Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (36 page)

We are now seeing small but significant examples of innovation and commitment to child-friendly green design. The city of Austin, Texas, purchased a farm, renamed it Pioneer Farms, and turned it into a living history museum. “Kids can go out there, learn about agriculture, pet the animals,” says Scott Polikov, a Texas town planner and attorney. “It’s more akin to a zoo, but at least it’s a farm that kids can visit regularly.” In Kansas City, Missouri, Randy White and Vicki Stoecklin of the White Hutchinson Leisure and Learning Group offer their help to neighborhoods or businesses interested in designing outdoor children’s play spaces—discovery play gardens. “There is a sense of wildness about a discovery play garden,” they write. “Children’s discovery play gardens are very different than landscaped areas designed for adults, many of whom prefer manicured lawns and tidy, neat, orderly, uncluttered
landscapes. Discovery play gardens are much looser in design because children value unmanicured places and the adventure and mystery of hiding places and wild, spacious, uneven areas broken by clusters of plants.”

Educator David Sobel wants to reinvent the vacant lot. He campaigns for new partnerships of educators, environmental groups, landscape architects, and developers to protect natural areas, or playscapes, for children. As he points out, developers often leave aside land—slices of property not large enough to be playing fields, not conveniently enough located to be pocket parks, but just fine as islands of wildness. Sobel’s vision is to claim these stray patches as playscapes and incorporate such natural features as ponds with frogs and turtles, berry vines to pick, hills to sled, bushes and hillsides for hiding and digging. Unrealistic? A growing number of planners and educators are creating wonderful playgrounds, such as one in Central Park in Manhattan, where kids can climb rocks to the top of a granite outcrop with a spiral slide carved into its side (and mud at the bottom). At a Sunnyvale, California, play area next to wetlands, kids are encouraged to dig for fish fossils.

The concept of so-called adventure playgrounds originated in Europe after World War II when a playground designer studied children playing in “normal” asphalt and cement playgrounds—and found they preferred playing in the dirt and lumber from the post-war rubble. The concept is well established in Europe, and a few adventure playgrounds have been built in this country, including ones in Berkeley, Huntington Beach, and Irvine, California. The Huntington Beach Adventure Playground is a previously empty lot where kids created their own play environment in the past. Today, on the lot, children seven and up can still play in the mud and build forts. The playground includes a small pond with rafts. A rope bridge leads over the pond to the “zip line,” a tire swing that runs down a cable. There is also a water slide, which is simply a slot in a hill covered with plastic that lands kids in muddy water at the bottom. The Irvine Adventure Playground also offers organized
outdoor and nature activities such as campfire building and cooking outdoors, astronomy, and gardening. At Irvine’s adventure playground, new kids must complete a safety course before they can take up hammer and nails and build a fort; an adult must accompany kids under age six. These playgrounds may not offer much solitude, but they do emphasize direct experience with natural elements.

Such efforts will gain credibility as the new research in the restorative quality of nature becomes better known, especially the compelling studies that show the link between outdoor play in green settings and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

During the next decade or two, a crush of city and county master plans will be newly drawn or updated, determining the future of our open space. All over the country, creators of these plans and the public that advises them will have an opportunity to consider whether the veins of nature and wildness will be as important as the arteries of transportation to the future of our neighborhoods. Rather than accept a parcel-by-parcel, park-by-park approach, we need to call for broad, regional strategies—and for new ways to form them.

William B. Honachefsky, one of the pioneering scientists who first championed the link between environmental sustainability and local land-use planning, argues that, on the surface, municipal land-use practices would appear to minimize environmental damage, through building regulations and site-specific environmental impact statements and local ordinances that control storm-water runoff, soil erosion, vegetation removal, and steep-slope construction. “While these are certainly well-intentioned additions, there is a dark side to their application,” according to Honachefsky. “Collectively, they perpetuate a system of segmented reviews, analyses, and mitigation that is the antithesis of the way natural systems actually function.”

One answer to this fragmented, piecemeal approach is what Will Rogers, president of the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a private conservation group headquartered in San Francisco, calls “greenprinting”—an approach to urban ecology that is catching on around the country. Greenprinting uses traditional real-estate techniques and entrepreneurial conservation methods to identify and protect open space, creating a blueprint for the public conservation process. When TPL works with a city or region, “We ask [people what] they want their community to look like in fifty years,” says Rogers. He calls such proactive planning “taking conservation out of the emergency room.” Instead of reacting to sprawl, planners get ahead of the wave.

Although preserving vistas and watersheds and protecting wildlife habitat in an urban environment are worthy goals, human health provides another reason for preservation, one that doesn’t get enough attention. For example, preserving open space could be essential to solving the crisis of childhood obesity. A 2001 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a connection “between the fact that [typical sprawl] makes no room for sidewalks or bike paths and the fact that we are an overweight, heart disease-ridden society.” The authors assert that children are particularly at risk, citing a South Carolina study showing that students are four times more likely to walk to schools built before 1983 than to those built later.

One way to address that challenge is to accelerate the protection of disappearing open space through a national greenprinting movement. Such efforts are taking hold in Seattle; in Chattanooga, Tennessee; in Atlanta; in Stamford, Connecticut; and along the East River in Brooklyn. Jacksonville, Florida, the city that “used to smell like pulpwood and Puppy Chow,” according to the
Orlando Sentinel Tribune
, “has become the poster community for ‘greenprinting’ in Florida.” In these cities, TPL leads a four-step greenprinting process that includes “visioning” by government and private organizations, extensive public conversation,
an investigation into how to pay for land, and finally the identification of the targeted land. As a result, Jacksonville voters approved a half-cent sales tax to set aside open space. Some cities, counties, and private conservation groups prefer to buy development rights from landowners, especially farmers—who are then “paid” to farm rather than sell to developers.

