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

by Louv, Richard

  More recently, he added an eighth intelligence: naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”). Charles Darwin, John Muir, and Rachel Carson are examples of this type. Gardner explained:

  The core of the naturalist intelligence is the human ability to recognize plants, animals, and other parts of the natural environment, like clouds or rocks. All of us can do this; some kids (experts on dinosaurs) and many adults (hunters, botanists, anatomists) excel at this pursuit. While the ability doubtless evolved to deal with natural kinds of elements, I believe that it has been hijacked to deal with the world of man-made objects. We are good at distinguishing among cars, sneakers, and jewelry, for example, because our ancestors needed to be able to recognize carnivorous animals, poisonous snakes, and flavorful mushrooms.

  Gardner’s monumental work, which has helped shape public and private education, used findings from neurophysiology research to pinpoint parts of the brain that correlate to each identified intelligence; he showed that humans could lose one of the specific types of intelligence through disease or injury. Naturalist intelligence is not as clearly linked to biological evidence.

  “Were I granted another lifetime or two, I would like to rethink the nature of intelligence with respect to our new biological knowledge, on the one hand, and our most sophisticated understanding of the terrain of knowledge and societal practice, on the other,” he wrote in 2003.

  The Montessori movement, along with other education approaches, has made this connection for decades. However, the impact of nature experience on early childhood development is, in terms of neuroscience, understudied. Gardner’s designation of the eighth intelligence suggests another rich arena for research, but his theory has immediate application for teachers and parents who might otherwise overlook the importance of natural experience to learning and child development.

  Professor Leslie Owen Wilson teaches courses in educational psychology and theories of learning in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin. Her university offers one of the premier graduate programs in environmental education. She, for one, awaits more definitive biological evidence. Nonetheless, she offers a list of descriptors for children with the eighth intelligence. Such children, she writes:

  1. Have keen sensory skills, including sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

  2. Readily use heightened sensory skills to notice and categorize things from the natural world.

  3. Like to be outside, or like outside activities like gardening, nature walks, or field trips geared toward observing nature or natural phenomena.

  4. Easily notice patterns from their surroundings—likes, differences, similarities, anomalies.

  5. Are interested in and care about animals or plants.

  6. Notice things in the environment others often miss.

  7. Create, keep, or have collections, scrapbooks, logs, or journals about natural objects—these may include written observations, drawings, pictures and photographs, or specimens.

  8. Are very interested, from an early age, in television shows, videos, books, or objects from or about nature, science, or animals.

  9. Show heightened awareness of and concern for the environment and/or for endangered species.

  10. Easily learn characteristics, names, categorizations, and data about objects or species found in the natural world.

  Some teachers, as we will see later, are making good use of their knowledge of the eighth intelligence. However, the problem with such a helpful list of indicators is that some adults may incorrectly use it to interpret naturalistic intelligence as a separate intelligence, one somehow relegated to a stereotype: Nature Boy or Nature Girl, the kids who collect snakes or hover over the classroom aquarium (if the classroom is lucky enough to have one). It’s unlikely that Ben Franklin’s teachers thought of him as a Nature Boy, but surely his intensified senses and ability to see natural connections were related to his transcendent experiences in nature. Children are able to attune themselves to all kinds of learning if they have appropriate developmental experiences.

  Gardner has drawn needed attention to the fact that intelligence should not be narrowly defined as linguistic or logical-mathematical. Further, he emphasizes that children may have several of the eight intelligences, or all, in different degrees. Wilson’s first descriptor is “keen sensory skills.” Certainly all the intelligences teach children to pay attention, but as we will see in a later chapter, there is probably something peculiar to experiences in nature that work particularly well in attuning attention—and not only because nature is interesting.

  Janet Fout, a West Virginia environmental activist, told me that when her daughter was small she encouraged her to note the details, to detect them with all of her senses. Janet’s own affinity with the natural world began early. Now in her early fifties, Janet was raised in her grandmother’s house in town. Her grandmother had moved there after forty years of harsh living in rural West Virginia. The simple white house was fronted by one of the few remaining dirt roads in Huntington. Day and evening, she and the other kids in her neighborhood spent hours playing hide-and-seek or freeze-tag. A water maple in the front yard offered her a branch low enough to grab, wrap a leg around, and pull herself up, and served as her personal hideout and escape, “a place where I could contemplate my life and future, undisturbed, and feed my wild, wild dreams.” Her recollections are rich with sensory learning, with paying attention:

  My Grandma generally had to threaten a switching to get me to come inside, and the sinuous willow tree in our neighbor’s yard provided her with all the fine keen switches she needed to coerce me—even when the weather turned “bad.” What we call “bad” weather now was seen by me as an opportunity. I never judged the weather then but took advantage of the shifting winds. Summer rains sent me charging inside in search of a swimsuit and back outside to drench myself, fully clothed if my swimsuit wasn’t found. Rain on the dirt road at Twelfth Street had a smell all its own—different as it hit the gray dirt instead of asphalt, bricks, or concrete.

