Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Page 4

  We can no longer assume a cultural core belief in the perfection of nature. To previous generations of children, few creations were as perfect or as beautiful as a tree. Now, researchers flood trees with genetic material taken from viruses and bacteria to make them grow faster, to create better wood products, or to enable trees to clean polluted soil. In 2003, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded researchers to develop a tree capable of changing colors when exposed to a biological or chemical attack. And the University of California promoted “birth control for trees,” a genetically engineered method of creating a “eunuch-tree that spends more of its energy making wood and not love.”

  For baby boomers, such news is fascinating, strange, disturbing. To children growing up in the third frontier, such news is simply more hair on the dog—an assumed complexity.

  • A hyperintellectualized perception of other animals

  Not since the predominance of hunting and gathering have children been taught to see so many similarities between humans and other animals, though now those similarities are viewed in a very different, more intellectualized way.

  This new understanding is based on science, rather than myth or religion. For example, recent studies reported in the journal Science describe how some nonhuman animals compose music. Analyses of songs of birds and humpback whales show they use some of the same acoustic techniques, and follow the same laws of composition, as those used by human musicians. Whale songs even contain rhyming refrains, and similar intervals, phrases, song durations, and tones. Whales also use rhyme in the way we do, “as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material,” the researchers write. According to their study, whales physiologically have a choice: they could use arrhythmic and nonrepeating tunes, but instead, they sing.

  Such information is not a substitute for direct contact with nature, but this kind of knowledge does inspire a certain wonder. My hope is that such research will cause children to be more inclined to cultivate a deeper understanding of their fellow creatures. Sure, romanticized closeness—say, swimming with dolphins at an animal touchy-feely resort—may soften some of our loneliness as a species. On the other hand, nature is not so soft and fuzzy. Fishing and hunting, for example, or the way Nick Raven put meat on his table, are messy—to some, morally messy—but removing all traces of that experience from childhood does neither children nor nature any good.

  “You look at these kids [in the animal-rights movement], and you largely see urban, disaffected, but still privileged people,” says Mike Two Horses, of Tucson, founder of the Coalition to End Racial Targeting of American Indian Nations. His organization supports native people such as the Northwest’s Makah tribe, who are traditionally dependent on whale hunting. “The only animals the young animal rightists have ever known are their pets,” he says. “The only ones they’ve ever seen otherwise are in zoos, Sea World, or on whale-watching [now whale-touching] expeditions. They’ve disconnected from the sources of their food—even from the sources of the soy and other vegetable proteins they consume.”

  I see more good in the animal-rights movement than Two Horses does, but his point has merit.

  • Contact with nature: so close, and yet so far

  Even as the definition of life itself is up for grabs, the potential for contact with more common wild animals is increasing, despite what Two Horses says. In a number of urban regions, humans and wild critters are coming into contact in ways that have been unfamiliar to Americans for at least a century. For one, the U.S. deer population is the highest it has been in a hundred years.

  In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, social historian and urban theorist Mike Davis describes what he calls a new dialectic between the “wild” and the “urban”: “Metropolitan Los Angeles, now bordered primarily by mountains and desert rather than by farmland as in the past, has the longest wild edge, abruptly juxtaposing tract houses and wildlife habitat, of any major non-tropical city. . . . Brazen coyotes are now an integral part of the street scene in Hollywood and Toluca Lake.” A reporter for the British newspaper the Observer writes: “[American] settlers and their descendants went about taming the environment with warlike ferocity. After ethnically cleansing the natives, they set about the extermination of bears, mountain lions, coyotes and wildfowl . . . but mountain lions adapted. Los Angeles may be the only city on earth with mountain lion victim support groups.”

  At midcentury, millions of Americans migrated to suburbia, following the dream of owning their own homes and a piece of land—their own quarter-acre of the frontier. For a while, space was expansive. Today, sprawl does not guarantee space. The newly dominant type of development—with interchangeable shopping malls, faux nature design, rigid control by community covenants and associations—dominates the bellwether metro regions of Southern California and Florida, but also encircles most of the older urban regions of the nation. These dense donuts of development offer fewer places for natural play than the earlier suburbs. In some cases, they offer even fewer natural play spaces than the centers of the old industrial cities.

  In fact, parts of urban Western Europe are greener—in the sense of increasing the amount and quality of natural surroundings within urban regions—than most of urban/suburban America, a land still associated with frontier and open space. “An important lesson from many of these European cities has to do with the very perception we have of cities,” writes Timothy Beatley, professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, in Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities. Particularly in Scandinavian cities, where green design is gaining popularity, “there is a sense that cities are and ought to be places where nature occurs. In the United States, a challenge remains to overcome the polar distinction between what is urban and what is natural. Perhaps because of the expansiveness of our ecological resources and land base, we have tended to see the most significant forms of nature as occurring somewhere else—often hundreds of miles away from where most people actually live—in national parks, national seashores, and wilderness areas.”

