Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (23 page)

If a geographic place rapidly changes in a way that demeans its natural integrity, then children’s early attachment to land is at risk. If children do not attach to the land, they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature, nor will they feel a long-term commitment to the environment, to the place. This lack of attachment will exacerbate the very conditions that created the sense of disengagement in the first place—fueling a tragic spiral, in which our children and the natural world are increasingly detached.

I am not suggesting the situation is hopeless. Far from it. Conservation and environmental groups and, in some cases, the traditional Scouting organizations are beginning to awaken to the threat to nature posed by nature-deficit disorder. A few of these organizations, as we will see, are helping to lead the way toward a nature-child reunion. They recognize that while knowledge about nature is vital, passion is the long-distance fuel for the struggle to save what is left of our natural heritage and—through an emerging green urbanism—to reconstitute lost land and water. Passion does not arrive on videotape or on a CD; passion is personal. Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

I am well again, I came to life

in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains
. . .

—J
OHN
M
UIR

Each new year is a surprise to us
.

We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird
,

and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream
,

reminding us of a previous state of existence
. . . .

The voice of nature is always encouraging
.

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

It is not half so important to know as to feel when introducing a young child to the natural world
.

—R
ACHEL
C
ARSON

A
LONE, PARENTS CANNOT
heal the broken bond. But each guardian, parent, or other family member can lead the way at home, and within the institutions to which they belong. Educators, city planners, youth nature-program leaders, environmentalists—all of these people will determine the direction of the third frontier, and guide it either toward the end of natural experience, or toward its rebirth in new forms. Parents can encourage institutions to change, but cannot wait for them.

Parents already feel besieged by the difficulty of balancing work and family life. Understandably, they may resist the idea of adding any to-dos to their long list of chores. So here is another way of viewing the challenge: nature as antidote. Stress reduction, greater physical health, a deeper sense of spirit, more creativity, a sense of play, even a safer life—these are the rewards that await a family when it invites more nature into children’s lives.

Several years ago, Jerry Schad invited me and my sons, then five and eleven, to accompany him and his four-year-old son on a hike along Cottonwood Creek in the mountains east of San Diego. We parked
along Sunrise Highway and slipped down a rough path toward a valley far below. The path was a tunnel through chaparral, scrub oak, and manzanita, widened and deepened by countless hikers who have found Cottonwood Creek Falls—named by Schad—primarily because they have read his
Afoot and Afield
guidebooks.

But before I take you on this hike, let me say something about the pressures that parents endure. Simply put, many of us must overcome the belief that something isn’t worth doing with our kids unless we do it right. If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It’s a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it’s even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it’s a lot more fun.

As we wound our way down the trail, Jason, my older son, held his brother Matthew’s hand on the rougher spots while Schad’s son, Tom, rushed ahead. Schad told how he grew up in the Santa Clara Valley, now better known as Silicon Valley. He never went camping as a kid. When he was twelve, however, he began sleeping in the backyard during the summers and became fascinated with the night sky, which ultimately led to his career teaching astronomy. As an adult, he favors sleeping on a simple pad beneath the stars in the wilderness.

He spoke with awe about the mysteries of the lost corners of the county, and especially of the night sky—for example, the strange shadows that Venus can cast along the desert floor. Being at a particularly scatological age, the younger boys, Tom and Matthew, were more interested in coyote poop than Venusian shadows. They poked at it and offered an assortment of names for it. Matthew wanted to know why we didn’t see any large animals.

“Because they have super powers,” I explained.

He stopped in his tracks.

“They can hear and smell us from far away,” I added. He was impressed by this, but only briefly. So many rocks to collect; so little time.
The two young boys, competing to be leader of the hike, rushed onward. Small children are not like adults: Schad and I, who had just met, were overly polite; Matthew and Tom were immediately familiar, trading intimacies and insults as if they had known each other for twenty years.

“I want to go bushwhacking here!” Tom announced. He disappeared for a moment into the bushes. “Look out for snakes,” he called. “One could pop his head up any time.” Over the years, Tom’s father has sighted two hundred Bighorn sheep, one mountain lion, and a lot of rattlers. April, Jerry advises, is the month one should be most careful about snakes. He avoids going off trails or bushwhacking—carving your own trail through the brush—during that month. Snakes wake hungry from hibernation then, and are likely to be aggressive.

“Usually, I take Tom on hikes closer to home, but I like bringing him out here, too,” said Schad. “He’s able to test himself, to explore and take some risks. It’s important for him to learn good judgment about hiking.”

His advice to parents: take your children on easier, shorter hikes, close to urban areas, because small children tend to get bored long before they grow weary.

Matthew was the first one to hear the falls.

We came to the end of the path at a grove of oaks where Cottonwood Creek rushes down through the gap. We walked along the creek to the first of several falls and deep pools that are fed by snowmelt and runoff from the recent rains. As the boys clambered up the boulders and ran along the ledges, Schad and I called to them to slow down to look. “See the darkness?” Schad said to Tom, pointing to stripes of slime that trailed down a rock face into a deep pool. “Don’t step on those; they’re very slick and you’ll slip into the water.”