  When rainfall was especially heavy, I headed for Monroe Avenue, where backed-up storm drains would provide an instant “swimming pool” with thigh-high water where I waded and splashed. Leaves became sailing ships that dodged the perils of being swept away in the whirlpool of the storm drain. A good hard rain meant mudpies were in the making and my creative juices, like the rain in the gutters, began to flow. If a storm unleashed its full fury with thunder and lightning, I huddled bravely on the red-metal glider on the big front porch with others emitting appropriate cries of awe or terror. Fluke storms associated with unexpected cold fronts, transforming giant raindrops to icy hail, were the best of all—the sultry heat of a summer day magically dissipated. Hail as big as golfballs made great missiles to hurl at imagined foes.

  Sometimes on a summer night close to bedtime, I would fill a jar with lightning bugs, bring it inside to my darkened room, and marvel at the iridescent and random illumination these marvelous insects emanated—liberating one in my room and returning the remaining jarful to freedom. Quietly I would lie in bed, watching this flying light-form, now isolated like me, from others of its kind. Soon mesmerized and calmed by the occasional tiny signal light, I drifted off to sleep.

  Almost since the birth of her daughter, Julia Fletcher, mother and child spent time together in nature, not only in the mountains, but also in the semi-natural nature of their own yard. This time heightened Julia’s powers of observation. Janet recalls, “One of our favorite games was making names for unusual colors we saw in nature. ‘That one’s candlelight,’ Julia would say as we watched the sunset. I used to tease her that she could always go to work naming new colors for the Crayola crayon company!”

  Janet and Julia also invented nature games. As they wandered through the woods, they would listen for “the sounds they could not hear.” Janet called this game “The Sound of a Creature Not Stirring.” A list might include:

  sap rising

  snowflakes forming and falling

/>   sunrise

  moonrise

  dew on the grass

  a seed germinating

  an earthworm moving through the soil

  cactus baking in the sun

  mitosis

  an apple ripening

  feathers

  wood petrifying

  a tooth decaying

  a spider weaving its web

  a fly being caught in the web

  a leaf changing colors

  a salmon spawning

  And then this list might expand beyond nature, such as the sound that occurs . . .

  after the conductor’s baton ceases to rise

  Although Julia’s adult life is just getting under way, Janet believes that early attention to nature’s details played a major role in Julia’s speech development, writing, and artwork, and that her daughter’s keen attention to detail will continue to serve her well. “Unlike many of her peers, Julia is not easily impressed by ‘stuff,’” says Janet. “What’s real, what’s enduring—a view from a mountaintop, a soaring bird of prey, a rainbow after a summer’s rain—these things leave a lasting impression on her.” Janet’s sphere of motherly influence has waned, of course. Her daughter spends less time outdoors. But Julia has not lost her love of nature, solitude, and simple pleasures. “These values are rooted deeply in those early years,” says Janet, the years when she and Julia listened to the sounds of creatures not stirring.

  Coming to Our Senses

  One of the world’s leading experts on butterflies, Robert Michael Pyle, teaches children about the insects by first placing a living butterfly on their noses, so that the butterfly can become the teacher.

  “Noses seem to make perfectly good perches or basking spots, and the insect often remains for some time. Almost everyone is delighted by this: the light tickle, the close-up colors, the thread of a tongue probing for droplets of perspiration. But somewhere beyond delight lies enlightenment. I have been astonished at the small epiphanies I see in the eyes of a child in truly close contact with nature, perhaps for the first time. This can happen to grown-ups too, reminding them of something they never knew they had forgotten.”

  Perhaps the eighth intelligence is the intelligence within nature, the lessons waiting to be delivered if anyone shows up.

  This is how Leslie Stephens views the educational necessity of nature. An at-home mother especially attuned to nature, she grew up in San Diego, a self-described “tomboy,” roaming Tecolote Canyon with her Weimaraner, Olga, by her side. In those years, Tecolote Canyon was a wild place, at the edge of a housing tract, filled with chaparral and sage. Coyotes and deer found their way there through suburban tracts. Her family spent most summer afternoons at Shell Beach in La Jolla, and every August she traveled to her grandparents’ home at Ryan Dam, on the Great Falls of the Missouri River in Montana. When she was thirteen, the arm of the canyon where she played as a child was plowed up by bulldozers, and homes were built.

  When she became a parent, her family moved to the edge of another canyon, called Deer Canyon. It is, she says, “our little wilderness, narrow and deep.” She wants her children to learn from this edge of another universe, as she did. The canyon stimulates not only their spirits, but also their intellect. She tells how, when she was a girl, her canyon taught her a broader definition of shelter, and gave her “a deep understanding of how the world works”:

  A child who is allowed to run free in a place that is natural will very quickly begin to look around for a special shelter. The interior framework of bushes is inspected and judged for its suitability to act as a fort. Trees, especially mature ones, provide towering castles, and the best climbing branches are claimed as “rooms.” In contrast, the exposure a child feels running across a grassy, sunny slope or wide, open field allows her to feel the lack of shelter. It is only through experiencing both opposites that children begin to understand each part more deeply.

