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

by Louv, Richard

  The full pursuit of such promise will require a forgiving definition of the wild. The poet Gary Snyder has said, “A wilderness is always a specific place, basically there for the local critters that live in it. In some cases a few humans will be living in it too. Such places are scarce and must be rigorously defended. Wild is the process that surrounds us all, self-organizing Nature . . .” Self-organizing nature must surely be preserved whenever possible, but, for the purposes of reintroducing future generations to nature, we cannot stop there. In truth, the nature that shaped so many of us was seldom self-organizing—at least not in the pristine way that Snyder suggests.

  Many Americans still do live in rural areas, and those who grew up in what remains of the farm country share a memory—often idealized—of that life. Before she died, my friend Elaine Brooks, who took such good care of the last natural open space in La Jolla, described the landscape of small-town western Michigan, where she had spent her childhood summers on her grandparents’ farm: “There was always a sense of being places where no one had quite been before, wandering the farm. Many years later, revisiting the farm long after it had been sold, I walked back into some woods that had not been a part of my grandparents’ farm, to discover the remains of an old house that I had never seen before.” The skeletal house was only a few hundred feet from the sandy valley where she and her cousin had played. “But we had never ventured beyond my grandfather’s wire fence. The land seemed wild to us, but it had been tamed a hundred years before.” During her occasional trips back to western Michigan to visit relatives, Elaine found that she could easily re-create this illusion of wildness. As time passed between visits, she found that she had to drive farther to get away from houses; there were more homes salted back in the woods, now that the convenience of snowblowers and dune buggies and snowmobiles made it easier to live away from town. But still, even in the small towns, it was easy to go for a walk and find patches of woods and streams that blotted out the evidence of human habitation.

  Open land is still accessible and natural play is still possible in many places in America. We have seen that accessibility to nature isn’t everything. Even in areas of the country where residential neighborhoods are still nestled in woods and fields, parents express puzzlement because children tend to prefer to connect with electrical outlets. But location does count. If future generations are to rediscover nature, where will they find it? In the past, children found nature and exploratory freedom even in the densest inner-city neighborhoods—in vacant lots, weedy alleys and waterfronts, even rooftops. However, urban infill (building on remaining open space in existing neighborhoods, as a trade-off for protecting outlying green belts) is reducing even that space.

  When cities get denser through infill, parks are often an afterthought, and open space is diminished. Such development is spreading quickly; it now dominates even the outer rings of most growing American cities and seeps into the most rural areas, creating an urban milieu that “screams human presence,” as Elaine Brooks once put it. In such places, most original vegetation was eradicated long ago, so that occasional landscaping is the only living relief. Landscaping in such settings is merely an architectural element in urban design. This type of development is especially dominant in South Florida and Southern California—but almost everywhere in America, new residential developments are cut from this architectural and legal pattern.

  We don’t have to continue down this road. There is another possibility with long-term potential: the resettling of vast areas of rural America emptied in recent decades by the crash of agriculture and its supportive industries. We might call this “pro-nature” cluster development. In 1993 (the year that the Census Bureau stopped issuing farm-resident reports), author and New York Times Denver bureau chief Dirk Johnson pointed out that, a century earlier, Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed based on a measurement by the Census Bureau that defined an area as “settled” when it had more than six people per square mile. As of 1993, though, in about two hundred counties on the Great Plains, population density had fallen below that frontier threshold. “While hardly anyone was paying attention, something quite extraordinary happened to a huge swath of the United States: it emptied out,” Johnson wrote. “In five states of the Great Plains, there are more counties with fewer than six persons per square mile than there were in 1920. In Kansas, such counties cover more territory than they did in 1890. . . . Even the number of counties with fewer than two persons per square mile is on the rise.”

  Since then, the emptying of parts of rural America has only increased. The causes are complex—not the least of them the rise of corporate mega-farms and the bankruptcies among small farmers. But great stretches of land are now underpopulated. A few years ago, the governor of Iowa invited immigrants from other countries to resettle his state. Geographers at Rutgers University have called for the federal government to remove the stragglers and turn parts of the Great Plains into a wildlife park to be called Buffalo Commons. That specific event is unlikely, and the geographers have since amended their controversial proposal. But something akin to it could happen. The emptying of the plains, the notion of zoopolis, the new knowledge of our kinship with other animals—these trends suggest that the idea of frontier for future generations is not settled, and that future generations in this part of the world may well create a sensible way to distribute population. Permanent disconnection of the young and nature is not inevitable.

  Indeed, while short-term relief is important at, for example, the family and school level, the long-term reconnection of future generations with nature will require a radical change in the way cities are designed, where population is distributed, and how those populations interact with land and water. Imagine, in a fourth frontier, a back-to-the-land movement unlike any in our history.

