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

removes 4.3 million pounds of pollutants from the air each year, “a benefit worth $10.8 million annually.” The canyons and other natural urban land also serve to control and carry storm water runoff. By preserving “green infrastructure,” as American Forests calls it, we avoid massive public investments in man-made infrastructure.

The most important value is generational. Before her death, community college biology professor Elaine Brooks championed the canyons not only for their unique ecologies and their beauty but also for their psychological and spiritual value to future generations—whose connection to nature is now threatened. “There is a canyon within a reasonable distance of nearly every school in the city,” she pointed out. What an exciting prospect, she said—a network of natural libraries for teaching children about the region’s rare and fragile ecosystems—and about themselves. It is not too late to tie these ribbons of chaparral and sage, to offer this gift to the future. Nor is it too late for other cities across North America, and the world, to become green zoopolises in their own right, and in their own ways.

Overly idealistic? Perhaps. But this is worth repeating: Over a century ago, some of the world’s greatest cities faced a choice not unlike what we consider today, a choice between urban health and pathology. The healthy cities movement of that time resulted in the first wave of great urban parks, including Central Park. Our generation has a similar opportunity to make history.

Joni Mitchell had it right: “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot.” But perhaps, in the near future, we could add a line of hopeful epilogue to that song: Then they tore down the parking lot / And raised up a paradise.

20. Where the Wild Things Will Be: A New Back-to-the-Land Movement

When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.

—WENDELL BERRY

ON A SUMMER MORNING, a nine-year-old girl wakes to the sound of the Smiths’ rooster. She watches dust fall in the rays of sunshine in her room.

She remembers that yesterday was the last day of school. She grins, throws on her jeans and T-shirt and canvas shoes, grabs her paperback copy of her favorite Maurice Sendak book, and stuffs it in her day pack. Her parents are still asleep. She tiptoes down the hallway, stops at her brother’s doorway long enough to tie the laces of his shoes together, grabs a package of graham crackers from the kitchen, and rushes out into the sun.

She runs along the path of the common green, past her family’s garden and onward. She hears the periodic hum of the central cogeneration plant, and the whirring of the new windmills at the edge of the village. As she passes the Smiths’ house, with its roof of low grass and flowers, the rooster races across the path. She chases it a few feet, flapping her elbows, then trots down a winding side path to the creek—a waterway that runs through the village. She knows that this is recycled rainwater cleaned by the natural filtration of vegetation, but she does not think about this: she considers the rings in the water. She sits down on the bank of the stream and waits. By now, her parents are probably up; her mother is usually at her computer before her father, because her father likes to climb up on the green roof and stand in the grass and sip his coffee, and watch the sun move higher on the horizon.

The girl sees the first head pop up. Then another. She sits perfectly still. The frogs’ eyes appear above the surface of the water and watch her. She takes off her shoes and drops her feet in the water, and the frogs flee again. She moves her toes in the mud. She wonders if her brother has discovered his shoes, and she smiles. . . .

A Better Way to Live

If we hope to improve the quality of life for our children, and for generations to come, we need a larger vision. We can make changes now in our family lives, in classrooms, and in the organizations that serve children, but in the long run, such actions will not seal the bond between nature and future generations. As we have seen, a new kind of city—a zoopolis—is possible. Yet no matter how designers shape it, any city has limits to human carrying capacity—especially if it includes nature. Children in the future will still grow up in residential areas outside of cities. The current models for that growth are unsatisfactory; they include suburban sprawl at the edges of cities and buckshot development in rural areas. Both separate children from nature.

When seen through the prism of green urbanism, however, the future of the small town and rural life is exciting. Children who grow up in a new Green Town will have the opportunity to experience nature as the supporting fabric of their everyday lives. The technology and design principles for the widespread creation of Green Towns already exist, and an incipient back-to-the-land movement is emerging. You and I may not live to see the day when Green Cities and Green Towns are the norm, but the imagining and creation of them can be the great work of our children and their children. We can offer them a head start.

The full pursuit of such promise will require a forgiving definition of the wild. The poet Gary Snyder has said, “A wilderness is always a specific place, basically there for the local critters that live in it. In some cases a few humans will be living in it too. Such places are scarce and must be rigorously defended. Wild is the process that surrounds us all, self-organizing Nature . . .” Self-organizing nature must surely be preserved whenever possible, but, for the purposes of reintroducing future generations to nature, we cannot stop there. In truth, the nature that shaped so many of us was seldom self-organizing—at least not in the pristine way that Snyder suggests.

Many Americans still do