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

by Louv, Richard

  Nonetheless, evidence of a generational break from nature—gathered since the late 1980s—is growing in the United States and elsewhere.

  Robin Moore, a professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University, first charted the shrinkage of natural play spaces in urban England, a transformation of the landscape of childhood that occurred within a space of fifteen years. Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokémon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree. Similarly, Japan’s landscape of childhood, already downsized, has also grown smaller. For almost two decades the well-known Japanese photographer Keiki Haginoya photographed children’s play in the cities of Japan. In recent years, “children have disappeared so rapidly from his viewfinder that he has had to bring this chapter of his work to an end,” Moore reports. “Either indoor spaces have become more attractive, or outdoor spaces have become less attractive—or both.”

  In Israel, researchers revealed that nearly all adults surveyed indicated that natural outdoor areas were the most significant environments of their childhood, while less than half of children ages eight to eleven shared that view. Even accounting for romanticized memories, that’s a startling difference in perception. The Netherlands, often associated with greener-than-average thinking is, nonetheless, a highly urbanized country where the young “have little contact with nature,” according to a survey of students from seven Dutch secondary schools by Wageningen scientist Jana Verboom-Vasiljev. “There is little sign that a love of nature is inculcated at home. Indeed, about three-quarters of the pupils thought there was only ‘a bit of interest’ for nature at home, and eleven per cent said there was none.” More than half never go to nature reserves and parks, zoos or botanical gardens. Most students were unable to name a single endangered plant species and knew only a few endangered animals. “The list of wild animals or plants they would miss if they became extinct was dominated by cuddly mammals or animals featured on television. . . . It was a surprise to find even pets and domesticated animals on the list,” said Verboom-Vasiljev, reporting the research findings. Although the research was conducted in the Netherlands, “the picture we obtained may also apply to at least the more urbanized regions of Europe where the cultural, economic and social climates are broadly similar.” Indeed, in Amsterdam, a study compared children’s play in the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s to child’s play in the first years of the twenty-first century: Children today play outside less often and for briefer periods; they have a more restricted home range and have fewer, less diverse playmates.

  In the United States, children are spending less time playing outdoors—or in any unstructured way. From 1997 to 2003, there was a decline of 50 percent in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Also, Hofferth reports that children’s free play and discretionary time in a typical week declined a total of nine hours over a twenty-five-year period. Also, children spend less time playing outdoors than their mothers did when they were young, according to Rhonda L. Clements, a professor of education at Manhattanville College in New York State. She and her colleagues surveyed eight hundred mothers, whose responses were compared to the views of mothers interviewed a generation ago: 71 percent of today’s mothers said they recalled playing outdoors every day as children, but only 26 percent of them said their kids play outdoors daily. “Surprisingly, the responses did not vary a great deal between mothers living in rural and urban areas,” Clements reported. “However, this finding coincides with research conducted in England and Wales.” The results of those studies negated the assumption that children living in rural areas would have access to greater public space for play and recreation. They found that farmlands, with their restricted use and lack of local supervision for children’s activities, did not offer the rural child more opportunities for outdoor experiences.

  Some researchers have suggested that the nature deficit is growing fastest in English-speaking countries. That may be true, but the phenomenon is occurring in developing countries in general. The Daily Monitor, published in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, issued a plea in March 2007 for parents to get their children out of the house and into the outdoors, noting that “many Ethiopians will have reached adulthood far removed from outdoor experiences.”

  One U.S. researcher suggests that a generation of children is not only being raised indoors, but is being confined to even smaller spaces. Jane Clark, a University of Maryland professor of kinesiology (the study of human movement), calls them “containerized kids”—they spend more and more time in car seats, high chairs, and even baby seats for watching TV. When small children do go outside, they’re often placed in containers—strollers—and pushed by walking or jogging parents. Most kid-containerizing is done for safety concerns, but the long-term health of these children is compromised. In the medical journal the Lancet, researchers from the University of Glasgow in Scotland reported a study of toddler activity where the researchers clipped small electronic accelerometers to the waistbands of seventy-eight three-year-olds for a week. They found that the toddlers were physically active for only twenty minutes a day. Similar patterns were found among Ireland’s rural children. Clearly the childhood break from nature is part of a larger dislocation—physical restriction of childhood in a rapidly urbanizing world, with nature experience a major casualty.

  As the nature deficit grows, another emerging body of scientific evidence indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for physical and emotional health. For example, new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children’s cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.

  Nature-Deficit Disorder

  The overarching importance of this research combined with our knowledge of other changes in the culture demands a shorthand description. So, for now, let’s call the phenomenon nature-deficit disorder. Our culture is so top-heavy with jargon, so dependent on the illness model, that I hesitate to introduce this term. Perhaps a more appropriate definition will emerge as the scientific research continues. And, as mentioned earlier, I am not suggesting that this term represents an existing medical diagnosis. But when I talk about nature-deficit disorder with groups of parents and educators, the meaning of the phrase is clear. Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities. Nature deficit can even change human behavior in cities, which could ultimately affect their design, since long-standing studies show a relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies.

  As the following chapters explain, nature-deficit disorder can be recognized and reversed, individually and culturally. But deficit is only one side of the coin. The other is natural abundance. By weighing the consequences of the disorder, we also can become more aware of how blessed our children can be—biologically, cognitively, and spiritually—through positive physical connection to nature. Indeed, the new research focuses not so much on what is lost when nature fades, but on what is gained in the presence of the natural world. “There is a great need to educate parents about this research—to awaken or inspire the parents’ pleasure with nature play—as the necessary context for continued nature experiences for their children,” says Louise Chawla.

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

  PART II

  WHY THE YOUNG (AND THE REST OF US)

  NEED NA
TURE

  Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth

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

  —RACHEL CARSON

  From wonder into wonder existence opens.

  —LAO-TZU

  4. Climbing the Tree of Health

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

  —GERALDINE PAGE AS CARRIE WATTS, IN The Trip To Bountiful

  ELAINE BROOKS’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.

  The Ghosts of Fay Avenue Extension

  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.