  Such thinking should seem more familiar than grandiose, rooted as it is in Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision, Thoreau’s self-reliance, and the homesteading of the West. Its precedents include the middle-class “back-to-the-land” movement in nineteenth-century England. In the 1960s, a back-to-the-land movement in a number of Western countries attempted an ad hoc resuscitation of that vision as an act of rebellion against what was perceived as a materialist culture; that exodus may have attracted over one million people in the United States. While remnants of that original migration remain, the 1960s agrarian movement neither succeeded nor failed, but, instead, evolved: into environmentalism, into a focus on sustainable communities, and into the simplicity movement.

  In the early 1980s, another trend seemed to be on the verge of changing the face of rural America. The 1980 Census showed that the nation’s population was less concentrated; in addition to the sprawl of the suburbs, more Americans were moving to rural areas than to high-density older cities. With the advent of the personal computer, both farmers and upscale information workers could suddenly imagine themselves living in a new Eden, where the best of the rural and urban worlds could be linked by modem. Some Americans realized that dream, but two realities intruded: one was that when people moved to small towns, they generally brought their urban expectations and problems, including suburban sprawl, with them; second, the city-to-small-town movement proved to be a demographic blip. A few small towns were transformed, but most continued to lose population—particularly in the Great Plains. Certainly no back-to-the-land rush followed.

  Yet, all the elements of desire remain, and a new literature of sustainable community design has since emerged. A new back-to-the-land movement may be possible, considering the densification of suburbia and its failure to deliver on its original promise of increased natural surroundings; new research showing the necessity of nature to health; and a new realization that dramatic, visionary change will be necessary if tomorrow’s children are to experience a direct connection to nature. The green urbanism of Western Europe and parts of the United States helps to point the way, by showing that the improbable is possible. We are no longer talking about retreating to rural c
ommunes, but, rather, about building technologically and ethically sophisticated human-scale population centers that, by their very design, reconnect both children and adults to nature.

  Brave New Prairie

  The girl is glad that her family moved here from Los Angeles. Her memories of that city and its congestion and the smell of the air are beginning to fade. She did not even mind the long winter, when the snow built up in drifts and the wind blew the snow dry, so that even after the snow stopped falling from the clouds, the blizzard continued. She loved watching that from the window of her bedroom, surrounded by her books and drawing paper.

  One night, her father woke her in the middle of the night and led her outside under the stars, and said, “Look.” She saw lightning on the horizon, and the great river of light above. “Lightning and the Milky Way,” said her father. His hands were on her shoulders. “Amazing.” She liked the way he said that word, softly, without saying anything else until she was tucked back in bed.

  Now she is up moving again, to the edge of the village . . . .

  PROFESSOR DAVID ORR describes what he believes is a paradigm shift in “design intelligence” comparable to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He calls for a “higher order of heroism,” one that encompasses charity, wildness, and the rights of children. As he defines it, a sane civilization “would have more parks and fewer shopping malls; more small farms and fewer agribusinesses; more prosperous small towns and smaller cities; more solar collectors and fewer strip mines; more bicycle trails and fewer freeways; more trains and fewer cars; more celebration and less hurry . . .” Utopia? No, says Orr. “We have tried utopia and can no longer afford it.” He calls for a movement of “hundreds of thousands of young people equipped with the vision, moral stamina, and intellectual depth necessary to rebuild neighborhoods, towns, and communities around the planet. The kind of education presently available will not help them much. They will need to be students of their places and competent to become, in Wes Jackson’s words, ‘native to their places.’”

  Several years ago, I visited Wes Jackson at the Land Institute on the Kansas prairie near Salina. An admiring Atlantic profile once described him as an intellectual descendant of Thoreau, and possibly as important. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called genius award—Jackson established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University–Sacramento. Restless by nature, and increasingly dismayed by what he considered the dead-end, anti-environment direction of agriculture, he and his wife, Dana, came home to Kansas and created the Land Institute, a research institution linked to the nation’s Land Grant agricultural colleges and surrounded by hundreds of acres of native prairie grasses and plant-breeding plots. For over two decades, Jackson has been one of the most prominent voices arguing for the resettling of the Great Plains, albeit in an entirely new way. Some consider Jackson outrageously radical, the John Brown of rural America. (His great-grandfather rode with the abolitionist Brown.) He wants to emancipate the land and the rest of us along with it. His vision describes a world where families would return to a more natural existence, but avoid the mistakes of past back-to-the-land movements.

  He claims that agriculture as we know it is a grand mistake, a “global disease,” and that the plowshare may have destroyed more options for future generations than the sword. In his office overlooking rolling hills and fields of prairie grasses, he leans forward and says, “I’m trying to build a new agriculture that’s based on the model of the prairie.” Jackson, a large and imposing figure (described by one writer as a cross between the prophet Isaiah and a bison) adds, “But we can’t stop there: we need a human economy based on the prairie, on nature.” According to Jackson, the natural prairie of perennial grasses that once held the top-soil tight is now tilled regularly, loosening the soil, and as a result the nation’s legacy of precious topsoil is floating downstream and turning to sediment. Streams and rivers throughout the Midwest run unnaturally muddy. Erosion is ripping away soil at a rate twenty times natural replenishment, even faster than during the Dust Bowl. By one estimate, Iowa has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years. Kansas has lost a quarter. He sees much of the current emphasis on crop rotation as wishful thinking.