Environmental designers and biologists such as Ben Breedlove argue for a far larger urban eco-management system—the kind of computer-driven, digital system that’s been in use for about eighteen years by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’ Habitat Evaluation Process (HEP). This system assesses conditions of wild habitat, yet can be applied to already developed areas (say, neighborhoods in need of suburban redevelopment) and project optimum configuration of that area.

“That’s going to be increasingly important, because we’re not going to be able to buy large land tracts in the future,” Breedlove says. “You can aggregate groups of animals and their preferences in the landscape. . . . For large groups of species there is not a particular competition between humans and animals for terrain. Where there is, you can deal with landscaping, you can deal with lot sizes and basically accommodate many of those species, too.”

The problem with such visionary plans is that they are often either used to push for changes that the authors did not intend or they end up gathering dust on the shelves of planners, professors, and journalists. Critics typically say such visions never stick because no one bothers to come up with a long-term plan, with teeth, that details how to get there from here.

What we really need, in addition to the long view, is a simple, central organizing principle. The best planning guide may be hidden in the folds of one of those prescient urban plans from the past. In 1907, John Nolen, a father of American urban planning, offered four guiding principles. Future development should:

1. Conform to topography

2. Use places for what they are naturally most fit

3. Conserve, develop, and utilize all natural resources, aesthetic as well as commercial

4. Aim to secure beauty by organic arrangements rather than by mere embellishment or adornment.

Today that set of principles might be boiled down to a single focus:
respect the natural integrity of place
. We may not be able to agree on the definition of “quality of life,” but we all know a natural horizon when we see it. Because of what we now know about the relationship between children and nature, we can appreciate the added importance of that integrity.

I can imagine San Diego as a potential prototype. My city already markets itself as a nature designation for tourists. Why stop with the famous zoo and the beaches? Why not market all of San Diego as the nation’s first zoopolis?

“That could be an exciting campaign,” Pat Flanagan told me. Until recently, Flanagan was director of Informal Education at the San Diego Natural History Museum. “Where we could really design for urban wildlife would be to increase the number of pollinating birds and insects—including butterflies,” she said. “By planting so many non-native plants and scraping the hills, we’re depleting the native nectar plants; we’re interrupting the flow of hummingbirds coming north from Mexico in the spring.” She suggested that the natural history museum replicate the “forgotten pollinators campaign” conducted by Tucson’s Arizona–Sonora Desert Museum, which works to repair pollination corridors. Imagine the San Diego museum and zoo selling packets of indigenous seeds of pollinating plants. Every garden in San Diego “could contain a palette of plants that would not only be beautiful to look at but would provide nectar, and roosting and nesting sites for animals—as well as protective cover.”

Local school districts currently offer studies on rain forests and global warming—but fail to focus on their home region’s own rich array of indigenous species. In the new zoopolis, our schools would use surrounding natural environments as classrooms. In a city with so much sunlight, with such fair weather, natural playgrounds should be the rule.

In the surrounding city, the practitioners of green urban design could flourish. Landscape architect Steve Estrada, president of the San Diego chapter of Partners for Livable Places, suggests that one way to protect endangered species is to create
new
territory within the urban space: “Some of our endangered birds love willow trees. Why not plant great swaths of indigenous willows in the city—instead of palms—as new nesting areas?” New neighborhoods should contain continuous patches of local vegetation, like the English hedgerows that have for hundreds of years remained abundant with wildlife. “These days, we’re focused on smart growth for people,” he says. “Why not smart growth for animals?” He also imagines the presence of native plants and animals where people can’t miss them—in the malls. Mike Stepner, former city architect and dean of the New School of Architecture, believes that animal- and plant-related design questions should be incorporated into architecture and planning curricula.

Organizing a new urban/suburban approach to nature, it seems to me, requires an early focus on a symbolic, tangible, and reachable goal.

San Diego, for example, is blessed with a unique topology, laced with canyons that are home to an extraordinary array of plant and animal life. Steadily, almost imperceptibly, these canyons have been chipped away to accommodate sewer-access roads, expensive homes, bridges, roads, highways, hot tubs. As a columnist for the
San Diego Union-Tribune
, I once suggested that what my city needs is a San Diego Urban Canyonlands Park. The political protection of these canyons depends on our ability to see each as part of a single, named, public resource. Response
was enthusiastic, and progress is being made. Beyond stopping the encroachments, the San Diego Park and Recreation Department’s deputy director for open space hopes that San Diego will someday “find a way to connect the canyons, not only by the trails in the canyons, but by designated bikeways and walkways between them—a whole system.”

To achieve this, however, the public must see the currently isolated canyons (or, in other cities, other disconnected natural areas) as something large and singular. For that to happen, the biological, educational, psychological, and spiritual value of open space must be clear. Its economic value must be clear, too. Recently, American Forests, the nation’s oldest nonprofit citizens’ conservation organization, estimated that San Diego’s urban forest removes 4.3 million pounds of pollutants from the air each year, “a benefit worth $10.8 million annually.” The canyons and other natural urban land also serve to control and carry storm water runoff. By preserving “green infrastructure,” as American Forests calls it, we avoid massive public investments in man-made infrastructure.

The most important value is generational. Before her death, community college biology professor Elaine Brooks championed the canyons not only for their unique ecologies and their beauty but also for their psychological and spiritual value to future generations—whose connection to nature is now threatened. “There is a canyon within a reasonable distance of nearly every school in the city,” she pointed out. What an exciting prospect, she said—a network of natural libraries for teaching children about the region’s rare and fragile ecosystems—and about themselves. It is not too late to tie these ribbons of chaparral and sage, to offer this gift to the future. Nor is it too late for other cities across North America, and the world, to become green zoopolises in their own right, and in their own ways.