Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (10 page)

As electronic technology surrounds us, we long for nature—even if the nature is synthetic. Several years ago, I met Tom Wrubel, founder of the Nature Company, the pioneering mall outlet for all things faux flora and fauna. In the beginning, the store, which became a nationwide chain, was aimed primarily at children. In 1973, Wrubel and his wife, Priscilla, noted a common thread in nature-oriented retailing: the emphasis was on
getting
to nature. “But once you got to the mountains or wherever, what do you do, except shoot or catch things,” he said. “So we emphasized books and gadgets to use in nature.”

The Wrubels caught and accelerated a wave—what the Nature Company’s president, Roger Bergen, called “the shift from activity-orientation in the 1960s and ’70s, to knowledge-orientation in the ’80s.” The Nature Company marketed nature as mood, at first to children primarily. “We go for strong vertical stone elements, giant archways. Gives you the feeling that you’re entering Yosemite Canyon. At the entrances, we place stone creeks with running water—but these creeks are
modernistic, an architect’s dream of creekness,” Tom Wrubel explained. His version of nature was both antiseptic and whimsical. Visitors walked through the maze of products: dandelion blossoms preserved within crystalline domes; designer bird-feeders; inflatable snakes and dinosaurs; bags of Nature Company natural cedar tips from the mountains of New Mexico; “pine cones in brass cast from Actual Cones,” according to the display sign. In the air: the sounds of wind and water, buzzing shrimp, snapping killer whales—courtesy of “The Nature Company Presents: Nature,” available on audiotape and compact disk. “Mood tapes” were also available, including “Tranquility,” a forty-seven-minute, musically scored video the catalog described as a “deeply calming, beautiful study in the shapes and colors of clouds, waves, unfolding blossoms and light.”

Wrubel sincerely believed that his stores stimulated concern for the environment. Perhaps he was right.

Such design emphasis now permeates malls across the country. For example, Minnesota’s Mall of America now has its own UnderWater World. John Beardsley, a curator who teaches at the Harvard Design School, describes this simulated natural attraction in
Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape
: “You’re in a gloomy boreal forest in the fall, descending a ramp past bubbling brooks and glass-fronted tanks stocked with freshwater fish native to the northern woodlands. At the bottom of the ramp, you step onto a moving walkway and are transported through a 300-foot-long transparent tunnel carved into a 1.2-million-gallon aquarium. All around you are the creatures of a succession of ecosystems: the Minnesota lakes, the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, and a coral reef.”

There, according to the mall’s promotional line, you’ll “meet sharks, rays, and other exotic creatures face to face.” This “piece of concocted nature,” as Beardsley terms it, “is emblematic of a larger phenomenon.” Beardsley calls it the growing “commodification of nature: the increasingly pervasive commercial trend that views and uses nature as a sales
gimmick or marketing strategy, often through the production of replicas or simulations.” This can be presented on a grand scale; more often, the commodification of nature occurs in smaller, subtler ways. As Beardsley points out, this phenomenon is new only in scale and to the degree that it permeates everyday life. “For at least five centuries—since the 15th-century Franciscan monk Fra Bernardino Caimi reproduced the shrines of the Holy Land at Sacro Monte in Varallo, Italy, for the benefit of pilgrims unable to travel to Jerusalem—replicas of sacred places, especially caves and holy mountains, have attracted the devout,” he writes. The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco included a small railroad, according to Beardsley, that “featured fabricated elephants, a replica of Yellowstone National Park complete with working geysers, and a mock-up Hopi village.” But now, “almost everywhere we look, whether we see it or not, commodity culture is reconstructing nature. Synthetic rocks, video images of forests, Rainforest Cafés.”

Mall and retail design is one way to package nature for commercial purposes, but the next stage goes a step further by using nature itself as an advertising medium. Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo are experimenting with a genetic technology through which they can choose the colors that appear on butterfly wings. The announcement of this in 2002 led writer Matt Richtel to conjure a brave new advertising medium: “There are countless possibilities for moving ads out of the virtual world and into the real one. Sponsorship-wise, it’s time for nature to carry its weight.” Advertisers already stamp their messages into the wet sands of public beaches. Cash-strapped municipalities hope corporations agree to affix their company logo on parks in exchange for dollars to keep the public spaces maintained. “The sheer popularity” of simulating nature or using nature as ad space “demands that we acknowledge, even respect, their cultural importance,” suggests Richtel. Culturally important, yes. But the logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of “true” nature—the certainty that it’s not even worth looking at.

True, our experience of natural landscape “often occurs within an automobile looking out,” as Elaine Brooks said. But now even that visual connection is optional. A friend of mine was shopping for a new luxury car to celebrate her half-century of survival in the material world. She settled on a Mercedes SUV, with a Global Positioning System: just tap in your destination and the vehicle not only provides a map on the dashboard screen, but talks you there. But she knew where to draw the line. “The salesman’s jaw dropped when I said I didn’t want a backseat television monitor for my daughter,” she told me. “He almost refused to let me leave the dealership until he could understand why.” Rear-seat and in-dash “multimedia entertainment products,” as they are called, are quickly becoming the hottest add-on since rearview mirror fuzzy dice. The target market: parents who will pay a premium for a little backseat peace. Sales are brisk; the prices are falling. Some systems include wireless, infrared-connected headsets. The children can watch
Sesame Street
or play Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStation without bothering the driver.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway’s edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children’s early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges—all that was and is still available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie.

