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

At the center of the fishing controversy is this question: Do fish feel pain? Without delving into the scientific controversy, suffice it to say that the answer to that question depends on your definition of pain and suffering; the answer is not as clear as it may seem. Certainly, the definition is not settled. Those children who do fish (or hunt) in the future will do so under a growing cloud. Yet, in an increasingly de-natured world, fishing and hunting remain among the last ways that the young learn of the mystery and moral complexity of nature in a way that no videotape can convey. Yes, fishing and hunting are messy—even morally messy—but so is nature. No child can truly know or value the outdoors if the natural world remains under glass, seen only through lenses, screens, or computer monitors.

Fishing also offers generational connection. In a world in which children seldom follow their mothers and fathers into the family business or the parents’ professions, fishing is an avocation, a craft, a calling that a parent can deliver to the next generation. For so many families, fishing serves as glue that binds the generations, even if fishing fades.

My son Jason, twenty-five, now lives in Brooklyn. He spends hours exploring New York’s neighborhoods and parks and along the water’s edge. One evening, when I was visiting him in New York, we took a four-hour hike through Central Park. We stood for a long time on a bridge over the arm of one of the park’s ponds, staring into the opaque, green water, stilled by evening calm. We watched a fifty-something man with a ponytail make his way through the undergrowth to the shore and cast across the water. Suddenly a bass grabbed the lure, exploded into the air and tail-danced across the water. Jason and I both laughed with surprise, and I suddenly missed the many hours we fished together when he was a little boy.

After a while, Jason said, “You know, Dad, when I walk through the older neighborhoods, with the old brick and all that organic change, I sometimes get the feeling I had when I was a kid exploring the canyon behind our house.”

It pleases me that Jason finds forms of nature beneath the surfaces, where others may see none.

Wildcrafting and the Shift from Taking to Watching

For families not attracted to fishing or hunting, wonderful alternatives exist. One is wildcrafting, a term that originally meant gaining skill and knowledge about wilderness survival, but has come to be used more specifically as the hunting and gathering of plants in their wild state, for food, herbal medicines, or crafts.

This isn’t your mother’s leaf pressing, but a sophisticated interaction with nature, requiring patience, careful observation, and a cultivated knowledge of species identification. Wildcrafting also comes with its own set of ethical issues. Utne magazine, in an article on wildcrafting entitled “The Guerrilla Gatherers,” pointed out that wildcrafting in protected wilderness areas is technically illegal. Wildcrafting organizations counsel parents and children to ask themselves such questions as: Are you collecting in a fragile environment? Is the plant rare, threatened, or endangered—or are such plants near enough to be damaged? Is wildlife foraging the stand? Is the stand growing, shrinking, or staying the same size? John Lust, in The Natural Remedy Bible, advises that wildcrafters “harvest where the plant appears to be thriving, as that is where we will be able to find the strongest plants,” and to “be sure to leave enough so that the plant can easily recover its growth.”

Careful wildcrafting, he argues, can be practiced “in such a way as to aid the growth of wild plants by judicious thinning and pruning.” Wildcrafting’s value is enhanced because it presents the ethical issues inherent in childhood hunting and gathering. Responsible wildcrafting connects children to nature in a direct way, helps explain the sources of food, and teaches them the basics of sustainability.

An even less invasive activity is wildlife viewing. Some folks watch raccoons in the backyard; others take trips of hundreds of miles to see a single bird species. Unfortunately, the number of Americans participating in traditional forms of recreational wildlife watching decreased between 1991 and 2001, from 76 million in 1991, to 66 million in 2001, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s “National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife.”

One branch of wildlife watching is growing. World Watch reports, “Birding has become one of the continent’s fastest growing outdoor pastimes.” Birding has traditionally been a hobby for mature adults. In contrast to some other outdoor activities, birding may be gaining ground among some groups of young people, according to Birding magazine. Part of this growth is due to the advent of compact field guides, and advances in camera technology make birding easier than in the past. Digital cameras dramatically reduce the cost of experimental photos of worms, beetles, and small feet. In 2001, the percentage of birders between sixteen and twenty-four years old increased from 10.5 to 15.5 percent of bird watchers; but the percentage of birders between twenty-five and thirty-nine actually fell from 31.8 to 24.3 percent. Birding surmised that “the busy family-rearing years of twenty-five to thirty-nine years old do not permit as much involvement in birding as they did a few years ago.”

For a child who is primarily an audile learner, or who has poor eyesight, birding could be an especially wonderful way to experience nature. Little Teddy Roosevelt, with his poor eyesight as a child, could imitate hundreds of birdcalls, and did so even as an adult.

Birding does not need to be an elaborate or expensive endeavor. Mothering magazine offers some useful advice:

Don’t rush to the library for a book; let your young scientist learn to see and record the information firsthand. . . . Make a list or chart to note down the same observations for each different type of bird. In this way, your child will learn to rely on firsthand observations and knowledge building. . . .