In just a few weeks, a group of boyz of the hood become the boyz of the woods. At the Crestridge Ecological Reserve, 2,600 acres of mountainous California between the cities of El Cajon and Alpine, a dozen members of the Urban Corps, ages eighteen to twenty-five—all but one of them male, all of them Hispanic—follow two middle-aged Anglo women—park docents—through sage and patches of wild berries.

As members of the city-sponsored Urban Corps, they attend a charter school that emphasizes hands-on conservation work. They’ve spent the past few weeks at the nature preserve clearing trails, pulling out non-native plants, learning the art of tracking from a legendary former Border Patrol officer, and experiencing a sometimes baffling explosion
of senses. The young people wear uniforms: light-green shirts, dark-green pants, military-style canvas belts. One of the docents wears a blue sunbonnet, the other a baggy T-shirt and day pack.

“Here we have the home of the dusky-footed wood rat,” says Andrea Johnson, a docent who lives on a ridge overlooking this land.

She points at a mound of sticks tucked under poison oak. A wood rat’s nest looks something like a beaver’s lodge; it contains multiple chambers, including specialized indoor latrines and areas where leaves are stored to get rid of toxins before eating. The nests can be as tall as six feet. Wood rats tend to have houseguests, Johnson explains. “Kissing bugs! Oh my, yes,” she says. Kissing bugs, a.k.a. the blood-sucking assassin bug.

“This is one reason you might not want a wood-rat nest near your house. Kissing bugs are attracted to carbon dioxide, which we all exhale. Consequently, the kissing bug likes to bite people around their mouths,” Johnson continues, fanning herself in the morning heat. “The bite eats away the flesh; my husband has a
big scar
on his face.”

One of the Urban Corpsmen shudders so hard that his pants, fashionably belted far to the south of his hips, try to head farther south.

Leaving the wood-rat’s lair, the docents lead the Urban Corps members through clusters of California fuchsia and laurel sumac into cool woods where a spring seeps into a little creek. Carlos, a husky six-footer with earrings and shaved head, leaps nimbly from rock to rock, his eyes filled with wonder. He whispers exclamations in Spanish as he crouches over a two-inch-long tarantula hawk, a wasp with orange wings, dark-blue body, and a sting considered one of the most painful of any North American insect. This wasp is no Rotarian; it will attack and paralyze a tarantula five times its size, drag it underground, plant a single egg, and seal the chamber on its way out. Later, the egg hatches into a grub that eats the spider alive. Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

Several of the young men spent their early childhood in rural Central America or on Mexican farms. Carlos, who now works as a brake
technician, describes his grandmother’s farm in Sinaloa, Mexico. “She had pigs, man. She had land. It was fine.” Despite their current urban habitats, these young first- and second-generation immigrants experienced nature more directly when they were small children than have most North Americans. “In Mexico, people know how hard it is to own a piece of land up here, so they value it. They take care of it. People who live on this side of the border don’t value land so much. Take it for granted. Too much cream on the taco, or something.” But right now the boyz of the woods aren’t so serious. They begin to tease a nineteen-year-old with a shy grin and a hickey the size of a tarantula hawk.

“He’s been sleepin’ with his window open again,” someone says. “Blair Witch got him.”

“Nah, man,” says Carlos, laughing, “
Chupacabras
chewed him,” referring to Latin America’s half-bat, half-kangaroo, razor-clawed, goat-sucking mythological beast, most recently reported in Argentina. Or maybe it was just the kissing bug.

Over the weeks, Carlos has observed closely and sketches the plants and animals in notebooks. Along with the other students, he has watched a bobcat stalk game, heard the sudden percussion of disturbed rattlesnake dens, and felt a higher music. “When I come here, I can
exhale
,” says Carlos. “Here, you
hear
things; in the city, you can’t hear anything because you can hear everything. In the city, everything is
obvious
. Here, you get closer and you see more.”

Not that long ago, the sound track of a young person’s days and nights was composed largely of the notes of nature. Most people were raised on the land, worked the land, and were often buried on the same land. The relationship was direct.

Today, the life of the senses is, literally, electrified. One obvious contributor is electronics: television and computers. But simpler, early technologies played important roles. Air-conditioning, for example: The
U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 1910, only 12 percent of housing had air-conditioning. People threw open their sash windows and let in night air and the sound of wind in leaves. By the time the baby boomers came along, approximately half our homes were air-conditioned. By 1970, that figure was 72 percent, and by 2001, 78 percent.

In 1920, most farms were miles from a city of any size. Even by 1935, fewer than 12 percent of America’s farms had electricity (compared to 85 percent of urban homes); not until the mid-1940s were even half of all U.S. farm homes electrified. In the 1920s, farmers gathered at feed stores or cotton gins to listen to the radio, or created their own wired networks by connecting several homes to a single radio. In 1949, only 36 percent of farms had telephone service.

Few of us are about to trade our air conditioners for fans. But one price of progress is seldom mentioned: a diminished life of the senses. Like the boyz of the hood, as human beings we need direct, natural experiences; we require fully activated senses in order to feel fully alive. Twenty-first-century Western culture accepts the view that because of omnipresent technology we are awash in data. But in this information age, vital information is missing. Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing below the “transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it,” as D. H. Lawrence put it, in a relatively obscure but extraordinary description of his own awakening to nature’s sensory gift. Lawrence described his awakening in Taos, New Mexico, as an antidote to the “know-it-all state of mind,” that poor substitute for wisdom and wonder:

Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we know all about it. We’ve done the globe and the globe is done.

This is quite true, superficially. On the superficies, horizontally,
we’ve been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it. Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically. It’s all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean and saying you know all about the sea. . . .

As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything. When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room. We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves: “It’s very much what you’d expect.” We really know it all.

We are mistaken. The know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilization. Underneath is everything we don’t know and are afraid of knowing.

Some of us adults recognize the know-it-all state of mind in ourselves, sometimes at unlikely moments.

Todd Merriman, a newspaper editor and father, remembers an illuminating hike with his young son. “We were walking across a field in the mountains,” he says. “I looked down and saw mountain lion tracks. They were fresh. We immediately headed back to the car, and then I saw another set of tracks. I knew they had not been there before. The lion had circled us.” In that moment of dread and excitement, he became intensely aware of his surroundings. Later, he realized that he could not remember the last time he had used all of his senses so acutely. The near encounter jarred something loose.

How much of the richness of life have he and his son traded for their daily immersion in indirect, technological experience? Today, Merriman often thinks about that question—usually while he is sitting in front of a computer screen.

I
T DOESN’T TAKE
an encounter with a mountain lion for us to recognize that our sensory world has shrunk. The information age is, in
fact, a myth, despite songwriter Paul Simon’s phrase, “These are the days of miracle and wonder. . . . Lasers in the jungle,” and all that. Our indoor life feels downsized, as if it’s lost a dimension or two. Yes, we’re enamored of our gadgets—our cell phones connected to our digital cameras connected to our laptops connected to an e-mail-spewing satellite transponder hovering somewhere over Macon, Georgia. Of course, some of us (I include myself here) love the gizmology. But quality of life isn’t measured only by what we gain, but also by what we trade for it.

Instead of spending less time at the office, we work on Internet Time. A billboard on the freeway near my home advertises an online banking service. It shows a chipper young woman in front of her computer saying, “I expect to pay bills at 3
A.M
.” Electronic immersion will continue to deepen. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory are working to make computers invisible in the home. In New York, architects Gisue and Mojgan Hariri promote their idea of a dream Digital House, with walls of LCD screens.