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

by Louv, Richard

  Another trend is the creation or purchase of urban farms. The city of Göteborg, Sweden, owns sixty farms at its fringes, some open to the public—including pick-your-own berry and vegetable farms, a visiting or petting farm for children, and another offering a riding stable for people with disabilities. Small areas of pasture, livestock, and farm buildings are even being sited at the core of new housing clusters.

  Schools, too, are being transformed. Zurich is redesigning its schools, breaking up concrete surfaces around the buildings and planting trees and grass. Through a system using mirrors, students in the classrooms of one school can see and monitor the solar voltaic system and the life of the greenroof. Proponents say such design goes beyond aesthetics; children and adults in these more natural settings concentrate better and are more productive.

  In his campaign to encourage such green urbanism in the United States, Timothy Beatley is increasingly interested in its impact on children. During the years he and his wife lived in the Netherlands, they were struck by how free the children were—how they were less endangered by traffic, how they could ride public bikes and public trams, and get around on their own. They were impressed by the increasing number of new developments that include wild places specifically for kids to play—where they could dig, or build a pond or build a little fort. “The fear just wasn’t there,” he says. “We also noticed that there was less resentment toward parents—we seldom heard kids saying, ‘Oh, my Mom won’t let me go anywhere.’ Maybe part of this is cultural; you see fewer commercial messages to kids there. But a lot of the reason is design. Now that we’re back in the U.S., and have small children of our own, we’re much more aware of the importance of creating a different way of living, one more connected to nature.”

  While many Americans may consider such ecotopian thinking bizarre, even threatening, green urbanism in Western Europe proves that an alternative urban future is possible and practical, and has given hope to pioneers in American cities who agree with McDonough that cities should be “sheltering; cleansing of air, water, and spirit; and restorative and replenishing of the planet, rather than fundamentally extractive and damaging.” Who knows? If such thinking spreads, Huck might even come home to the territories.

  The Return of Green America

  Two decades ago, I visited Michael Corbett where he lived, in the future. Corbett and his wife, Judy, had bought seventy acres of tomato fields in the college town of Davis, California, in 1975. There, they built Village Homes, the first fully solar-powered housing development in America, and one of the modern world’s first examples of green urbanism.

  As Corbett escorted me around this two-hundred-home neighborhood, I was struck by the inside-out nature of the place. In Village Homes, garages were tucked out of sight; homes pointed inward, toward open green space, walkways, and bike paths. In a typical planned community, then and now, you find martially trimmed postage-stamp yards and covenants that prohibit or restrict variations on the developer’s original theme. At Village Homes, I saw a profusion of flowers and vegetable gardens. Grapevines on roofs thickened in the summer, providing shade, and thinned in the winter, letting the sun’s rays through. Residents were producing nearly as much edible food as the original farmer had. Instead of a gate or wall, orchards surrounded this community. Corbett’s teenage daughter, Lisa, elaborated: “We’ve got a group of kids called ‘the harvesters.’ The orchards are set aside for the kids; we go out and pick the nuts and sell them at a farmer’s market at the gazebo in the center of the village.”

  As we walked through the development, Corbett stopped at the far edge. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he pointed beyond the almond trees at the periphery and across the street, to a condominium development that was not part of Village Homes. Its surfaces were almost entirely white stucco, glaring in the sun. A small child pumped his tricycle slowly across a white cement parking lot. “Look at that kid over there,” Corbett said. “He’s kind of limited where he can go, isn’t he? Where’s he going to go?”

  Recently, I asked Corbett if he had any observations about the behavior of the young people who had grown up at Village Homes or about their parents. “The parents loved it here because their kids were easy to watch; there was no through-traffic, so it was safe. The kids really got involved with the gardens, and harvesting the fruit from the orchard. They developed a respect for where food came from. The junior high kids were particularly interested in gardening—they started gardening on their own. This was less true of the high school kids. Interesting—not once in twenty years have I seen the kids who live here throw a tomato or fruit at anyone else.”

  Not once?

  “Not once. Kids from outside Village Homes did it, but our kids chased them out.”

  By nearly every measure, Village Homes succeeded. From the time Village Homes was launched, people lined up to move in. Among them: liberals, conservatives, libertarians (including economist Milton Friedman’s daughter); this was never a counterculture commune. In 2003, a professor of Environmental Science at University of California, Davis, told CBS’s Charles Osgood that the typical Village Homes resident’s energy bill was a third to a half that paid by residents in surrounding neighborhoods. Developers and architects from around the world visited Village Homes. And as the years passed, similar eco-communities started springing up across parts of Western Europe, where green design is now considered mainstream.

  But in one crucial way, Village Homes did not succeed. In America, no commercial developer, to Corbett’s knowledge, has replicated the Village Homes concept, a fact that deeply disappoints him. He places some of the blame on the exterior cosmetics of his own design. But the morning is young. The influence of urban naturalists and environmentalists is on the increase, particularly in the Northwest. The naturalist and nature writer Robert Michael Pyle praised Portland urban naturalist Mike Houck for launching an effort to involve the arts community in refreshing the cities and devoting himself to urban stream restoration. “When streams are rescued from the storm drains, they are said (delightfully) to be ‘daylighted.’ We are finally discovering the link between our biophilia and our future,” writes Pyle. Portland’s international “Country in the City” conference pushes for urban ecological diversity and encourages the dedication of urban Northwesterners to the wild salmon.

