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

by Louv, Richard

  True, our experience of natural landscape “often occurs within an automobile looking out,” as Elaine Brooks said. But now even that visual connection is optional. A friend of mine was shopping for a new luxury car to celebrate her half-century of survival in the material world. She settled on a Mercedes SUV, with a Global Positioning System: just tap in your destination and the vehicle not only provides a map on the dashboard screen, but talks you there. But she knew where to draw the line. “The salesman’s jaw dropped when I said I didn’t want a backseat television monitor for my daughter,” she told me. “He almost refused to let me leave the dealership until he could understand why.” Rear-seat and in-dash “multimedia entertainment products,” as they are called, are quickly becoming the hottest add-on since rearview mirror fuzzy dice. The target market: parents who will pay a premium for a little backseat peace. Sales are brisk; the prices are falling. Some systems include wireless, infrared-connected headsets. The children can watch Sesame Street or play Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStation without bothering the driver.

  Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway’s edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children’s early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges—all that was and is still available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie.

  Perhaps we’ll someday tell our grandchildren stories about our version of the nineteenth-century Conestoga wagon.

  “You did what?” they’ll ask.

  “Yes,” we’ll say, “it’s true. We actually looked out the car window.” In our useful boredom, we used our fingers to draw pictures on fogged glass as we watched telephone poles tick by. We saw birds on the wires and combines in the fields. We were fascinated with roadkill, and we counted cows and horses and coyotes and shaving-cream signs. We stared with a kind of reverence at the horizon, as thunderheads and dancing rain moved with us. We held our little plastic cars against the glass and pretended that they, too, were racing toward some unknown destination. We considered the past and dreamed of the future, and watched it all go by in the blink of an eye.

  Soap

  May do

  For lads with fuzz

  But sir, you ain’t

  the kid you wuz

  Burma-Shave.

  Is roadside America really so boring today? In some stretches, yes, but all the others are instructive in their beauty, even in their ugliness. Hugh A. Mulligan, in an Associated Press story about rail travel, quoted novelist John Cheever’s recollection of the “peaceable landscape” once seen by suburban rail commuters: “It seemed to me that fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sandlot ballplayers and owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world made by people like me.” Such images still exist, even in this malled America. There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.

  The Rise of Cultural Autism

  In the most nature-deprived corners of our world we can see the rise of what might be called cultural autism. The symptoms? Tunneled senses, and feelings of isolation and containment. Experience, including physical risk, is narrowing to about the size of a cathode ray tube, or flat panel if you prefer. Atrophy of the senses was occurring long before we came to be bombarded with the latest generation of computers, high-definition TV, and wireless phones. Urban children, and many suburban children, have long been isolated from the natural world because of a lack of neighborhood parks, or lack of opportunity—lack of time and money for parents who might otherwise take them out of the city. But the new technology accelerates the phenomenon. “What I see in America today is an almost religious zeal for the technological approach to every facet of life,” says Daniel Yankelovich, the veteran public opinion analyst. This faith, he says, transcends mere love for new machines. “It’s a value system, a way of thinking, and it can become delusional.”

  The late Edward Reed, an associate professor of psychology at Franklin and Marshall College, was one of the most articulate critics of the myth of the information age. In The Necessity of Experience he wrote, “There is something wrong with a society that spends so much money, as well as countless hours of human effort—to make the least dregs of processed information available to everyone everywhere and yet does little or nothing to help us explore the world for ourselves.” None of our major institutions or our popular culture pay much notice to what Reed called “primary experience”—that which we can see, feel, taste, hear, or smell for ourselves. According to Reed, we are beginning “to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well.” René Descartes argued that physical reality is so ephemeral that humans can only experience their personal, internal interpretation of sensory input. Descartes’ view “has become a major cultural force in our world,” wrote Reed, one of a number of psychologists and philosophers who pointed to the postmodern acceleration of indirect experience. They proposed an alternative view—ecological psychology (or ecopsychology)—steeped in the ideas of John Dewey, America’s most influential educator. Dewey warned a century ago that worship of secondary experience in childhood came with the risk of depersonalizing human life.