  These are some of the trends that form the American context for a de-natured childhood, something that is perhaps as mysterious as—and certainly less studied than—the march of the nanorobots or the advance of the chimera.

  3. The Criminalization of Natural Play

  For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms . . .

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  CONSIDER MISTER RICK’S neighborhood.

  Fifteen years ago, John Rick, a middle-school math teacher, and his family moved to Scripps Ranch because of its child-friendly reputation. Set in a lush old eucalyptus grove in a northern San Diego neighborhood laced with canyons and linked by walking paths, Scripps is one of those rare developments where parents can imagine their children enjoying nature, just as they did. A sign near its entrance reads, “Country Living.”

  “We have more Scout troops per capita than just about anywhere else in the country,” says Rick. “The planners fought to have vast amounts of open space for kids to play in and parks for every neighborhood.”

  A few years after moving to Scripps Ranch, Rick started reading articles in the community’s newsletter about the “illegal use” of open space. “Unlike where we had lived before, kids were actually out there running around in the trees, building forts, and playing with their imaginations,” he recalls. “They were putting up bike ramps to make jumps. They were damming up trickles of water to float boats. In other words, they were doing all the things we used to do as kids. They were creating for themselves all those memories that we cherish so fondly.” And now it had to stop. “Somehow,” says Rick, “that tree house was now a fire hazard. Or the ‘dam’ might cause severe flooding.”

  Authoritative adults from the Scripps Ranch Community Association chased kids away from a little pond near the public library, where children had fished for bluegills since Scripps Ranch had been a working c
attle spread many decades earlier. In response to the tightened regulations, families erected basketball hoops. Young people moved their skateboard ramps to the foot of their driveways. But the community association reminded the residents that such activities violated the covenants they had signed when they bought their houses.

  Down came the ramps and poles, and indoors went the kids.

  “Game Boy and Sega became their imagination,” Rick says. “Parents became alarmed. Their kids were getting fat. Something had to be done.” So the parents supported the creation of a skate park in a more willing neighborhood. That neighborhood was ten miles away.

  Rick is free to move to another neighborhood, but in the growing donuts of development surrounding most American cities, such restrictions are becoming the rule. Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents and kids now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law.

  One source of constriction is private government. Most housing tracts, condos, and planned communities constructed in the past two to three decades are controlled by strict covenants that discourage or ban the kind of outdoor play many of us enjoyed as children. Today, more than 57 million Americans live in homes ruled by condominium, cooperative, and homeowners’ associations, according to the Community Associations Institute. The number of community associations burgeoned from 10,000 in 1970 to 286,000 today. These associations impose rules on adults and children (if children are allowed in them at all), ranging from mildly intrusive to draconian. Scripps Ranch is governed by one of the more flexible community associations, but even there official squads of adults regularly tear down forts and tree houses built by kids in the wooded canyons.

  Some reasons are understandable: for example, concern about camps of transients or the outbreak of fire. But the unintended consequence is the discouragement of natural play.

  Public government also restricts children’s access to nature. For the most part the criminalization of natural play is more suggestive than real. However, in some communities, young people who try to recreate their parents’ childhoods may face misdemeanor charges or see their parents sued. In Pennsylvania, three brothers, ages eight, ten, and twelve, spent eight months and their own money to build a treehouse in their backyard. The district council ordered the boys to tear it down because they had no building permit. In Clinton, Mississippi, a family happily spent four thousand dollars to build an elaborate, two-story, Victorian-style tree house. They asked the city if a permit was necessary, and a city official said no. Five years later, the city planning and zoning department announced that the tree house must be demolished because it violated an ordinance prohibiting construction of an accessory building in front of a house.

  Other stringent restrictions on children’s outdoor play spring from our efforts to protect nature from human population pressures. For example, to protect the endangered Arroyo southwestern toad, three thousand acres of camping and fishing in Angeles National Forest were closed year-round. At California’s Oceano Dunes region, kite-flying has been banned because kites scare off a protected species of shorebird, the snowy plover, which has a limited habitat suitable for nesting. After the ban went into effect, a park ranger told Oceano resident Ambrose Simas he could no longer fly kites (perceived as hawks by the plover) with his great-grandson on the same beach where he had once flown kites with his father and grandfather. In my city, it is illegal to “injure, destroy, cut or remove any tree . . . [or] plant . . . growing in any city-owned park . . . without written permission from the city manager.” But what exactly constitutes “to injure?” Does a child seriously injure a tree by climbing it? Some think so. Another statute makes it illegal to “take, kill, wound, or disturb . . . any bird or animal . . . unless the same shall have been declared noxious by the city manager . . .”

