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

South America, Asia and Southern Africa because, they say, they cannot recruit American youths to fill the dirtiest jobs in the parks kitchens and hotels.”

What park officials call “windshield tours” are replacing camping. In 2001, the number of visitors who camped in national parks dropped by nearly a third, to its lowest point in a quarter century. The drop-off in camping is especially evident among people younger than thirty, possibly because no one took them camping when they were kids. Consequently, they’re not taking their own kids camping. One California survey, cited by Oregonian reporter Michael Milstein, found that more than eight of ten campers became interested in the outdoors when they were children—but more than half of the camping parties surveyed had no children with them.

But are parks for kids anymore? For the Matrix generation, much of the natural mystery and risk of the outdoors has been surgically removed. As park officials work to make parks safer and more accessible, the outdoors often ends up feeling more like Disneyland than wilderness. Some kids end up disappointed that the parks aren’t more Disneyesque. When middle school students sent me their reflections on nature, one boy reported visiting Utah’s Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the world’s largest natural bridge, which was carved out of the cliffs above modern-day Lake Powell over thousands of years. “The bridge was somewhat disappointing. It was not as perfect as in the brochure,” the boy wrote. His parents enhanced the family vacation by renting Jet Skis.

Here’s the hidden danger. If park and forest attendance stagnates as the visitor age rises, what happens to the future political constituency for parks and national forests? Not much, if visitor drop were the only change at hand. But that phenomenon appears to be occurring at the exact moment when development and energy interests are rapidly ratcheting up their pressure on the natural environment.

The Endangered Environmentalist

The broader issue involves the future of the stewardship ethic, in particular the shrinking genetic pool of environmentalists, conservationists, and other stewards.

In 1978, Thomas Tanner, professor of environmental studies at Iowa State University, conducted a study of environmentalists’ formative influences. He probed what it was in their lives that had steered them to environmental activism. He polled staff members and chapter officers of major environmental organizations. “Far and away the most frequently cited influence was childhood experience of natural, rural, or other relatively pristine habitats. But for some reason, you don’t hear many environmentalists expressing much concern about the intimacy factor between kids and nature,” says Tanner. For most of these individuals, the natural habitats were accessible for unstructured play and discovery nearly every day when they were kids.

Since then, studies in England, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Slovenia, Austria, Canada, El Salvador, South Africa, Norway, and the United States have confirmed and broadened Tanner’s findings. In 2006, Cornell University researchers Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies went beyond studying the childhood influences of environmentalists; they looked at a broad sample of urban adults, ages eighteen to ninety. The study indicated that adult concern for, and behavior related to, the environment derives directly from participating in such “wild nature activities” as playing independently in the woods, hiking, fishing, and hunting before the age of eleven. The study also suggested that free play in nature is far more effective than mandatory, adult-organized activities in nature. Paradoxically, this suggests that organizers of nature activities should strive to make the experience as unorganized as possible—but still meaningful. Not an easy task to accomplish.

Children do need mentors, of course. In other surveys of environmental leaders, according to environmental psychologist Louise Chawla, most attributed their commitment to a combination of two sources in childhood or adolescence: many hours spent outdoors in “keenly remembered” wild or semi-wild places, and a mentoring adult who taught respect for nature.

“In story after story, activists told about a family member who took the child into woods or gardens and modeled appreciative attention to plants and animals there. What they did not demonstrate was fear, or heedless destruction. Even when people described hunting or fishing with their family as a child, their parents showed a quality of attention that was not purely instrumental,” writes Chawla. She tells that “a Kentucky lawyer who became a leading organizer of the struggle to save the wild and scenic Red River from damming mused about what made him different from proponents of the dam. Many of them, like him, must have grown up fishing and hiking in Kentucky’s woods and fields. ‘Maybe a lot has to do with who you go fishing with,’ he suggested. ‘Or who you’re talking to when you’re walking.’ In his case, he fished with a father who took time to ‘appreciate what’s there,’ who didn’t just catch fishing bait but watched the insects and worms and noticed the details of the surrounding plants and trees.” Chawla calls this the “contagious attitude of attentiveness.”

The childhoods of conservationists and naturalists are replete with stories of early inspiration, leading directly to their later activism. E. O. Wilson, the father of biophilia, addressed this in his memoir, Naturalist: “Most children have a bug period, and I never outgrew mine. Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”

Edmund Morris’s description of the boyhood years of the presidential patron of conservation, Theodore Roosevelt, suggests a similar genesis:

The bookish “Teedie” became aware of the “enthralling pleasures” of building wigwams in the woods, gathering hickory nuts and apples, hunting frogs, haying and harvesting, and scampering barefoot down long, leafy lanes. . . . Even in these early years, his knowledge of natural history was abnormal. No doubt much of it was acquired during his winters [reading] . . . but it was supplemented, every summer, by long hours of observation of the flora and fauna around him.

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