Last Child in the Woods - Pt. 1

The first ten or eleven years of my life was spent living in two different apartments just outside of Granite City, Illinois in a small village known as Pontoon Beach. Despite it's promising name, there was no actual beach. In fact, there was very little nature of any kind.  The majority of our play took place in shared green spaces that  were the equivalent of a large front lawn. However, there was a large vacant lot situated between our apartment building and a near-deserted strip mall that housed,among other things, a bar and a motorcycle showroom.

 The vacant lot was wooded and while not a thing of beauty it offered a tiny bit of nature to an otherwise developed area. My friends and I sometimes played in those woods. Among the trees, cigarette butts, and broken glass we'd occasionally find a turtle, but more often a toad or grasshopper. I wasn't much impressed by these animals. I was much more likely to be frightened of touching a frog than I was to go running home asking if I could keep it. I don't know how I came to be this way. What makes us afraid of harmless animals? Is this a learned response or is it due to a lack of experience in nature? I played outside pretty much every single day of the summer when I was little but my time was spent riding bicycles, playing baseball, and running around the neighborhood with friends. While I was definitely an outside kid I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a nature kid.

I've been reading a book the past few days titled Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. In the book Richard Louv argues that exposure to nature is essential to our children's physical and emotional development. Not surprisingly, though, he finds that few kids these days spend much time at all outdoors - none-the-less in nature. Here are some of my favorite passages...

*  Today kids are aware of the global threats to the environment - but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. That's exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child.


*  A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest - but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move.


*  How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes - our daily lives.


*  [There is a] severance of the public and private mind from our food's origins...Few of us miss the more brutal aspects of raising food. For most young people, memory supplies no experience for comparison...In less than a half century, the culture has moved from a time when small family farms dominated the countryside to a transitional time when many suburban families' vegetable gardens provided little more than recreation, to the current age of shrink-wrapped, lab-produced food.


*  We can no longer assume a cultural core belief in the perfection of nature. To previous generations of children, few creations were as perfect or as beautiful as a tree. Now, researchers flood trees with genetic material taken from viruses and bacteria to make them grow faster, to create better wood products, or to enable trees to clean polluted soil...And the University of California promoted "birth control for trees," a genetically engineered method of creating a "eunuch-tree that spends more of it's energy making wood and not love." For baby boomers, such news is fascinating, strange, disturbing, To children growing up [today] such news is simply more hair on the dog - an assumed complexity.


*  The newly dominant type of [developed neighborhood]...offers fewer places for natural play than earlier suburbs...A few years after moving to Scripps Ranch, John Rick started reading articles in the community's  newsletter about the "illegal use" of open space. "Unlike where we had lived before, kids were actually out there running around in the trees, building forts, and playing with their imaginations," he recalls. "They were putting up bike ramps to make jumps. They were damming trickles of water to float boats. In other words, they were doing all the things we used to do as kids. They were creating for themselves all those memories that we cherish so fondly." And now it had to stop. "Somehow," says Rick, "that tree house was now a fire hazard. Or the 'dam' might cause severe flooding."


Authoritative adults from the Scripps Ranch Community Association chased kids away from a little pond near the public library, where children had fished for bluegills...In response to the tightened regulations, families erected basketball hoops. Young people moved their skateboard ramps to the foot of their driveways. But the community association reminded the residents that such activities violated the covenants they had signed when they bought their houses.


Down came the ramps and poles, and indoors went the kids.




 I can't agree more with arguments such as the fact so many parents state they want their kids to have less screen time yet they keep expanding their opportunities (phones, i-pads, Kindles, car video systems, etc) for watching. Louv writes "Quality of life isn't measured only by what we gain, but also by what we trade for it." I'm going to continue to read and think about all this. I'd like to use a future post to relate these ideas to things I've been noticing in my own community as well as considerations for my own parenting.