  North Carolina State University professor Robin Moore directs a research and design program that promotes the natural environment in the daily lives of children. He takes Reed and Dewey to heart in his contemporary examination of postmodern childhood play. Primary experience of nature is being replaced, he writes, “by the secondary, vicarious, often distorted, dual sensory (vision and sound only), one-way experience of television and other electronic media.” According to Moore:

  Children live through their senses. Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world. Since the natural environment is the principal source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life. . . . This type of self-activated, autonomous interaction is what we call free play. Individual children test themselves by interacting with their environment, activating their potential and reconstructing human culture. The content of the environment is a critical factor in this process. A rich, open environment will continuously present alternative choices for creative engagement. A rigid, bland environment will limit healthy growth and development of the individual or the group.

  Little is known about the impact of new technologies on children’s emotional health, but we do know something about the implications for adults. In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently. Enterprising psychologists and psychiatrists now treat Internet Addiction, or IA as they call it.

  As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically. The effects are more than skin deep, says Nancy Dess, senior scientist with the American Psychological Association. “None of the new communication technologies involve human touch; they all tend to place us one step removed from direct experience. Add this to control-oriented changes in the workplace and schools, where people are often forbidden, or at least discouraged, from any kind of physical contact, and we’ve got a problem,” she says. Without touch, infant primates die; adult primates with touch deficits become more aggressive. Primate studies also show that physical touch is essenti
al to the peace-making process. “Perversely, many of us can go through an average day and not have more than a handshake,” she adds. Diminishing touch is only one by-product of the culture of technical control, but Dess believes it contributes to violence in an ever more tightly wired society.

  Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is an expert on the co-evolution of the hominid hand and brain. In The Hand, he contends that one could not have evolved to its current sophistication without the other. He says, “We’ve been sold a bill of goods—especially parents—about how valuable computer-based experience is. We are creatures identified by what we do with our hands.” Much of our learning comes from doing, from making, from feeling with our hands; and though many would like to believe otherwise, the world is not entirely available from a keyboard. As Wilson sees it, we’re cutting off our hands to spite our brains. Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, he says, “because these students have so little real-world experience; they’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior—but now we know that something’s missing.”

  The Infinite Reservoir

  Not surprisingly, as the young grow up in a world of narrow yet overwhelming sensory input, many of them develop a wired, know-it-all state of mind. That which cannot be Googled does not count. Yet a fuller, grander, more mysterious world, one worthy of a child’s awe, is available to children and the rest of us. Bill McKibben, in The Age of Missing Information, argues that “the definition of television’s global village is just the contrary—it’s a place where there’s as little variety as possible, where as much information as possible is wiped away to make ‘communications’ easier.” He describes his personal experience with a nearby mountain: “The mountain says you live in a particular place. Though it’s a small area, just a square mile or two, it took me many trips to even start to learn its secrets. Here there are blueberries, and here there are bigger blueberries . . . You pass a hundred different plants along the trail—I know maybe twenty of them. One could spend a lifetime learning a small range of mountains, and once upon a time people did.”

  Any natural place contains an infinite reservoir of information, and therefore the potential for inexhaustible new discoveries. As naturalist Robert Michael Pyle says, “Place is what takes me out of myself, out of the limited scope of human activity, but this is not misanthropic. A sense of place is a way of embracing humanity among all of its neighbors. It is an entry into the larger world.”

  During my visits with middle school, high school, and college students, a discussion of the senses would inevitably come about when we talked about nature. Sometimes I would ask directly, other times the students would raise the subject in the classroom or later, through essays. Their verbal answers were often hesitant, searching. This was apparently not a subject that many, if any, had confronted before. For some young people, nature is so abstract—the ozone layer, a faraway rain forest—that it exists beyond the senses. For others, nature is simple background, a disposable consumer item. One young man in a Potomac, Maryland, classroom described his relationship with nature as shaky, at best. “Like most I exploit what it gives and I do with it what I please,” he said. He thought of nature “as a means to an end or a tool; something made to be used and admired, not something to live. Nature to me is like my house or even like my cluttered room. It has things in it which can be played with. I say play away, do what you want with it, it’s your house.” He made no mention of the senses, saw or understood no complexity. I admired his honesty.

  Yet other young people, when prompted, did describe how experiences in nature excited their senses. For example, one boy recalled his sensory experience when camping, “the red and orange flames dancing in the darkness, the smoky fumes rising up, burning my eyes and nostrils. . . .”

