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

review of the earlier studies, Andrea Faber Taylor and Frances E. Kuo at the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, cautioned that in some of them children were self-selecting the spaces in which they played. Children, when given a choice, may choose green spaces when they intend to engage in creative play. Taylor’s and Kuo’s research demonstrated that children have greater ability to concentrate in more natural settings. In their study, children also selected where they wanted to play. The Denmark study focused on only forty-five children and a relatively extreme setting. These studies, therefore, do not necessarily prove a direct link between nature play and creativity. Nonetheless, the possibility that creative children prefer natural areas for their play raises its own crucial question: What happens when creative children can no longer choose a green space in which to be creative?

Nature and Famous Creators

Curious about the influence of nature in the early development of the famously creative, I asked my teenage son, Matthew, to spend some summer library time searching through biographies for examples. He took on this job with enthusiasm. I offered to pay him for his time, but he declined money, as is his way. Realizing how much work he was in for, I persisted. Would any other kind of compensation do?

“How about StarCraft, Dad,” he said.

“A video game?”

“Computer game.”

I acquiesced. He headed for the library and hauled back the first stack of biographies. Excited, he brought me the first passage he found, from a biography of the great science-fiction author—the man who also originated the principles of the geostationary communication satellite—Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke grew up in Minehead, England, a coastal town on the Bristol Channel, with boyhood “vistas of the Atlantic Ocean that created the illusion of infinite space,” as biographer Neil McAleer tells it. On that shore, McAleer wrote, the young Clarke “built battlements of sand and explored the tidewater pools.”

During the winter months [Clarke] often cycled home in the dark, with the stars and moon illuminating his route in clear weather. Such starry evenings influenced Clarke’s budding cosmic consciousness. The silent night sky above him stirred his imagination and brought forth images of the future. Men would walk on the moon someday, he knew, and later they would leave their boot prints on the red sands of Mars. Even the gulf between our sun and other stars would be bridged eventually, and their planets explored by the descendants of our species.

In his later years, Clarke admitted that the only place where he was ever completely relaxed was by the edge of the sea, or weightless within it.

I added Matthew’s collection to other examples I had found. Joan of Arc first heard her calling, at age thirteen, “toward the hour of noon, in summer, in my father’s garden.” Jane Goodall, at two years of age, slept with earthworms under her pillow. (Don’t try this at home.) John Muir described “reveling in the wonderful wildness” around his boyhood home in Wisconsin. Samuel Langhorne Clemens held down an adult job as a printer at fourteen, but when his working day ended at three in the afternoon, he headed to the river to swim or fish or navigate a “borrowed” boat. One can imagine that it was there, as he dreamed of becoming a pirate or a trapper or scout, that he became “Mark Twain.” The poet T. S. Eliot, who grew up alongside the Mississippi River, wrote, “I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to those who have not.” And the imagination of biophilia’s patron, E. O. Wilson (whose boyhood nickname was “Snake”), was ignited while exploring the “woods and swamps in a languorous mood . . . [forming] the habit of quietude and concentration.”

In Edison: Inventing the Century, biographer Neil Baldwin tells how “Little Al,” as Edison was nicknamed, wandered away one day while visiting his sister’s farm. Her husband found him sitting in a box of straw. The little boy explained, “I saw baby chickens come out of eggs the old hen was sitting on so I thought I could make little gooses come out of the goose eggs if I sat on them. If the hens and geese can do it, why can’t I?” Later, seeing the egg stain on Al’s pants, and that he was upset, his sister comforted him, reportedly saying, “It’s all right, Al. . . . If no one ever tried anything, even what some folks say is impossible, no one would ever learn anything. So you just keep on trying and maybe some day you’ll try something that will work.”

Or consider Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the more creative public figures in American history. In Eleanor and Franklin, Joseph P. Lash tells how, “as she passed from childhood to adolescence, the beauty of nature spoke to her awakening senses.” He goes on:

The changes of the seasons, the play of light on the river, the color and coolness of the woods began to have the profound meaning to her that they would retain throughout her life. When she was a young girl, she wrote a half century later, “there was nothing that gave me greater joy than to get one of my young aunts to agree that she would get up before dawn, that we would walk down through the woods to the river, row ourselves the five miles to the village in Tivoli to get the mail, and row back before the family was at the breakfast table.”

She disappeared into the woods and fields for hours, where she would read her books and write stories filled with awe and rooted in the metaphors of nature. In “Gilded Butterflies,” a particularly fanciful short story Lash recounts in his book, Eleanor unconsciously describes her own future. In her story, she is lying on her back in the long grass one hot summer day, when she is startled by the voices of butterflies. “Curiosity sharpening my ears