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

is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.” The Hindus, for example, envisaged the Earth being carried on the back of an elephant and the elephant on a tortoise. Anthropomorphism, “the residue of the continuous use of animal metaphor,” was central to the relationship between humans and other animals. But anthropomorphism fell into disrepute during the past two centuries as animals became used as raw material, as test subjects, their DNA combined with machines. As wild animals have gradually disappeared from our lives, “in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy,” writes Berger. Yet, never have so many households, at least in the richest countries, owned so many pets. “Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by [animal] imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals,” writes Berger. Though children have always played with toys made in the image of animals, “it was not until the 19th century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods.”

Over this time, the animal toys shifted from symbolic to realistic. The traditional hobby horse was first a rudimentary stick “to be ridden like a broom handle; in the 19th century, the symbolic hobby horse evolved into the realistic rocking horse, shaped as a close reproduction to a real horse, painted realistically, sometimes with parts made of real leather, and manes of hair, and designed to closely reproduce a horse’s galloping. In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” Or has it? Often when I would tuck my sons into bed, one of us would pick up a stuffed animal and make it speak: a cotton koala, a polyester monkey, a fabricated fish, each available for consultation, each of them with a name and character. Science may frown on anthropomorphism, but children do not: each decade, stuffed animals seem to populate more of the human environs; they appear in their rows and mounds in every corridor of every airport, in mall stalls, in zoos and museums and even fast-food restaurants. Berger writes that these playtoys “address our loneliness as a species, our powerful yearning, this spiritual hunger, which at its very core is a faith in the invisible.” He adds, “Even as wildness fades from our children’s lives they signal their hunger—or, perhaps more accurately, we sense their hunger. We come full circle, and nurture their souls with totems, with the anthropomorphic symbols of the parallel lives all around us.”

Nearly every parent—even the most rational, who also speak with or for teddy bears—can report some spiritual moment in their own memory of childhood, often in nature. Or they can relate experiencing similar moments in their own children’s early years. Yet the spiritual necessity of nature to the young is a topic that receives little notice. The absence of research may suggest a certain nervousness. After all, a child’s spiritual experience in nature—especially in solitude—is beyond adult or institutional control.

Some religious institutions and belief systems resist and distrust the suggestion that nature and spirit are related. Suspicious of environmentalism as an ersatz religion, they perceive a creeping, cultural animism. This belief, which runs deep in American culture, is perhaps one of the least acknowledged but most important barriers between children and nature.

Suzanne Thompson is keenly aware of the impact of environment on human behavior. A few years ago, Suzanne, who is in her early fifties, looked around her rather sterile Southern California neighborhood and decided it was unsafe for kids. Their parents seldom ventured out except to go to work. This meant that children playing out front were more vulnerable to unsavory passersby, so she ripped up her front yard, built a courtyard with a river-rock wall around it, put out some Adirondack chairs, and announced to her neighbors that they could use the courtyard as a place to socialize. When I visited Thompson’s neighborhood courtyard one early evening, her neighbors sat with their drinks, and the kids sat on the wall or played out on the darkening grass. With her simple creative act, she recast the spirit of her neighborhood.

She loves spending time in nature and encouraged her daughter to do the same. But like many religiously conservative Christians, she is suspicious of any cultural emphasis on the spirit-nature connection and what she calls the “environmental agenda.”

“The Lord created and placed humans in a garden with a mandate to enjoy it, manage it with authority, in subjection to the Creator,” she says. At the core of the creation story, she believes, is the “truth that humans are made in the image of God, sharing some of the capacities unique to God, such as freedom to choose, creativity, authority over creation.” Without an informed biblical foundation, she believes, concern for the environment falls prey to sentimentalism; idolotry of nature; bioegalitarianism (which “elevates animals, devalues humans”); and biocentrism (which “disregards the Biblical notion that where human needs and non-human needs are in conflict, priority goes to meeting the human needs”). Thompson sees it as “essential for children to interact directly with nature before being presented with abstractions about its importance. It’s not whether they will care. . . . It’s also about why.”

Yet, a new movement within environmentalism suggests that her faith and an intensified effort to protect nature, and expose children to it, are not at odds.

Faith-based Environmentalism, Science, and the Next Generation

We cannot care for God if we do not care for his creation. “The extent that we separate our children from creation is the extent to which we separate them from the creator—from God,” says Paul Gorman, founder and director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, headquartered in Amherst, Massachusetts. In Gorman’s view, “Any religious faith that acts as an accomplice to this separation is heretical and sinful. Many of us are coming to share this radical view.” Radical, yes, but not fringe. Gorman’s organization, formed in