Could a new generation of settlers follow? We have seen at least one false start. In the mid-1970s, for the first time since 1820, rural areas began to grow faster, proportionately, than cities. Rapid growth is still occurring in small towns, especially those that have been anointed by major employers—say, an automobile manufacturing plant—or, more commonly, those on the metropolitan fringe, meaning within an hour’s drive of a city. Housing is cheaper there, so gas prices be damned. But it’s also true that in great stretches of rural and small-town America, the city-to-rural migration of the 1970s did not last. Economics was one reason; another was the fact that human beings are social animals. The buckshot urbanization of rural areas was simply too isolating. So today, sprawl rules, but the great migration to the farther reaches of America has yet to occur, and perhaps—as of now—that’s for the best. Too often, small towns invaded by urban expatriates lose their character and physical beauty to overdevelopment.
Still, history is full of false starts, and it is shaped by waves that came and receded and then returned in greater force. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, opening millions of acres to settlement. As of this writing, Congress is entertaining several bills similar in spirit; instead of offering land, one of the bills, which calls for a New Homestead Act, offers incentives for people willing to start businesses in those rural areas that have lost population over the past decade. The act provides tax and savings credits, seed money for startups, and repays up to half of recent graduates’ college loans—no small offering to the 40 percent of student borrowers who leave college with debt payments higher than 8 percent of their monthly income. Other incentives to move out of major population centers will likely be more powerful, such as the spread of wireless computer services (currently, the country’s largest regional wireless broadband network covers a 600-square-mile rural county, where the largest town has a population of only 13,200); the creation of a spate of regional airports serving smaller cities and towns; and a rising concern about terrorism in the larger cities.
Given these developments, families with children will continue to have several choices. They can, right now, move to a smaller city, such as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “The single best thing about living here is that everything is easy,” says sociologist Rosemary Erickson, who moved back to her native South Dakota from California in 2004. This was her second return; the first time was in the 1980s, when she operated her business from Davis, a hamlet a few miles outside of Sioux Falls. Sioux Falls is no small town, but it’s far quieter and arguably much closer to nature than the heaving megalopolises on the coasts, and the prairie and farms Rosemary loved as a girl surround it. Sioux Falls, she points out, has become “amazingly diverse, with Sudanese refugees and all the rest,” she says. “When I was a girl in Davis, there was only one black student.” People in Sioux Falls by no means feel isolated from the world. While retirees comprise much of the migration back to her area of the country, Rosemary does know families that have moved to South Dakota so that their children could experience a quieter upbringing, including a more direct experience of nature.
Weather is probably the greatest disincentive, but surmountable through more sophisticated insulation—some of it being perfected by green engineers—and better weather forecasting, along with the new popularity of manufactured residential storm rooms. “We have tornado shelters in all big malls. A lot of people say, ‘There’s a tornado warning; lets go to the mall!’” Rosemary says, laughing.
So we have a choice about the kind of cities and towns we will build, about the way population is distributed, about the values we bring to such political and personal decisions. We could, in fact, someday create a smaller-scale way of life in those parts of America that are now losing population.
Green Towns in the Countryside
The dream of green towns in the countryside is rooted in a rich tradition. Ebenezer Howard, the most important historical figure in urban planning, was born in 1850, grew up in small towns in England, immigrated to America as a young man, and failed as a Nebraska farmer. Arriving in Chicago in 1872, the year after the great Chicago fire, he witnessed the rebuilding of that city. During his years in America, his reading of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American utopians helped shape his views on how a better life might be achieved through town planning. In 1898, he published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, later retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow. His vision of what he called “town-country” remains valid. The three magnets of social organization, he wrote, were the town, the country, and the town-country, the latter combining the best social and economic features, and avoiding the downsides, of the first two. Thus came the Garden Cities movement, in its various versions.
Howard’s key idea was that groups of citizens would create a joint company to buy land in economically depressed agricultural areas and establish new towns with a fixed population of thirty-two thousand residents living on one thousand acres. Each town would be surrounded by five thousand acres of green belt. He expanded this idea into what he called the Social City: several Garden Cities linked by rail lines or highways. In the following decades, Howard’s theories were sometimes put into practice, mainly in England and America, and influenced suburban development. The problem now is that many of the elemental green influences were lost along the way; instead of garden cities, we got gated cities. From the developers’ viewpoint, fear sold better than green. Howard’s “town-country” concept never really blossomed, but in recent applications of New Urbanist thinking, the idea’s time may have arrived. New Urbanism, a community design philosophy often associated with Smart Growth and controlling suburban sprawl, favors the return of such traditional features as front porches, backyard garages, multi-use buildings, and housing clustered near commercial service areas.
