Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (7 page)

Such knowledge may inspire us to choose a different path, one that leads to a nature-child reunion.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth

find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts
.

—R
ACHEL
C
ARSON

From wonder into wonder existence opens
.

—
L
AO-TZU

I bet I can live to a hundred if only I can get outdoors again
.

—G
ERALDINE
P
AGE AS
C
ARRIE
W
ATTS, IN
The Trip To Bountiful

E
LAINE
B
ROOKS’S GRAY HAIR
was wound around her head in a great nest. A pencil was stuck through the bun to hold it up. Climbing a hill, she passed quietly through a stand of native vegetation: black sage, laurel leaf sumac, and wild morning glories. She trailed her fingers through non-native species—exotic invaders, she called them—such as oxalis, with yellow blooms that mirror the sun. She enjoyed a special relationship with this stretch of forgotten land. She brought to mind writer Annie Dillard’s words about needing to “explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

“You know, in three years coming to this open space, I have never seen kids playing here, except on the bike path,” said Brooks. She bent to touch a leaf that looked like the paw of a slender cat. “The native lupine is a nitrogen fixer,” she explained. “The roots house their own foreign invader—bacteria—which collect nitrogen from air in the soil and transform it into a modified nitrogen that plants need.” Some lichens, a complex organism of symbiotic fungi and algae, also feed nitrogen to their neighbors and can live for more than a century.

When land like this is graded, lupine and lichen are destroyed, along
with the ecosystems they support. Plants live together, she said, and they die together.

For years, as a community-college teacher, she brought her students here to expose them to the nature many of them had never experienced. She taught them that land shapes us more than we shape land, until there is no more land to shape.

She haunted these thirty acres of lost La Jolla, and filled fifteen notebooks with pressed plants, rainfall measurements, and observations of the species that live here. An island of grass, succulents, and cacti, this is one of the last places in California where true coastal sage and a variety of other rare native plants can still be found so close to the ocean. Not that anyone planned it this way. In the early 1900s, a light-rail line ran through the patch of wildness, but its tracks were abandoned and pulled up. The land waited. Then in the late 1950s, the city set the corridor aside, assigning to it the forgettable name of Fay Avenue Extension. The plan was to build a major street through this part of the city. But the idea faded. And for nearly half a century, as the town boomed around it, the parcel was forgotten—except for the creation of an asphalt bike path that covers the ghost rail line.

Wearing jeans, a frayed flannel shirt, and hiking boots, Brooks stood in a field of wild onions, prickly pear, and native nightshade. The pleasant scent of licorice arrived from a patch of Mediterranean fennel, first brought to California by pioneers in the 1800s and used as a condiment. Wild oats, also an exotic, towered over most of the desert-designed native plants, which clung to the earth. If you’re a plant in this environment, it’s safer to keep your head down. “Look here, at the native blue dicks,” she exclaimed, pointing to violet, long-stemmed flowers next to wild chrysanthemums. The last, while not native, are as familiar as grinning daisies. It’s hard to dislike them.

One wonders: Why would anyone spend so many hours and days in what amounts to a big vacant lot?

One answer is that Brooks was a throwback, a rarity in her profession.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history—an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms—gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C. Brooks was uncomfortable in either environmental camp. For years, she worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a biologist and oceanographer. She became a plankton expert.

She liked teaching better. She believed—as do many Americans—that she should pass along her love of nature. Plus, teaching at the community-college level afforded her the time she needed to know these hills and fields. No one paid her to study this land, but no one said she couldn’t.

Brooks was a throwback in another way. The admirable vogue in ecology is to focus on preserving networks of natural corridors, rather than isolated islands of life, which are usually deemed beyond saving. In principle, she agreed with that philosophy. But as Elaine Brooks believed, isolated patches of wild land are valuable to know, as are isolated people.

These islands of nature are most important for the young who live in surrounding or adjacent neighborhoods. She pointed to the scars of a bulldozer that came through years ago. Despite what developers will tell you about restoration, she said, once a piece of land is graded, the biologic organisms and understructure of the soil are destroyed. “No one knows how to easily re-create that, short of years of hand-weeding. Leaving land alone doesn’t work; the natives are overwhelmed by the invaders.” Spot bulldozing is common across the county, even on land that is supposedly protected. “Much of this destruction is done out of expediency and ignorance,” she said. She believed people are unlikely to value what they cannot name. “One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.”

She trotted down a narrow footpath and then over a rise. A red-tailed hawk circled above. On a slope ahead, rivulets of fire-retardant, non-native ice plant had turned into a flood and would soon cover the hillside. But clusters of native agave—a cactus-like succulent from which tequila is made—made their stand. The agave blooms once in its long life; it grows for two decades or more and then in a final burst of energy shoots up a single, trembling flower stalk that can be up to twenty feet high. At dusk, bats dance in the air around it and carry pollen to other flowering agave.

Brooks stopped below a small hillside covered with original native bunch grass, a species that dates from pre-Spanish California, from a time before cattle were introduced. Just as tall-grass prairie once covered the Great Plains states, bunch grass carpeted much of Southern California. (In the Great Plains, botanists can still encounter remnants of tall-grass prairie in deserted pioneer graveyards.) There is something fine about touching this grass, in knowing it.

