Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (37 page)

Overly idealistic? Perhaps. But this is worth repeating: Over a century ago, some of the world’s greatest cities faced a choice not unlike what we consider today, a choice between urban health and pathology.
The healthy cities movement of that time resulted in the first wave of great urban parks, including Central Park. Our generation has a similar opportunity to make history.

Joni Mitchell had it right: “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot.” But perhaps, in the near future, we could add a line of hopeful epilogue to that song:
Then they tore down the parking lot / And raised up a paradise
.

When going back makes sense, you are going ahead
.

—W
ENDELL
B
ERRY

O
N A SUMMER MORNING
, a nine-year-old girl wakes to the sound of the Smiths’ rooster. She watches dust fall in the rays of sunshine in her room
.

She remembers that yesterday was the last day of school. She grins, throws on her jeans and T-shirt and canvas shoes, grabs her paperback copy of her favorite Maurice Sendak book, and stuffs it in her day pack. Her parents are still asleep. She tiptoes down the hallway, stops at her brother’s doorway long enough to tie the laces of his shoes together, grabs a package of graham crackers from the kitchen, and rushes out into the sun
.

She runs along the path of the common green, past her family’s garden and onward. She hears the periodic hum of the central cogeneration plant, and the whirring of the new windmills at the edge of the village. As she passes the Smiths’ house, with its roof of low grass and flowers, the rooster races across the path. She chases it a few feet, flapping her elbows, then trots down a winding side path to the creek—a waterway that runs through the village. She knows that this is recycled rainwater cleaned by the natural filtration of vegetation, but she does not think about this: she considers the rings in the water. She sits down on the bank of the stream and waits. By now, her parents are probably up; her mother is usually at her computer before her father, because her father likes to climb up on the green roof and stand in the grass and sip his coffee, and watch the sun move higher on the horizon
.

The girl sees the first head pop up. Then another. She sits perfectly still. The frogs’ eyes appear above the surface of the water and watch her. She takes off her shoes and drops her feet in the water, and the frogs flee again. She moves her toes in the mud. She wonders if her brother has discovered his shoes, and she smiles
. . . .

If we hope to improve the quality of life for our children, and for generations to come, we need a larger vision. We can make changes now in our family lives, in classrooms, and in the organizations that serve children, but in the long run, such actions will not seal the bond between nature and future generations. As we have seen, a new kind of city—a zoopolis—is possible. Yet no matter how designers shape it, any city has limits to human carrying capacity—especially if it includes nature. Children in the future will still grow up in residential areas outside of cities. The current models for that growth are unsatisfactory; they include suburban sprawl at the edges of cities and buckshot development in rural areas. Both separate children from nature.

When seen through the prism of green urbanism, however, the future of the small town and rural life is exciting. Children who grow up in a new Green Town will have the opportunity to experience nature as the supporting fabric of their everyday lives. The technology and design principles for the widespread creation of Green Towns already exist, and an incipient back-to-the-land movement is emerging. You and I may not live to see the day when Green Cities and Green Towns are the norm, but the imagining and creation of them can be the great work of our children and their children. We can offer them a head start.

The full pursuit of such promise will require a forgiving definition of the wild. The poet Gary Snyder has said, “A wilderness is always a specific place, basically there for the local critters that live in it. In some cases a few humans will be living in it too. Such places are scarce and must be rigorously defended. Wild is the process that surrounds us all,
self-organizing Nature . . .” Self-organizing nature must surely be preserved whenever possible, but, for the purposes of reintroducing future generations to nature, we cannot stop there. In truth, the nature that shaped so many of us was seldom self-organizing—at least not in the pristine way that Snyder suggests.

Many Americans still do live in rural areas, and those who grew up in what remains of the farm country share a memory—often idealized—of that life. Before she died, my friend Elaine Brooks, who took such good care of the last natural open space in La Jolla, described the landscape of small-town western Michigan, where she had spent her childhood summers on her grandparents’ farm: “There was always a sense of being places where no one had quite been before, wandering the farm. Many years later, revisiting the farm long after it had been sold, I walked back into some woods that had not been a part of my grandparents’ farm, to discover the remains of an old house that I had never seen before.” The skeletal house was only a few hundred feet from the sandy valley where she and her cousin had played. “But we had never ventured beyond my grandfather’s wire fence. The land seemed wild to us, but it had been tamed a hundred years before.” During her occasional trips back to western Michigan to visit relatives, Elaine found that she could easily re-create this illusion of wildness. As time passed between visits, she found that she had to drive farther to get away from houses; there were more homes salted back in the woods, now that the convenience of snowblowers and dune buggies and snowmobiles made it easier to live away from town. But still, even in the small towns, it was easy to go for a walk and find patches of woods and streams that blotted out the evidence of human habitation.

Open land is still accessible and natural play is still possible in many places in America. We have seen that accessibility to nature isn’t everything. Even in areas of the country where residential neighborhoods are still nestled in woods and fields, parents express puzzlement because children tend to prefer to connect with electrical outlets. But location
does count. If future generations are to rediscover nature, where will they find it? In the past, children found nature and exploratory freedom even in the densest inner-city neighborhoods—in vacant lots, weedy alleys and waterfronts, even rooftops. However, urban infill (building on remaining open space in existing neighborhoods, as a trade-off for protecting outlying green belts) is reducing even that space.