  The experience of irrepressible Jared Grano, a ninth-grader whose father is a middle-school principal, sends a positive message to parents who worry that they might be alienating their kids from nature by taking them on the sometimes-dreaded family vacation. He complained that, although vacations are supposed to be for getting away from it all, “Unfortunately, I had to take them all with me! My parents, younger brother, and younger sister would all be traveling with me in an oven on wheels for over a week. The Grand Canyon? I was in no hurry to see the canyon. I figured it would be there for me later.” When the family arrived, Jared gazed at “the massive temples of the canyon.” His first thought was, “It looks like a painting.” He was impressed by the beauty and majesty of the surroundings. “But after seeing the canyon from several different vantage points, I was ready to leave. Although the canyon was magnificent, I felt that I was not part of it—and without being part of it, it seemed little more than a giant hole in the ground.” But the vacation was young, and the know-it-all state of mind penetrable. After the Grand Canyon, his family drove to smaller Walnut Canyon National Monument, near Flagstaff, Arizona. Jared assumed that Walnut Canyon would be similar to the Grand Canyon, “interesting to look at, but nothing to hold my attention.”

  Nine hundred years ago, the Sinagua people built their homes under cliff overhangs. Twenty miles long, four hundred feet deep and a quarter mile wide, the canyon is populated with soaring turkey vultures, as well as elk and javelina. Life zones overlap, mixing species that usually live apart; cacti grow beside mountain firs. Jared described details of the path they walked, how the bushes were low and straggly and looked as though they had been there for many years, and the shape of the tall green pines across the gap. “As we followed the path down into the canyon, the skies grew suddenly dark. It began raining and the rain quickly turned to sleet,” Jared wrote. “We found shelter in one of the ancient Indian caves. Lightning lit up the canyon and the sound of thunder reverberated in the cave. As we stood waiting for the storm to end, my family and I talked about the Indians who once lived here. We discussed how they cooked in the caves, slept in the caves, and found shelter in the caves—just as we were doing.” He looked out across the canyon through the haze of rain. “I finally felt that I was a part of nature.” The context of his life shifted. He was immersed in living history, witnessing natural events beyond his control, keenly aware of it all. He was alive.

  Surely such moments are more than pleasant memories. The young don’t demand dramatic adventures or vacations in Africa. They need only a taste, a sight, a sound, a touch—or, as in Jared’s case, a lightning strike—to reconnect with that receding world of the senses.

  The know-it-all state of mind is, in fact, quite vulnerable. In a flash, it burns, and something essential emerges from its ashes.

  6. The “Eighth Intelligence”

  BEN FRANKLIN LIVED a block from Boston Harbor when he was a boy. In 1715, when Ben was nine, his eldest brother was lost at sea, but Ben was not deterred. “Living near the water, I was much in and about it, learned early to swim well, and to manage boats, and when in a boat or canoe with other boys I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of difficulty,” he wrote later.

  This love of water and his bent toward mechanics and invention merged and led to one of his earliest experiments.

  One windy day, Ben was flying a kite from the bank of the Mill Pond, a holding area for water from high tide. In a warm wind, Ben tied the kite to a stake, threw off his clothes and dove in.

  “The water was pleasantly cool, and he was reluctant to leave it, but he wanted to fly his kite some more,” biographer H. W. Brands writes. “He pondered his dilemma until it occurred to him that he need not forgo one diversion for the other.” Climbing out of the pond, Ben untied the kite and returned to the cool water. “As t
he buoyancy of the water diminished gravity’s hold on his feet, he felt the kite tugging him forward. He surrendered to the wind’s power, lying on his back and letting the kite pull him clear across the pond without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.”

  He applied a scientist’s mind to the lessons of the senses, and used his direct experience with nature to solve a problem. Today, of course, we have moved much scientific experimentation to the electronic ether. But surely the foundation of such experimentation remains the kind of direct experience that Ben enjoyed as he surrendered to the wind’s power.

  Nature Smart: Paying Attention

  Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University, developed his influential theory of multiple intelligences in 1983. Gardner argued that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, was far too limited; he instead proposed seven types of intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These included: linguistic intelligence (“word smart”); logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart”); spatial intelligence (“picture smart”); bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart”); musical intelligence (“music smart”); interpersonal intelligence (“people smart”); and intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart”).