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

during the Dust Bowl. By one estimate, Iowa has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years. Kansas has lost a quarter. He sees much of the current emphasis on crop rotation as wishful thinking.

At the Land Institute, Jackson and his researchers are conducting ecological and genetic research to create prairie-like grain fields, what he calls a “domestic prairie for the future.” Modern agriculture relies on annuals such as corn or wheat, which must be seeded every year, after the land is tilled, with resulting erosion. By contrast, the native prairie, with its perennial plants and deep sod and spreading root systems, doesn’t lose topsoil; it builds it. The only problem is, the original prairie isn’t particularly edible for humans.

Jackson’s new domestic prairie would be a mix, a polyculture, of hardy perennials, some of them offspring of the natural wild grasses of the original prairie, which would produce edible grain. He hopes to produce high-yielding grains that will reproduce through their roots, and thereby withstand harsh winters and hold the soil in place. Jackson has little faith in genetic engineering; one mistake, he says, and we could suffer a disaster on the scale of ozone depletion. Through slower, traditional genetics research—the kind done in the larger world, not by physically manipulating DNA—he estimates it will take fifty years, maybe longer, to produce plants for a sustainable agricultural prairie. But some day, he suggests, this domestic prairie could yield nearly as much grain nourishment per acre as the average acre of Kansas wheat now produces, once energy costs are factored in. He can imagine this new prairie flourishing over most of the nation’s cultivated land sometime later in this century, or perhaps the one after that.

But here’s the catch: If the domestic prairie is really to sustain us, we’ll eventually have to redistribute the population out across the country and live a kind of life that few of us can imagine today, a more radical life than back-to-the-land hippies had in mind. In Jackson’s view, our great-grandchildren will live in farms or villages spread out across the land. Their distribution will be based on intricate ecological formulas, employing technologies at once familiar yet radically different from those of the 1990s—or the 1890s. Whether you view this future as a new Utopia or a rural gulag depends, he says, “on the limits of your imagination.” He believes that no form of solar energy, including the domestic prairie, will produce enough energy to sustain us unless the population is redistributed. Later in this century, in his analysis, American settlement patterns will be determined by how many people the land in each particular bioregion can sustain. Cities will still exist, but will be downscaled, most with about forty thousand citizens. Outside the cities, the rural population will be triple what it was in 1990, but this population will be carefully distributed. For example, the plains of central Kansas will support about one family for every forty acres. In Iowa and some of the West, including the Sacramento Valley, each family will be supported by as few as ten acres. (Considering this possibility, a friend of mine says, “I know this place. It’s called ‘France.’”)

These rural areas will sustain a new kind of farm and village life. People will live within square-mile communities; farm families will live on their own land but near each other, just outside the village, which is located at the center of this square. Several hundred to several thousand people (not everyone would be a farmer) would live in these new communities. The farmers working the domestic prairie will provide most of the protein and carbohydrates. Animals (including a winter-resistant cross between buffalo and cattle) will be raised in mobile pens wheeled around the unfenced landscape. This will eliminate the cost of repairing thousands of miles of fencing and allow wild species to migrate freely. People who live in the villages will spend part of their days raising vegetables, fruits, and animals in solar bioshelters. Energy needs will be provided by a variety of technologies, from passive solar installations to wind-powered generators to old-fashioned horsepower. For children, what an extraordinarily different environment—both futuristic and ancient—this would be.

Eco-exodus

The possibility of a return to wild prairie has precedent. As farming became concentrated in the Midwest and West, the small farms of New England faded. Between 1850 and 1950, thousands of square miles in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine that once were cropland became woodland. Like the remnants of an ancient civilization, forgotten stone farm fences disappeared into an overgrowth of pines and maples. Jay Davis, editor of the Republican Journal in Belfast, Maine, calls this period New England’s “sleeping century.” In a history of his county, Davis wrote, “As the fences of Waldo County knelt and fell and the trees stepped out to reclaim what had been theirs, and the mills decayed into the streams and the ridges were deserted, as people left and the survivors worked hard for a living, what emerged was, at least relatively, a twentieth-century wilderness.”

How similar that sounds to the current condition of the Great Plains. In a 2004 National Geographic description of the depopulating of that region, John G. Mitchell described how, in some communities, the median age of residents is already creeping into the sixties. “In fact, grass appears to be staging a comeback on some public lands, too,” Mitchell reports. “Fifteen national grass-lands embracing more than three and a half million acres are scattered across the Great Plains from North Dakota into Texas—a legacy acquired by the government after bankruptcies and foreclosures evicted thousands of unlucky homesteaders in the 1930s. It’s enough to make a person wonder: When grass returns to the Great Plains, can buffalo be far behind?” In fact, the number of bison—now seen as a reasonable ranching alternative to cattle—has grown dramatically. In the northern Plains, banks now help ranchers switch from cattle to bison. Such change, as National Geographic points out, offers a “sweeping perception of what the