INTRODUCTION
One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew,
then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite
seriously, “Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?”
I asked what he meant.
“Well, you’re always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp.”
At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been
telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch
crawdads in a creek, something I’d be hard-pressed to find a child
doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own
childhood— and, I fear, too readily discount my children’s experiences
of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed
out on something important.
He was right. Americans around
my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play
that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo,
like a quaint artifact.
Within the space of a few decades,
the way children understand and experience nature has changed
radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids
are aware of the global threats to the environment— but their physical
contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. That’s exactly the
opposite of how it was when I was a child.
As a boy, I was
unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other
forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the
ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I
knew every bend in the creek and dip in thebeaten dirt paths. I
wandered those woods even in my dreams. A kid today can likely tell you
about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she
explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind
and watching the clouds move.
This book explores the
increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the
environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of
that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals
the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child—and
adult—development.
While I pay particular attention to
children, my focus is also on those Americans born during the past two
to three decades. The shift in our relationship to the natural world is
startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to
nature. Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped,
hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight
stories about ghosts or mountain lions. As likely as not today, “summer
camp” is a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp. For a new generation,
nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is
something to watch, to consume, to wear —to ignore. A recent television
ad depicts a four-wheel-drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly
beautiful mountain stream—while in the backseat two children watch a
movie on a flip-down video screen, oblivious to the landscape and water
beyond the windows.
A century ago, the historian Frederick
Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier had ended. His
thesis has been discussed and debated ever since. Today, a similar and
more important line is being crossed.
Our society is
teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That lesson
is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the
outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many
of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and
cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom—while
disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Wellmeaning
public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring
children straight out of the woods and fields. In the patent-or-perish
environment of higher education, we see the death of natural history as
the more hands-on disciplines, such as zoology, give way to more
theoretical and remunerative microbiology and genetic engineering.
Rapidly advancing technologies are blurring the lines between humans,
other animals, and machines. The postmodern notion that reality is only
a construct—that we are what we program—suggests limitless human
possibilities; but as the young spend less and less of their lives in
natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and
psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience.
Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and
the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental,
physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature—
in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful
exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy
for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist
puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition
and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.
Reducing that deficit—healing the broken bond between our young and
nature—is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice
demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health
depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the
young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will
shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes—our daily
lives. The following pages explore an alternative path to the future,
including some of the most innovative environment-based school
programs; a reimagining and redesign of the urban environment—what one
theorist calls the coming “zoopolis”; ways of addressing the challenges
besetting environmental groups; and ways that faith-based organizations
can help reclaim nature as part of the spiritual development of
children. Parents, children, grandparents, teachers, scientists,
religious leaders, environmentalists, and researchers from across the
nation speak in these pages. They recognize the transformation that is
occurring. Some of them paint another future, in which children and
nature are reunited— and the natural world is more deeply valued and
protected.
During the research for this book, I was
encouraged to find that many people now of college age—those who belong
to the first generation to grow up in a largely de-natured
environment—have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand
what they have missed. This yearning is a source of power. These young
people resist the rapid slide from the real to the virtual, from the
mountains to the Matrix. They do not intend to be the last children in
the woods.
My sons may yet experience what author Bill
McKibben has called “the end of nature,” the final sadness of a world
where there is no escaping man. But there is another possibility: not
the end of nature, but the rebirth of wonder and even joy. Jackson’s
obituary for the American frontier was only partly accurate: one
frontier did disappear, but a second one followed, in which Americans
romanticized, exploited, protected, and destroyed nature. Now that
frontier—which existed in the family farm, the woods at the end of the
road, the national parks, and in our hearts—is itself disappearing or
changing beyond recognition.
But, as before, one
relationship with nature can evolve into another. This book is about
the end of that earlier time, but it is also about a new frontier—a
better way to live with nature.