  Timothy Beatley reports an array of U.S. experiments in green urbanism. The city of Davis now requires new developments to be connected to a greenway/bikeway system that extends through the city. “An important objective is that elementary schoolchildren be able to travel by bike from their homes to schools and parks without having to cross major roads,” according to Beatley. In Oregon, Portland’s Greenspaces program calls for the creation of a regional system of parks, natural areas, greenways, and trails for both wildlife and people. A 1997 study by Portland State University students identified a third of downtown Portland’s roofs that could be converted to greenroof design. Such conversions could potentially reduce the volume of combined sewer overflow by up to 15 percent and achieve a huge savings for the city.

  Numerous studies have shown the economic benefits of green space; for example, some show how adjacent housing benefits from small neighborhood parks. If the green space is well designed, the public gains a higher return on their property tax, adding value to the neighborhood and increasing the net return to the tax rolls. These economic incentives should encourage us to move away from the flat, green parks (which are underused by children, who prefer the rough edges to the flat green) toward a more natural pocket-park design. Indeed, such better-designed areas must be part of a reinvention of the way we live—part of the physical creation of zoopolis.

  A good example of zoopolis is Oregon’s famous trail system, known as the Loop, which encircles the Portland metro area. A century ago, when the system was conceived, the plan was for a 40-mile series of trails. Today, the system is 140 miles long and still growing. The Loop connects parks, open spaces, and neighborhoods. From it, other trails radiate
out and connect to county, state, and federal recreation areas.

  Green architecture slowly is gaining popularity in the United States. In San Bruno, California, the new Gap office has a greenroof of native grasses and wildflowers, “which undulates like the surrounding green hills,” according to Architecture Week. The roof reduces sound transmission by up to fifty decibels and provides an acoustic barrier to nearby air traffic. In Utah, the new twenty-thousand-seat Conference Center for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is capped by a greenroof. In Michigan, designers of a Herman Miller furniture factory constructed a wetlands system for collecting and treating storm-water runoff. According to Beatley, the most ambitious green building at this time may be the new Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, at Oberlin College in Ohio. The building was designed to be off the power grid. It treats its own wastewater and generates power through a combination of southern orientation, rooftop photovoltaics, geothermal pumps, and energy conservation. Carpet tiles, when replaced in future decades at the end of their useful life, will be recycled. As one designer put it, the Oberlin building “comes closest to achieving the metaphor of a structure functioning like a tree.”

  The Robert Redford building, a retrofitted structure built in 1917 that houses the Natural Resources Defense Council’s office in Santa Monica, California, is another good example. The building uses about 60 percent less water than most other buildings because its roof captures rainwater; its floors are made of bamboo, a fast-growing substitute for traditional hardwoods. The carpets are hemp. Toilets flush with rainwater and urinals use no water, because of a special filter that extracts waste.

  Surprisingly, one of the best examples of what the future could hold is the city of Chicago. Under the leadership of Mayor Richard Daley, the city is reclaiming its 165-year-old motto, “City in a Garden,” by launching an impressive campaign not just to preserve open space, but also to re-create wildlife habitat, greenways, stream corridors, and other natural land, thereby adding to its existing seventy-three hundred acres of parklands. Daley’s goal: make Chicago the greenest city in the nation. Inspired by rooftop gardens in Germany, Daley insisted that the new, thirty-thousand-square-foot roof of City Hall be designed as a rooftop garden to help insulate the building, absorb excess storm water, help prevent sewer flooding, and act as a giant air purifier.

  “The garden has already yielded some promising results. During an August heat wave, surface temperatures in areas of the garden were between 86 and 125 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 to 70 degrees less than the temperatures of the black-tar roof of the adjoining Cook County building,” reports Nancy Seegar, in Planning, the publication of the American Planning Association. This roof cost about twice as much as a conventional roof, but is expected to last twice as long. As with other roofs of this type, energy savings pay for the maintenance cost. More than twenty thousand plants representing 150 different species grow in the garden, and it even claims two beehives and four thousand non-aggressive honeybees; the beekeepers harvested 150 pounds of honey during the first year. Future harvests will be packaged and sold at the city’s Cultural Center. The bees are expected to forage for nectar in nearby Grant Park.

  Among the city’s other accomplishments: some three hundred thousand trees planted since 1989. The municipality has also restored twenty-eight miles of boulevard gardens, and turned twenty-one acres of underused city land and abandoned gas stations into pocket parks and seventy-two community gardens. In time, there may be two hundred such gardens. One of those once-blighted lots is now the “El Coqui” garden, named after a tree frog native to Puerto Rico; the garden serves as a classroom for a nearby elementary school. On Chicago’s Southeast Side, the city has established the Calumet Open Space Reserve, with four thousand acres, including wetlands, forests, and prairies. In Kane County, in the far western Chicago region, a Farmland Protection Program will buy farmland or development rights to farmland.