  At the Land Institute, Jackson and his researchers are conducting ecological and genetic research to create prairie-like grain fields, what he calls a “domestic prairie for the future.” Modern agriculture relies on annuals such as corn or wheat, which must be seeded every year, after the land is tilled, with resulting erosion. By contrast, the native prairie, with its perennial plants and deep sod and spreading root systems, doesn’t lose topsoil; it builds it. The only problem is, the original prairie isn’t particularly edible for humans.

  Jackson’s new domestic prairie would be a mix, a polyculture, of hardy perennials, some of them offspring of the natural wild grasses of the original prairie, which would produce edible grain. He hopes to produce high-yielding grains that will reproduce through their roots, and thereby withstand harsh winters and hold the soil in place. Jackson has little faith in genetic engineering; one mistake, he says, and we could suffer a disaster on the scale of ozone depletion. Through slower, traditional genetics research—the kind done in the larger world, not by physically manipulating DNA—he estimates it will take fifty years, maybe longer, to produce plants for a sustainable agricultural prairie. But some day, he suggests, this domestic prairie could yield nearly as much grain nourishment per acre as the average acre of Kansas wheat now produces, once energy costs are factored in. He can imagine this new prairie flourishing over most of the nation’s cultivated land sometime later in this century, or perhaps the one after that.

  But here’s the catch: If the domestic prairie is really to sustain us, we’ll eventually have to redistribute the population out across the country and live a kind of life that few of us can imagine today, a more radical life than back-to-the-land hippies had in mind. In Jackson’s view, our great-grandchildren will live in farms or villages spread out across the land. Their distribution will be based on intricate ecological formulas, employing technologies at once familiar yet radically different from those of the 1990s—or the 1890s. Whether you view this future as a new Utopia or a rural gulag depends, he says, “on the limits of your imagination.” He believes that no form of solar energy, including the domestic prairie, will produce enough energy to sustain us unless the population is redistributed. Later in this century, in his analysis, American settlement patterns will be determined by how many people the land in each particular bioregion can sustain. Cities will still exist, but will be downscaled, most with about forty thousand citizens. Outside the cities, the rural population will be triple what it was in 1990, but this population will be carefully distributed. For example, the plains of central Kansas will support about one family for every forty acres. In Iowa and some of the West, including the Sacramento Valley, each family will be supported by as few as ten acres. (Considering this possibility, a friend of mine says, “I know this place. It’s called ‘France.’”)

  These rural areas will sustain a new kind of farm and village life. People will live within square-mile communities; farm families will live on their own land but near each other, just outside the village, which is located at the center of this square. Several hundred to several thousand people (not everyone would be a farmer) would live in these new communities. The farmers working the domestic prairie will provide most of the protein and carbohydrates. Animals (including a winter-resistant cross between buffalo and cattle) will be raised in mobile pens wheeled around the unfenced landscape. This will eliminate the cost of repairing thousands of miles of fencing and allow wild species to migrate freely. People who live in the villages will spend part of their days raising vegetables, fruits, and animals in solar bioshelters. Energy needs will be provided by a variety of technologies, from passive solar installations to wind-powered generators to old-fashioned horsepower. For children, wh
at an extraordinarily different environment—both futuristic and ancient—this would be.

  Eco-exodus

  The possibility of a return to wild prairie has precedent. As farming became concentrated in the Midwest and West, the small farms of New England faded. Between 1850 and 1950, thousands of square miles in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine that once were cropland became woodland. Like the remnants of an ancient civilization, forgotten stone farm fences disappeared into an overgrowth of pines and maples. Jay Davis, editor of the Republican Journal in Belfast, Maine, calls this period New England’s “sleeping century.” In a history of his county, Davis wrote, “As the fences of Waldo County knelt and fell and the trees stepped out to reclaim what had been theirs, and the mills decayed into the streams and the ridges were deserted, as people left and the survivors worked hard for a living, what emerged was, at least relatively, a twentieth-century wilderness.”

  How similar that sounds to the current condition of the Great Plains. In a 2004 National Geographic description of the depopulating of that region, John G. Mitchell described how, in some communities, the median age of residents is already creeping into the sixties. “In fact, grass appears to be staging a comeback on some public lands, too,” Mitchell reports. “Fifteen national grass-lands embracing more than three and a half million acres are scattered across the Great Plains from North Dakota into Texas—a legacy acquired by the government after bankruptcies and foreclosures evicted thousands of unlucky homesteaders in the 1930s. It’s enough to make a person wonder: When grass returns to the Great Plains, can buffalo be far behind?” In fact, the number of bison—now seen as a reasonable ranching alternative to cattle—has grown dramatically. In the northern Plains, banks now help ranchers switch from cattle to bison. Such change, as National Geographic points out, offers a “sweeping perception of what the Great Plains used to be—and might in some ways be again.”