  Nature also teaches kids about friendship, or can. Sure they can learn that elsewhere, but there’s something different about friendship forged outdoors.

  When I was my children’s age, after school or on weekends anyone who wanted to be with friends just headed down to the old oak that grew along the seasonal creek. It was a great climbing tree and someone had tied a heavy rope from one of the sturdier branches. We would run, jump, and grab onto the rope and swing wildly, clearing the creek bed filled with smooth boulders and rocks. I do not recall anyone getting hurt there and upon reflection I think it may be that even though we tested each other’s limits, we knew our own. Pecking order established itself in an unspoken manner. But we were friends and we accepted each other. It was enough just to be together. The wildness of our place bonded us and we felt a connection that went beyond verbal exchanges to a deeper knowing.

  Stephens’s recollection brings to mind the fascinating, if skimpy, studies that suggest children who spend more time playing outdoors have more friends. Certainly the deepest friendships evolve out of shared experience, particularly in environments in which all the senses are enlivened. On one level, discovering—or rediscovering—nature through the senses is simply a way to learn, to pay attention. And paying attention is easier when you’re actually doing something, rather than only considering how it might be done.

  John Rick, the middle-school teacher who educated me about the growing number of legal and regulatory restrictions on natural play, grew up in the 1960s. His family’s house backed up on vacant land. At that time there were only three local television stations, one of them in Spanish. Computers and Game Boys didn’t exist. He spent his free hours exploring the land, as countless children did at that time. Rick says:

  I can remember how furious my dad used to get when he never had a shovel in the garage. That was because I had taken it to dig foxholes deep enough to crouch inside and put plywood over the top. We even took the time to disguise the cover with plants and dirt. A lot of the time the roof caved in on us, but we learned. There were other adventures, too: swings from trees, kites on two thousand feet of string. My dad helped when he could, but most of the time he left us to try things: to experiment, test, fail, or succeed. We learned so much more than we ever would have with someone showing us the right way to do things every time. Our failures gave us a deep, intrinsic understanding of how things worked. We understood the laws of physics long before we took the class.

  Schoolhouse in a Tree

  Nature can stimulate the eighth intelligence (and probably all the others) in countless ways. But I have a soft spot in my heart for tree houses, which have always imparted certain magic and practical knowledge.

  Rick’s story reminded me of my early career as neighborhood tree-house architect, at nine or ten years old. I couldn’t catch a ground ball well, but I could climb a trunk and nail a board with style. One summer I directed a crew of five or six boys in the appropriation of “spare” lumber from nearby building projects. In the 1950s, we did not consider it stealing—though it certainly was. Mountains of lumber, some of it crusted with concrete, would rise next to basement holes that became small lakes after summer storms. Carpenters looked the other way as we carted off four-by-eight sheets of plywood and two-by-fours. Our pockets bulged with nails that we collected from the ground.

  We picked the largest oak in the state, we figured: a tree that must have been two hundred years old. We erected a four-story tree house with a sealed bottom floor that we entered through a trap door on the floor of the second story. Each ascending level became more elaborate and larger as the branches of the tree opened out. The top floor was a crow’s nest that could only be reached by leaving the third story and crouch-walking out ten feet on a thick branch, transferring to a higher branch that dipped down close to the first one, and then traversing that branch to the crow’s nest—forty feet above the ground. The tree house was serviced by ropes and pulleys and two baskets. This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache, and from it we could see out over the cornfields and north to the gre
at, dark woods. To think of that tree house today, within the context of our litigious society, makes me shudder.

  I returned years later and the old tree was doing just fine. The only sign of civilization within its branches were two or three gray two-by-fours. If you drive across the Midwest today, or for that matter across any of wooded America, you can see similar artifacts, the skeletons of tree houses past. But you won’t see many new tree houses. More often than not, adults build the ones that do exist, sometimes for themselves.

  Adults have appropriated tree-house building, just as they have Halloween. (Perhaps the better word is reappropriated: the Medicis built a marble tree house during the Renaissance, and a town near Paris was famous in the mid-nineteenth century for its tree-house restaurants.) Elaborate books for adults advise tree-house builders to rest boards on major branches and close to the trunk; to brace boards to resist wind and twisting; to use natural-fiber manila rope, rather than nylon rope. They advise that the floor be tilted slightly to allow water runoff; that the ladder not be nailed to the trunk, but tied to the tree and self-supported. And so on.

  As tree-house architect, I could have used such information but did fine without it. We built our tree house well enough for our needs. None of my fellow builders was injured, at least not seriously. Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.