  At the same time, Chicago has developed one of the best renewable-energy rebate programs in the nation. A growing network of bike paths connects neighborhoods, parks, and business districts. An excellent mass-transit system means owning a car in metropolitan Chicago is no longer a necessity. Chicago has also developed a five-year plan to generate 20 percent of its electrical power from renewable energy sources and to retrofit existing public buildings. This is no Lone Ranger adventure, but a collaboration of 140 public and private organizations working under the banner of the Chicago Wilderness coalition. Commercial outlets are following Chicago’s public lead. For example, a new Target store, located on a redeveloped site, will have its own rooftop garden.

  The greening of Chicago has even received praise from conservative columnist George Will, who quotes Daley extolling the virtues of flowers. “Flowers calm people down,” says the son of the first Mayor Daley, who was beloved by many locals, but whose baton-wielding police force cracked the heads of 1960s flower children and political protesters.

  This latest mayor’s inventiveness, in fact, is in step with the rebirth of an older Chicago ethic. “Everyone is entitled to a home where the sun, the stars, open fields, giant trees, and smiling flowers are free to teach an undisturbed lesson of life,” wrote the great Chicago landscape planner, Jens Jensen, in the 1930s. The city’s original planners called for a metro park system “developed in a natural condition.” The initial result: the city’s park system and two hundred thousand acres of forest preserves surrounding the city. The 1909 Plan of Chicago called for “wild forests, filled with such trees, vines, flowers, and shrubs as will grow in this climate. . . . There should be open glades here and there and other natural features and the people should be allowed to use them freely.” This century’s Chicago plan, then, is no love child or wild-eyed radical act (this is big-shouldered Chicago, remember, not California), but a rational response to decades of urban de-naturing. One wonders how we strayed so far from life-affirming visions. Clearly, it’s not too late to find our way back.

  Perhaps the most moving representation of green urbanism was offered in proposals from several architectural firms to green part of Ground Zero at the World Trade Center site in New York City. The proposals provided “ample proof of the power of landscape to transform a scarred and haunted place,” according to the New York Times, which published the results. Designers offered ideas to turn the crater into a tree nursery, “a memorial arboretum—a large sunken garden of extraordinary tree specimens, flowers and wildlife from all over the world.” Trees germinated there would be carried along “the same routes once traveled by daily commuters from the World Trade Center on their way home,” to be planted in neighborhoods and parks throughout the city. That serious consideration is given to such ideas in these uncertain times speaks well of Mike and Judy Corbett’s own farsighted vision, which they struggled to realize in that tomato field so many years ago.

  Reinventing the Vacant Lot: Green Urban Design for Kids

  Until recently, the new urbanism and the sustainable cities movement have paid insufficient attention to the needs of children. There has been little in the way of research related to urban design and the environment of childhood, according to Robin Moore. Notable exceptions have addressed the issue of traffic, worldwide, and its negative effects on childhood. For example, in cities where traffic has severely restricted children’s freedom to roam, new urbanism initiatives favor traffic-calming speed bumps and pedestrian-friendly shopping and residential areas. Such efforts help, but are seldom, if ever, coordinated with efforts to increase the urban child’s access to nature. Even so-called “green developers” show little interest in integrating children and wildlife. Biologist Ben Breedlove points to 273 publications and software that allow easy, functional wildlife habitat design: “Virtually none of these manuals and related techniques is in use, because architects, planners and regulators control the ‘natural habitat.’” Future urban design should not only meet the human needs of road capacity and smooth traffic flow, but also, as Breedlove maintains,
meet the needs of nature, with provisions for wild animal mobility and life cycles.

  The preservation of natural areas in an urban region does not necessarily mean that children will be exposed to more nature. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle describes, as the Bay Area’s version of the Thirty Years’ War, the long crusade to transform most of the East Bay shoreline into a state park “has found itself halted just short of its goal—torn by a civil war among different visions of what the park should be.” The most striking clash, according to the Chronicle, has been between Bay Area residents who want more playing fields and groups “appealing with equal passion for endangered hawks, migrating ducks and other wildlife.” Arthur Feinstein, co-executive director of the Golden Gate Audubon Society, calls the park “one of our last hopes for our children to understand that there is a natural world.”

  The good news about the Bay’s Thirty Years’ War is that a major urban park is at least being contested by those who envision it as a future site of playing fields and those who envision it wild, as a place of direct experience. Children’s access to nature is at the center of that debate; hopefully, this and other future parks will emphasize opportunities for children to get their feet wet and their hands dirty. Yes, we need playing fields and skateboard parks, but put them where they belong, on already urbanized land—on multi-use school sites, for example. Prize the natural spaces and shorelines most of all, because once they’re gone, with rare exceptions they’re gone forever. In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness. We require these patches of nature for our mental health and our spiritual resilience. Future generations, regardless of whatever recreation or sport is in vogue, will need nature all the more.