  If endangered and threatened species are to coexist with humans, adults and children do need to tread lightly. But poor land-use decisions, which reduce accessible nature in cities, do far more damage to the environment than do children. Two examples: Each year, 53,000 acres of land are developed in the Chesapeake Bay watershed; that’s about one acre every ten minutes. At that rate, development will consume more land in the Chesapeake watershed in the next twenty-five years than in the previous three and a half centuries, according to the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. Similarly, the Charlotte, North Carolina, region lost 20 percent of its forest cover over the past two decades; between 1982 and 2002, the state lost farmland and forests at the rate of 383 acres a day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects forests declining from 767,000 acres in 1982 to 377,000 in 2022. Amazingly, developed land in North Carolina increased at a rate twice that of the state’s population growth.

  As open space shrinks, overuse increases. This is true even in those metropolitan regions considered, by the public, to be more suburban than urban. Ironically, people who move to Sun Belt cities expecting more elbow room often find less of it. Eight of the nation’s ten highest-density metropolitan areas are in the West. In some of those cities, typical development methods favor decapitated hills, artificial landscaping, yards the size of gravesites, and few natural play areas. The disappearance of accessible open space escalates the pressure on those few natural places that remain. Local flora is trampled, fauna die or relocate, and nature-hungry people follow in their four-wheel-drive vehicles or on their motorcycles. Meanwhile, the regulatory message is clear: islands of nature that are left by the graders are to be seen, not touched.

  The cumulative impact of overdevelopment, multiplying park rules, well-meaning (and usually necessary) environmental regulations, building regulations, community covenants, and fear of litigation sends a chilling message to our children that their free-range play is unwelcome, that organized sports on manicured playing fields are the only officially sanctioned form of outdoor recreation. “We tell our kids that traditional forms of outdoor play are against the rules,” says Rick. “Then we get on their backs when they sit in front of the TV—and then we tell them to go outside and play. But where? How? Join another organized sport? Some kids don’t want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.”

  Not every youngster automatically conforms. When Rick asked his students to write about their experiences in nature, twelve-year-old Lorie described how she loved to climb trees, particularly ones on a patch of land at the end of her street. One day, she and a friend were climbing in those branches and “a guy comes along and yells, ‘Get out of those trees!’ We were so scared; we ran inside and didn’t come out again. That was when I was seven, so that old man seemed pretty frightening. But it happened again last year in my own front lawn—but this time it was someone else, and I decided to ignore him, and so nothing happened.” Lorie thinks all of this is pretty stupid, limiting her opportunities to be “free and not have to be clean and act like girls who are afraid of a scratch or mud all the time.” She adds, “To me, still being considered a kid, it can’t be too much to ask. We should have the same rights as adults did when they were young.”

  Measuring the De-natured Childhood

  Over the past decade, a small group of researchers has begun to document the de-naturing of childhood—its multiple causes, extent, and impact. Much of this is new territory; the criminalization of natural play, for example, which is both a symptom and cause of the transformation, is occurring without much notice. Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by modern families, more time in front of the TV and the computer, and growing obesity among adults and children because of diet and sedentary lifestyles. We know these things. But do we know exactly how much less time children spend specifically in nature? No. “We also don’t know if there is any geographic or class divide, in terms of which kids spend time in nature,” says Louise Chawla, a Kentucky
State University environmental psychology professor and a tireless champion for increasing children’s experiences in nature. Good longitudinal studies that span the decades are missing. “We don’t have older data to compare. No one thought to ask these questions thirty or fifty years ago,” she says.

  Like many of us, too many researchers have taken the child-nature connection for granted. How could something so timeless change in such a short time? Even if some researchers asked that question, others dismissed it as an exercise in nostalgia. One reason is that there’s no commercial incentive to ask. For years, James Sallis has been studying why some children and adults are more active than others. He is program director of the Active Living Research Program for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a multi-year effort to discover how to design recreational facilities and whole communities so they stimulate people of all ages to be more active. The studies are focusing on such sites as urban parks, recreation centers, streets, and private homes. “Based on previous studies, we can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors,” says Sallis, “and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems.”

  I asked him what he had learned about how children use woods, fields, canyons, and vacant lots—in other words, unstructured natural sites.

  “We don’t ask about those places,” he said.

  If the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation isn’t collecting such data, it’s unlikely that studies funded by commercial interests would finance such research. One of the great benefits of unstructured outdoor recreation is that it doesn’t cost anything, Sallis explained. “Because it’s free, there’s no major economic interest involved. Who’s going to fund the research? If kids are out there riding their bikes or walking, they’re not burning fossil fuel, they’re nobody’s captive audience, they’re not making money for anybody. . . . Follow the money.”