T
HIS BOOK, LIKE MOST
, was a collective effort. My wife, Kathy Frederick Louv, and sons, Jason and Matthew, provided logistical, emotional, and intellectual support; they lived the research, too.

Publisher Elisabeth Scharlatt and literary agent James Levine made the book possible. Elisabeth’s gentle, clear-eyed perspective offered depth for roots and careful pruning of overgrowth. She is a joy to work with. Algonquin’s Amy Gash also offered wise and timely support, as did Craig Popelars, Ina Stern, Brunson Hoole, Michael Taeckens, Aimee Bollenbach, Katherine Ward, and the rest of the Algonquin team. Heavy editorial lifting was shared by my talented friend and virtual brother, Dean Stahl. Invaluable editorial support came from John Shore, Lisa Polikov, and Cheryl Nicchitta, and my editors at the
San Diego Union-Tribune
, including Bill Osborne, Bernie Jones, Lora Cicalo, Jane Clifford, Karin Winner, and Peter Kaye. For providing timely reality checks: John Johns, David Boe, Larry Hinman, Karen Kerchelich, Rosemary Erickson, R. Larry Schmitt, Melissa Baldwin, Jackie Green, Jon Funabiki, Bill Stothers, Michael Stepner, Susan Bales, Michael Goldstein, Susan White, Bob Laurence, Jeannette De Wyze, Gary Shiebler, Anne Pearse Hocker, Peter Sebring, Janet Fout, Neal Peirce, LaVonne Misner, Melissa Moriarty, and, especially by example, Michael Louv.

While an author traditionally does not thank people quoted in his or her book, accuracy and respect require special thanks to two groups: the teachers, especially John Rick, Brady Kelso, Tina Kafka, David Ward, and Candy Vanderhoff, who encouraged their students to share their thoughts; the students themselves (some of their names have been changed herein); and the hardy band of researchers who have plowed this field in recent years. I am particularly grateful to Louise Chawla, who not
only shared her own findings but pointed me to the work of others. My apologies to those researchers not quoted here, but whose work is invaluable nonetheless.

For the updated and expanded edition of this book, I am indebted to Cheryl Charles and Alicia Senauer for research updates. And I am grateful to Martin LeBlanc, Amy Pertschuk, Marti Erickson, John Parr, Stephen Kellert, Yusuf Burgess, Chris Krueger, Mike Pertschuk, Kathy Baughman McLeod, Nancy Herron, Bob Peart, and, again, Cheryl Charles, for establishing the Children & Nature Network, which carries on the work of this book.

Finally, I wish to thank Elaine Brooks, who did not live to read the book she helped inspire, but who speaks from these pages.

A word about this edition

This edition of
Last Child in the Woods
contains reporting on, and citations for, research that has emerged since the book was first published in 2005. It also reflects the growing international concern about nature deficit in children and the corresponding social movement that has emerged in the United States, Canada, and other countries. Included is the Field Guide, created especially for this edition, with a progress report by the author, Discussion Questions, an expanded Suggested Reading section, and 100 Practical Actions that can help foster changes in our schools, families, and communities that are essential to healthy childhood development.

L
AST
C
HILD IN THE
W
OODS

I
NTRODUCTION

O
NE EVENING WHEN
my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, “Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?”

I asked what he meant.

“Well, you’re always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp.”

At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something I’d be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood—and, I fear, too readily discount my children’s experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important.

He was right. Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact.

Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. 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.

As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered those woods even in my dreams. 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.

This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child—and adult—development.

While I pay particular attention to children, my focus is also on those people born during the past two to three decades. The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature. Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions. As likely as not today, “summer camp” is a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp. For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear—to ignore. A recent television ad depicts a four-wheel-drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly beautiful mountain stream—while in the backseat two children watch a movie on a flip-down video screen, oblivious to the landscape and water beyond the windows.

A century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier had ended. His thesis has been discussed and debated ever since. Today, a similar and more important line is being crossed.

Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom—while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Well-meaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields. In the patent-or-perish
environment of higher education, we see the death of natural history as the more hands-on disciplines, such as zoology, give way to more theoretical and remunerative microbiology and genetic engineering. Rapidly advancing technologies are blurring the lines between humans, other animals, and machines. The postmodern notion that reality is only a construct—that we are what we program—suggests limitless human possibilities; but as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience.

Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature—in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.

Reducing that deficit—healing the broken bond between our young and nature—is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. 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. The following pages explore an alternative path to the future, including some of the most innovative environment-based school programs; a reimagining and redesign of the urban environment—what one theorist calls the coming “zoopolis”; ways of addressing the challenges besetting environmental groups; and ways that faith-based organizations can help reclaim nature as part of the spiritual development of children. Parents, children, grandparents, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, environmentalists, and researchers from across the nation speak in these pages. They recognize the transformation that is occurring.
Some of them paint another future, in which children and nature are reunited—and the natural world is more deeply valued and protected.

During the research for this book, I was encouraged to find that many people now of college age—those who belong to the first generation to grow up in a largely de-natured environment—have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand what they have missed. This yearning is a source of power. These young people resist the rapid slide from the real to the virtual, from the mountains to the Matrix. They do not intend to be the last children in the woods.

My sons may yet experience what author Bill McKibben has called “the end of nature,” the final sadness of a world where there is no escaping man. But there is another possibility: not the end of nature, but the rebirth of wonder and even joy. Jackson’s obituary for the American frontier was only partly accurate: one frontier did disappear, but a second one followed, in which Americans romanticized, exploited, protected, and destroyed nature. Now that frontier—which existed in the family farm, the woods at the end of the road, the national parks, and in our hearts—is itself disappearing or changing beyond recognition.

But, as before, one relationship with nature can evolve into another. This book is about the end of that earlier time, but it is also about a new frontier—a better way to live with nature.

P
ART
I
T
HE
N
EW
R
ELATIONSHIP
B
ETWEEN
C
HILDREN AND
N
ATURE

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours
,

Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children
,

as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned

from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively

an interaction of man on man
.

—
H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

1. Gifts of Nature

When I see birches bend to left and right . . .
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them
.

—R
OBERT
F
ROST

I
F, WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
, we tramped through forests of Nebraska cottonwoods, or raised pigeons on a rooftop in Queens, or fished for Ozark bluegills, or felt the swell of a wave that traveled a thousand miles before lifting our boat, then we were bound to the natural world and remain so today. Nature still informs our years—lifts us, carries us.

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