Of course, creating new green towns, ones that directly reconnect future generations to nature, isn’t simply a town design challenge. Part of the dilemma is that such settlements, to be truly green, should be connected to employment centers by transportation mechanisms beyond just the automobile—eventually even beyond autos with hybrid engines. No single community design will suffice; numerous, simultaneous approaches will be required, including green-urban infill, green towns, increased public transit options, and greater use of telecommuting and teleconferencing.
Ebenezer Howard would recognize such a settlement as a new take on the town-country, the Garden City of the future. Plans or trial projects for such towns already exist—more rural versions of Michael Corbett’s Village Homes project in Davis, California. For example, CIVITAS, a Vancouver-based, internationally recognized, multi-disciplinary land planning company, was engaged to create a visionary concept for the long-term sustainability of 325 acres of existing agricultural land known as the Gilmore Farms within an agricultural land reserve in Richmond, British Columbia. According to CIVITAS, the plan calls for two compact villages placed on existing farmland, organized around a series of public spaces including a market street. Farmland around the villages would use intensive farming techniques and grow specialty crops. “The concept also provides an opportunity to develop nature preserve areas in the form of ecology parks, wildlife viewing, environmental studies and sanctuaries.”
Another CIVITAS project, Bayside Village, in Tsawwassen, British Columbia, calls for an “ecological village: a small-scaled housing cluster with the ambiance of a cohesive country hamlet” with smaller “and more humane” road widths “than those in standard suburban subdivisions.” Native plant species and landscaping will provide new habitat for songbirds within the residential areas. The ecological village single-family residential neighborhood will be “set within vast areas of enhanced wildlife and bird habitat including cultivated agricultural fields, pastures, a nature park, a waterfowl marsh and a songbird buffer area adjacent to the foreshore.”
A skeptic might contend that such new towns sound better on paper than they would prove to be in reality, and that they are, in
fact, euphemistic Trojan-horse developments that could open the countryside to further sprawl. Considering the spotty history of planned communities and new town developments, the skeptic would have a point. But if the approach is not piecemeal, if green urbanism principles are applied with the force of law and green-town development boundaries set, the result could be positive, indeed. At the very least, such concept towns remind us that there is more than one way to build a town.
Let me return to why such futuristic thinking is important to the relationship between children and nature. In our family lives, and our schools, and in all the environments in which we now live, we can do much—right now—to encourage the nature-child reunion. But in the long run, unless we change cultural patterns and the built environment, the nature gap will continue to widen. Moreover, the goal of this prescription must be not only to maintain the current level of health, but to dramatically improve it—to create a far better life for those who follow. We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the Earth while we expand our culture’s capacity for joy. The writer Peter Matthiessen has said, “There’s an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.” Such sorrow is understandable on one level, but inappropriate given that long horizon of the possible, of the regenerative, of a new frontier.
No future is inevitable. Those children and young people who now hunger to find a cause worth a lifetime commitment could become the architects and designers and political force of the fourth frontier, connecting their own children and future generations to nature—and delight. Am I out on a limb here? Of course. But that, as the saying goes, is where the fruit is.
A.D. 2050
The girl, whose name is Elaine, passes a row of public bicycles, and ducks under the branches of the pecan trees that ring the village. And suddenly she is in another world; she runs along the path through the knolls carpeted by wild onion, Indian hemp, columbine, and sky-blue aster—she knows the names of all these plants. She looks for tracks on the sandy path, and finds them: jackrabbit and quail. She places her hand over a coyote track, and compares the size of the toe marks to her own fingers.
She climbs one of the little knolls on hands and knees, holding her breath, and peeks over the edge, pushing aside milkweed. She sits in the grass and watches the sky and wonders if the clouds are moving or if she, on the earth, is turning. She reaches into her day pack and takes out her book. She lies back in the grass, and opens it, and reads:
“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief . . .”
She feels the morning wind on her skin.
She hears bees.
A half hour later she opens her eyes and the clouds are gone. She sits up.
The light is different. On a ridge to the north, she sees one, two, now three antelope. “Pronghorn,” she whispers, relishing the feel of the word. They slowly turn their heads in her direction. To the west, Elaine sees the little electric combines moving out to seed the native grain. And far to the east she sees the movement of dark shapes. “Bison,” she whispers. “Buffalo.” She decides she likes the word buffalo more, and says it again.
While she has slept, the world has changed.
PART VII
TO BE AMAZED
A child said What is the grass? fetching
it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not
know what it is any more than he.