Perhaps we’ll someday tell our grandchildren stories about our version of the nineteenth-century Conestoga wagon.

“You did
what?”
they’ll ask.

“Yes,” we’ll say, “it’s true. We actually
looked out the car window
.” In our useful boredom, we used our fingers to draw pictures on fogged glass as
we watched telephone poles tick by. We saw birds on the wires and combines in the fields. We were fascinated with roadkill, and we counted cows and horses and coyotes and shaving-cream signs. We stared with a kind of reverence at the horizon, as thunderheads and dancing rain moved with us. We held our little plastic cars against the glass and pretended that they, too, were racing toward some unknown destination. We considered the past and dreamed of the future, and watched it all go by in the blink of an eye.

Soap

May do

For lads with fuzz

But sir, you ain’t

the kid you wuz

Burma-Shave
.

Is roadside America really so boring today? In some stretches, yes, but all the others are instructive in their beauty, even in their ugliness. Hugh A. Mulligan, in an Associated Press story about rail travel, quoted novelist John Cheever’s recollection of the “peaceable landscape” once seen by suburban rail commuters: “It seemed to me that fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sandlot ballplayers and owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world made by people like me.” Such images still exist, even in this malled America. There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.

In the most nature-deprived corners of our world we can see the rise of what might be called cultural autism. The symptoms? Tunneled senses, and feelings of isolation and containment. Experience, including physical risk, is narrowing to about the size of a cathode ray tube, or
flat panel if you prefer. Atrophy of the senses was occurring long before we came to be bombarded with the latest generation of computers, high-definition TV, and wireless phones. Urban children, and many suburban children, have long been isolated from the natural world because of a lack of neighborhood parks, or lack of opportunity—lack of time and money for parents who might otherwise take them out of the city. But the new technology accelerates the phenomenon. “What I see in America today is an almost religious zeal for the technological approach to every facet of life,” says Daniel Yankelovich, the veteran public opinion analyst. This faith, he says, transcends mere love for new machines. “It’s a value system, a way of thinking, and it can become delusional.”

The late Edward Reed, an associate professor of psychology at Franklin and Marshall College, was one of the most articulate critics of the myth of the information age. In
The Necessity of Experience
he wrote, “There is something wrong with a society that spends so much money, as well as countless hours of human effort—to make the least dregs of processed information available to everyone everywhere and yet does little or nothing to help us explore the world for ourselves.” None of our major institutions or our popular culture pay much notice to what Reed called “primary experience”—that which we can see, feel, taste, hear, or smell for ourselves. According to Reed, we are beginning “to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well.” René Descartes argued that physical reality is so ephemeral that humans can only experience their personal, internal interpretation of sensory input. Descartes’ view “has become a major cultural force in our world,” wrote Reed, one of a number of psychologists and philosophers who pointed to the postmodern acceleration of indirect experience. They proposed an alternative view—ecological psychology (or ecopsychology)—steeped in the ideas of John Dewey, America’s most influential educator. Dewey
warned a century ago that worship of secondary experience in childhood came with the risk of depersonalizing human life.

North Carolina State University professor Robin Moore directs a research and design program that promotes the natural environment in the daily lives of children. He takes Reed and Dewey to heart in his contemporary examination of postmodern childhood play. Primary experience of nature is being replaced, he writes, “by the secondary, vicarious, often distorted, dual sensory (vision and sound only), one-way experience of television and other electronic media.” According to Moore:

Children live through their senses. Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world. Since the natural environment is the principal source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life. . . . This type of self-activated, autonomous interaction is what we call free play. Individual children test themselves by interacting with their environment, activating their potential and reconstructing human culture. The content of the environment is a critical factor in this process. A rich, open environment will continuously present alternative choices for creative engagement. A rigid, bland environment will limit healthy growth and development of the individual or the group.

Little is known about the impact of new technologies on children’s emotional health, but we do know something about the implications for adults. In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently. Enterprising psychologists and psychiatrists now treat Internet Addiction, or IA as they call it.

As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically. The effects are more than skin deep, says Nancy
Dess, senior scientist with the American Psychological Association. “None of the new communication technologies involve human touch; they all tend to place us one step removed from direct experience. Add this to control-oriented changes in the workplace and schools, where people are often forbidden, or at least discouraged, from any kind of physical contact, and we’ve got a problem,” she says. Without touch, infant primates die; adult primates with touch deficits become more aggressive. Primate studies also show that physical touch is essential to the peace-making process. “Perversely, many of us can go through an average day and not have more than a handshake,” she adds. Diminishing touch is only one by-product of the culture of technical control, but Dess believes it contributes to violence in an ever more tightly wired society.

Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is an expert on the co-evolution of the hominid hand and brain. In
The Hand
, he contends that one could not have evolved to its current sophistication without the other. He says, “We’ve been sold a bill of goods—especially parents—about how valuable computer-based experience is. We are creatures identified by what we do with our hands.” Much of our learning comes from doing, from making, from feeling with our hands; and though many would like to believe otherwise, the world is not entirely available from a keyboard. As Wilson sees it, we’re cutting off our hands to spite our brains. Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, he says, “because these students have so little real-world experience; they’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior—but now we know that something’s missing.”