As we continued our walk through Fay Avenue Extension, Brooks made her way to the highest knoll. From here she had a view of the Pacific Ocean. She often sat alone on this elevation, inhaling the nature and the long view. “One day I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. A tiny brown frog was sitting on a bush next to me. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’”

Sometimes, as she sat here, she imagined herself as her own distant ancestor: One step ahead of something large and hungry, she had leaped into branches and shinnied up a tall tree. At these times she looked out over the rooftops toward the sea, but did not, she said, see the cityscape. She saw savanna—the rolling, feminine, harsh yet nurturing plains of Africa. She felt her breath slow and her heart ease.

“Once our ancestors climbed high in that tree, there was something about looking out over the land—something that healed us quickly,”
said Brooks. Resting in those high branches may have provided a rapid comedown from the adrenaline rush of being potential prey.

“Biologically, we have not changed. We are still programmed to fight or flee large animals. Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers. Our ancestors couldn’t outrun a lion, but we did have wits. We knew how to kill, yes, but we also knew how to run and climb—and how to use the environment to recover our wits.”

Today, we find ourselves continually on the alert, chased by an unending stampede of two-thousand-pound automobiles and four-thousand-pound SUVs. Even inside our homes the assault continues, with unsettling, threatening images charging through the television cable into our living rooms and bedrooms. At the same time, the urban and suburban landscape is rapidly being stripped of its peace-inducing elements.

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

Brooks taught her students about the ecology of vacant lots through the lens of “biophilia,” the hypothesis of Harvard University scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward O. Wilson. Wilson defines biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” He and his colleagues argue that humans have an innate affinity for the natural world, probably a biologically based need integral to our development as individuals. The biophilia theory, though not universally embraced by biologists, is supported by a decade of research that reveals how strongly and positively people respond to open, grassy landscapes, scattered stands of trees, meadows, water, winding trails, and elevated views.

At the cutting edge of this frontier, added to the older foundation of ecological psychology, is the relatively new interdisciplinary field of
ecopsychology. The term gained currency in 1992, through the writing of historian and social critic Theodore Roszak. In his book
Voice of the Earth
, Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.” In recent years, the meaning of the term “ecopsychology” has evolved to include nature therapy, which asks not only what we do to the earth, but what the earth does for us—for our health. Roszak considers that a logical extension of his original thesis.

As he points out, the American Psychiatric Association lists more than three hundred mental diseases in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a large number of them associated with sexual dysfunction. “Psychotherapists have exhaustively analyzed every form of dysfunctional family and social relations, but ‘dysfunctional environmental relations’ does not exist even as a concept,” he says. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual “defines ‘separation anxiety disorder’ as ‘excessive anxiety concerning separation from home and from those to whom the individual is attached.’ But no separation is more pervasive in this Age of Anxiety than our disconnection from the natural world.” It’s time, he says, “for an environmentally based definition of mental health.”

Ecopsychology and all of its budding branches, reinforcing Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, have fueled a new surge of research into the impact of nature on human physical and emotional health. Professor Chawla, the international expert on urban children and nature, is skeptical about some of the claims made in the name of biophilia, but she also argues that one does not have to adopt unreservedly the entire thesis to believe that Edward O. Wilson and the ecopsychology movement are on to something. She calls for a common-sense approach, one that recognizes “the positive effects of involvement with nature on health, concentration, creative play, and a developing bond with the natural world that can form a foundation for environmental stewardship.”

The idea that natural landscapes, or at least gardens, can be therapeutic
and restorative is, in fact, an ancient one that has filtered down through the ages. Over two thousand years ago, Chinese Taoists created gardens and greenhouses they believed to be beneficial for health. By 1699, the book
English Gardener
advised the reader to spend “spare time in the garden, either digging, setting out, or weeding; there is no better way to preserve your health.”

In America, mental-health pioneer Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the American Declaration of Independence) declared, “digging in the soil has a curative effect on the mentally ill.” Beginning in the 1870s, the Quakers’ Friends Hospital in Pennsylvania used acres of natural landscape and a greenhouse as part of its treatment of mental illness. During World War II, psychiatry pioneer Carl Menninger led a horticulture therapy movement in the Veterans Administration Hospital System. In the 1950s, a wider movement emerged, one that recognized the therapeutic benefits of gardening for people with chronic illnesses. In 1955, Michigan State University awarded the first graduate degree in horticultural/occupational therapy. And in 1971, Kansas State University established the first horticultural therapy degree curriculum.

Today, pet therapy has joined horticultural therapy as an accepted health-care approach, particularly for the elderly and children. For example, research has shown that subjects experienced significant decreases in blood pressure simply by watching fish in an aquarium. Other reports link pet ownership to a lowering of high blood pressure and improved survival after heart attacks. The mortality rate of heart-disease patients with pets was found to be one-third that of patients without pets. Aaron Katcher, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, and Veterinary Medicine, has spent over a decade investigating how social relationships between human beings and other animals influence human health and behavior. Katcher and Gregory Wilkins, an expert on animal-facilitated therapy in residential treatment centers, tell of an autistic child who
spent several sessions with passive dogs before encountering Buster, a hyperactive adolescent dog brought from a local animal shelter. At first the autistic child ignored the dogs—but at a later session, “without any other change in regimen, the patient eagerly ran into the therapy room and within minutes said his first new words in six months: ‘Buster Sit!’” The child learned to play ball with Buster and give him food rewards—and also learned to seek out Buster for comfort.