The boys skittered like lizards up the rocks. Watching them, Schad admitted to a vicarious thrill: “When I take Tom with me, I see all of this freshly, through his eyes.” We sat for a while on a boulder overlooking a deep pool; the small boys used the boulder as a slide. At the
precipice, Schad and Jason and I used our bodies to block their descent. After a while, we tired of this and herded Matthew and Tom back up the path, our pockets heavy with rocks Matthew had picked up along the way and insisted we carry.

W
HAT IMPRESSED ME
most about Jerry Schad was not his formidable knowledge but his infectious enthusiasm. If such joy is dormant, we must reawaken it. This is not an easy task for parents who previously missed the chance to connect with the outdoors. But that opportunity is still available. “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder,” wrote Rachel Carson, he or she “needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”

The main thing is to find or rediscover our own sense of joy, excitement, and mystery. André Malraux, the novelist and French minister of culture after World War II, once wrote (quoting a priest), “There’s no such thing as a grown up person.” Certainly it’s never too late to rediscover the awe of a child. The most effective way to connect our children to nature is to connect ourselves to nature. If mothers, fathers, grandparents, or guardians already spend time outdoors, they can spend more; they can become birders, anglers, hikers, or gardeners. If children sense genuine adult enthusiasm, they’ll want to emulate that interest—even if, when they’re teenagers, they pretend to lose it.

Reading about nature with a child is another way, as an adult, to revive a sense of natural wonder. Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading
The Jungle Book
or
Tom Sawyer
or
Huckleberry Finn
? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave? Environmental educators and activists repeatedly mention nature books as important childhood influences.

Like many children of the 1950s, author Kathryn Kramer grew up on
The Lord of the Rings
. She spent entire summers “on an uncomfortable wicker couch in the living room of our summer place, my legs straight out like those of a stick figure drawn by someone who hasn’t the skill to make knees,” rereading the trilogy. “Maybe I’d glance up occasionally at the squares of sky through the windows; that seems to be all I wanted of outdoors and glorious summer weather. I had all the weather I needed in Tolkien’s books.” She was swept away, especially, by J. R. R. Tolkien’s description of nature, and cites this wonderful passage:

They were on an island in a sea of trees, and the horizon was veiled. On the southeastern side the ground fell very steeply, as if the slopes of the hill were continued far down under the trees, like island shores that really are the sides of a mountain rising out of deep waters. . . . In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow leaves. The air was thick with them, fluttering yellow from the branches; for there was a warm and gentle breeze blowing softly in the valley, and the reeds were rustling, and the willow boughs were creaking.

Page after page of Tolkien’s books go on like this, using “more words in English to describe place than most of us use in a lifetime,” Kramer says. She read the trilogy to her seven-year-old son, giving him the gift of this story and, through it, her enthusiasm for the natural world.

Especially during summer, parents hear the moaning complaint: “I’m
borrrred
.” Boredom is fear’s dull cousin. Passive, full of excuses, it can keep children from nature—or drive them to it.

In summers past (at least through the fog of memory), children were more likely to be pulled or forced out of their boredom. Most of the day, TV offered nothing except soaps and quiz games and an occasional cowboy movie—which made you want to leap up and head outside.

“Well, times have changed,” says Tina Kafka, the teacher I quoted earlier. A mother of three, she says, “Even if kids have all the unstructured time in the world, they’re not outside playing. They’re inside with their video games.” She recognizes how carefully planned activities pale in comparison to more spontaneous experiences in her children’s long-term memories. She wants to nurture magic in her children’s lives. But she’s also a realist. “Today, kids just don’t go out and play and ride their bikes that much. They’re more interested in electronics,” Kafka explains. “I’m uncomfortable with them lolling around watching TV, but to be honest, I also get tired of feeling that I have to keep them entertained.”

“The word ‘bored’ isn’t in my vocabulary,” some of us remember our grandmothers saying. In fact, the word wasn’t in anybody’s vocabulary until the nineteenth century, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of
Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind
. In medieval times, according to Spacks, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called “acedia,” a “dangerous form of spiritual alienation”—a devaluing of the world and its creator. Who had time for such self-indulgence, what with plague, pestilence, and the labor of survival? Acedia—or, accidie—was considered a sin. Then came the invention of labor-saving machinery, the valuing of the individual, and the “pursuit of happiness.” Forget the sin of acedia; now we could afford the emotional state of boredom. And just in time, too. Professor Spacks considers boredom a good thing, at least most of the time. “If life was never boring in pre-modern times,” she writes, “neither was it interesting, thrilling or exciting, in the modern sense of these words.”

At its best, boredom forces creativity. Today, kids pack the malls, pour into the video arcades, and line up for the scariest, goriest summer movies they can find. Yet, they still complain, “I’m
borrrred
.” Like a sugared drink on a hot day, such entertainment leaves kids thirsting for
more—for faster, bigger, more violent stimuli. This insidious, new kind of boredom is one reason for the rising number of psychiatric problems among children and adolescents, according to an article in
Newsweek
by Ronald Dahl, a professor of pediatrics at the Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dahl suggests this syndrome leads to more doctors prescribing Ritalin and other “stimulants to deal with inattentiveness at school or antidepressants to help with the loss of interest and joy in their lives.”