—WALT WHITMAN
21. The Spiritual Necessity of Nature for the Young
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity . . .
—GRETEL EHRLICH
WHEN MY SON Matthew was four, he asked me, “Are God and Mother Nature married, or just good friends?”
Good question.
During the course of researching this book, I heard many adults describe with eloquence and awe the role of nature in their early spiritual development, and how that connection continued to deepen as they aged. Many were committed to sharing that connection with their children, but faced challenges: how to explain the spirituality of nature—or, rather, our spirituality in nature—without tripping on the tangled vines of biblical interpretation, semantics, and politics. These can be real barriers to communicating the simple awe we felt as children as we lay on our backs seeing mountains and faces in clouds. It also inhibits progress toward a nature-child reunion.
There is a path out of this bramble.
Several years ago, a group of religious leaders that included a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and an imam met in my living room to discuss parenting. At that meeting, Rabbi Martin Levin, of Congregation Beth-El, offered a wonderful description of spirituality: to be spiritual is to be constantly amazed. “To quote the words of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great teacher of our age,” he said, “our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Heschel would encourage his students to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
In the old texts, a child’s spiritual life was assumed. Abraham began his search for God as a child. The Bible tells us that “God’s glory above the heavens is changed by the mouths of babes and infants.” Isaiah fore-saw a future time when “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and a little child shall lead them.” Jewish mysticism describes the fetus as privy to the secrets of the universe—forgotten at the moment of birth. And in the Gospels, Jesus said, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The visionary poets William Blake and William Wordsworth, among others, connected the child’s spirituality to nature. As a child, Blake announced that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting in a tree (and he received a beating for it). He also reported a tree filled with angels who sang from the branches. Words-worth’s poetry describes the transcendent experiences of children in nature. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” he wrote:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Of course, there were those who considered such thinking sentimental claptrap. Sigmund Freud, an atheist, considered such mysticism a regression into what he called the “oceanic experience” of the womb. As Edward Hoffman wrote in Visions of Innocence: Spiritual and Inspirational Experiences of Children, “Freud regarded childhood as a time in which our lowest, most animalistic impulses are strongest.” Children were, in Freud’s view, instinct-driven vehicles for incestuous longings for self-gratification. So much for winged angels in the trees.
Carl Jung, Freud’s closest intellectual ally, broke with him in 1913, and offered a view of the human psyche influenced by Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and fairy tales, among other factors. Jung believed that human beings become attuned to visionary experience in the second half of their life. “Late in Jung’s career, though, he seemed to shift his position somewhat,” according to Hoffman. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung even recalls how, at the age of seven or nine, he would sit alone on a boulder near his country home, asking himself: “Am I the one who is sitting on top of the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” However, other than such recollections about his own childhood, Jung had little to say about childhood spirituality. “In this respect,” according to Hoffman, “he was unfortunately typical of the whole current of mainstre
am psychology and its therapeutic offshoots.”
Even William James, who, as the founder of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, possessed a keen interest in religious experience, never really turned his attention toward the early years. Not until the 1960s and 1970s did the topic gain much interest, notably in Robert Coles’s book, The Spiritual Life of Children. The narrower topic of nature’s influence on childhood spirituality has been given shorter shrift. Ironically, much of the current work on the influence of nature on childhood cognition and attention is rooted in James’s work.
Hoffman is one of the few psychologists to attend this area. A licensed clinical psychologist in the New York area, he specializes in child development. While writing a biography of Abraham Maslow (who created the famous Hierarchy of Needs in the late 1960s), he discovered that the preeminent psychologist shared Hoffman’s view that even small children grappled with questions of a spiritual nature. Maslow died before he could elaborate on his findings. Hoffman pursued them, interviewing children and several hundred adults who described their spontaneous childhood experiences “of great meaning, beauty, or inspiration . . . apart from institutional religion.” He writes, “Most fundamentally, it now appears undeniable that some of us (perhaps far more than we suspect) have undergone tremendous peak—even mystical—experiences during our early years. In this respect, conventional psychology and its allied disciplines have painted a badly incomplete portrait of childhood and, by extrapolation, of adulthood as well.”
The reports he collected from children indicate (as do Coles’s studies) that a variety of exalted or transcendent experiences are possible during childhood. Among the triggers are heartfelt prayer or more formalized religious moments; the result can be “a visionary episode, a dream experience, or simply an ordinary moment of daily life that suddenly became an entry point to bliss.” Aesthetics can be a gateway, too: witness child composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. Most interesting, however, is Hoffman’s finding that most transcendent childhood experiences happen in nature.
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Page 30
