Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Louv, Richard (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

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.

As electronic technology surrounds us, we long for nature—even if the nature is synthetic. Several years ago, I met Tom Wrubel, founder of the Nature Company, the pioneering mall outlet for all things faux flora and fauna. In the beginning, the store, which became a nationwide chain, was aimed primarily at children. In 1973, Wrubel and his wife, Priscilla, noted a common thread in nature-oriented retailing: the emphasis was on getting to nature. “But once you got to the mountains or wherever, what do you do, except shoot or catch things,” he said. “So we emphasized books and gadgets to use in nature.”

The Wrubels caught and accelerated a wave—what the Nature Company’s president, Roger Bergen, called “the shift from activity-orientation in the 1960s and ’70s, to knowledge-orientation in the ’80s.” The Nature Company marketed nature as mood, at first to children primarily. “We go for strong vertical stone elements, giant archways. Gives you the feeling that you’re entering Yosemite Canyon. At the entrances, we place stone creeks with running water—but these creeks are modernistic, an architect’s dream of creekness,” Tom Wrubel explained. His version of nature was both antiseptic and whimsical. Visitors walked through the maze of products: dandelion blossoms preserved within crystalline domes; designer bird-feeders; inflatable snakes and dinosaurs; bags of Nature Company natural cedar tips from the mountains of New Mexico; “pine cones in brass cast from Actual Cones,” according to the display sign. In the air: the sounds of wind and water, buzzing shrimp, snapping killer whales—courtesy of “The Nature Company Presents: Nature,” available on audiotape and compact disk. “Mood tapes” were also available, including “Tranquility,” a forty-seven-minute, musically scored video the catalog described as a “deeply calming, beautiful study in the shapes and colors of clouds, waves, unfolding blossoms and light.”

Wrubel sincerely believed that his stores stimulated concern for the environment. Perhaps he was right.

Such design emphasis now permeates malls across the country. For example, Minnesota’s Mall of America now has its own UnderWater World. John Beardsley, a curator who teaches at the Harvard Design School, describes this simulated natural attraction in Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape: “You’re in a gloomy boreal forest in the fall, descending a ramp past bubbling brooks and glass-fronted tanks stocked with freshwater fish native to the northern woodlands. At the bottom of the ramp, you step onto a moving walkway and are transported through a 300-foot-long transparent tunnel carved into a 1.2-million-gallon aquarium. All around you are the creatures of a succession of ecosystems: the Minnesota lakes, the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, and a coral reef.”

There, according to the mall’s promotional line, you’ll “meet sharks, rays, and other exotic creatures face to face.” This “piece of concocted nature,” as Beardsley terms it, “is emblematic of a larger phenomenon.” Beardsley calls it the growing “commodification of nature: the increasingly pervasive commercial trend that views and uses nature as a sales gimmick or marketing strategy, often through the production of replicas or simulations.” This can be presented on a grand scale; more often, the commodification of nature occurs in smaller, subtler ways. As Beardsley points out, this phenomenon is new only in scale and to the degree that it permeates everyday life. “For at least five centuries—since the 15th-century Franciscan monk Fra Bernardino Caimi reproduced the shrines of the Holy Land at Sacro Monte in Varallo, Italy, for the benefit of pilgrims unable to travel to Jerusalem—replicas of sacred places, especially caves and holy mountains, have attracted the devout,” he writes. The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco included a small railroad, according to Beardsley, that “featured fabricated elephants, a replica of Yellowstone National Park complete with working geysers, and a mock-up Hopi village.” But now, “almost everywhere we look, whether we see it or not, commodity culture is reconstructing nature. Synthetic rocks, video images of forests, Rainforest Cafés.”

Mall and retail design is one way to package nature for commercial purposes, but the next stage goes a step further by using nature itself as an advertising medium. Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo are experimenting with a genetic technology through which they can choose the colors that appear on butterfly wings. The announcement of this in 2002 led writer Matt Richtel to conjure a brave new advertising medium: “There are countless possibilities for moving ads out of the virtual world and into the real one. Sponsorship-wise, it’s time for nature to carry its weight.” Advertisers already stamp their messages into the wet sands of public beaches. Cash-strapped municipalities hope corporations agree to affix their company logo on parks in exchange for dollars to keep the public spaces maintained. “The sheer popularity” of simulating nature or using nature as ad space “demands that we acknowledge, even respect, their cultural importance,” suggests Richtel. Culturally important, yes. But the logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of “true” nature—the certainty that it’s not even worth looking at.

True, our experience of natural landscape “often occurs within an automobile looking out,” as Elaine Brooks said. But now even that visual connection is optional. A friend of mine was shopping for a new luxury car to celebrate her half-century of survival in the material world. She settled on a Mercedes SUV, with a Global