When cities get denser through infill, parks are often an afterthought, and open space is diminished. Such development is spreading quickly; it now dominates even the outer rings of most growing American cities and seeps into the most rural areas, creating an urban milieu that “screams human presence,” as Elaine Brooks once put it. In such places, most original vegetation was eradicated long ago, so that occasional landscaping is the only living relief. Landscaping in such settings is merely an architectural element in urban design. This type of development is especially dominant in South Florida and Southern California—but almost everywhere in America, new residential developments are cut from this architectural and legal pattern.

We don’t have to continue down this road. There is another possibility with long-term potential: the resettling of vast areas of rural America emptied in recent decades by the crash of agriculture and its supportive industries. We might call this “pro-nature” cluster development. In 1993 (the year that the Census Bureau stopped issuing farm-resident reports), author and
New York Times
Denver bureau chief Dirk Johnson pointed out that, a century earlier, Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed based on a measurement by the Census Bureau that defined an area as “settled” when it had more than six people per square mile. As of 1993, though, in about two hundred counties on the Great Plains, population density had fallen below that frontier threshold. “While hardly anyone was paying attention, something quite extraordinary happened to a huge swath of the United States: it emptied out,” Johnson wrote. “In five states of the Great Plains, there are more counties with fewer than six persons per square
mile than there were in 1920. In Kansas, such counties cover more territory than they did in 1890. . . . Even the number of counties with fewer than two persons per square mile is on the rise.”

Since then, the emptying of parts of rural America has only increased. The causes are complex—not the least of them the rise of corporate mega-farms and the bankruptcies among small farmers. But great stretches of land are now underpopulated. A few years ago, the governor of Iowa invited immigrants from other countries to resettle his state. Geographers at Rutgers University have called for the federal government to remove the stragglers and turn parts of the Great Plains into a wildlife park to be called Buffalo Commons. That specific event is unlikely, and the geographers have since amended their controversial proposal. But something akin to it could happen. The emptying of the plains, the notion of zoopolis, the new knowledge of our kinship with other animals—these trends suggest that the idea of frontier for future generations is not settled, and that future generations in this part of the world may well create a sensible way to distribute population. Permanent disconnection of the young and nature is not inevitable.

Indeed, while short-term relief is important at, for example, the family and school level, the long-term reconnection of future generations with nature will require a radical change in the way cities are designed, where population is distributed, and how those populations interact with land and water. Imagine, in a fourth frontier, a back-to-the-land movement unlike any in our history.

Such thinking should seem more familiar than grandiose, rooted as it is in Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision, Thoreau’s self-reliance, and the homesteading of the West. Its precedents include the middle-class “back-to-the-land” movement in nineteenth-century England. In the 1960s, a back-to-the-land movement in a number of Western countries attempted an ad hoc resuscitation of that vision as an act of rebellion against what was perceived as a materialist culture; that exodus may have attracted over one million people in the United States. While
remnants of that original migration remain, the 1960s agrarian movement neither succeeded nor failed, but, instead, evolved: into environmentalism, into a focus on sustainable communities, and into the simplicity movement.

In the early 1980s, another trend seemed to be on the verge of changing the face of rural America. The 1980 Census showed that the nation’s population was less concentrated; in addition to the sprawl of the suburbs, more Americans were moving to rural areas than to high-density older cities. With the advent of the personal computer, both farmers and upscale information workers could suddenly imagine themselves living in a new Eden, where the best of the rural and urban worlds could be linked by modem. Some Americans realized that dream, but two realities intruded: one was that when people moved to small towns, they generally brought their urban expectations and problems, including suburban sprawl, with them; second, the city-to-small-town movement proved to be a demographic blip. A few small towns were transformed, but most continued to lose population—particularly in the Great Plains. Certainly no back-to-the-land rush followed.

Yet, all the elements of desire remain, and a new literature of sustainable community design has since emerged. A new back-to-the-land movement may be possible, considering the densification of suburbia and its failure to deliver on its original promise of increased natural surroundings; new research showing the necessity of nature to health; and a new realization that dramatic, visionary change will be necessary if tomorrow’s children are to experience a direct connection to nature. The green urbanism of Western Europe and parts of the United States helps to point the way, by showing that the improbable is possible. We are no longer talking about retreating to rural communes, but, rather, about building technologically and ethically sophisticated human-scale population centers that, by their very design, reconnect both children and adults to nature.

The girl is glad that her family moved here from Los Angeles. Her memories of that city and its congestion and the smell of the air are beginning to fade. She did not even mind the long winter, when the snow built up in drifts and the wind blew the snow dry, so that even after the snow stopped falling from the clouds, the blizzard continued. She loved watching that from the window of her bedroom, surrounded by her books and drawing paper
.

One night, her father woke her in the middle of the night and led her outside under the stars, and said, “Look.” She saw lightning on the horizon, and the great river of light above. “Lightning and the Milky Way,” said her father. His hands were on her shoulders. “Amazing.” She liked the way he said that word, softly, without saying anything else until she was tucked back in bed
.

Now she is up moving again, to the edge of the village
. . . .

P
ROFESSOR
D
AVID
O
RR
describes what he believes is a paradigm shift in “design intelligence” comparable to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He calls for a “higher order of heroism,” one that encompasses charity, wildness, and the rights of children. As he defines it, a sane civilization “would have more parks and fewer shopping malls; more small farms and fewer agribusinesses; more prosperous small towns and smaller cities; more solar collectors and fewer strip mines; more bicycle trails and fewer freeways; more trains and fewer cars; more celebration and less hurry . . .” Utopia? No, says Orr. “We have tried utopia and can no longer afford it.” He calls for a movement of “hundreds of thousands of young people equipped with the vision, moral stamina, and intellectual depth necessary to rebuild neighborhoods, towns, and communities around the planet. The kind of education presently available will not help them much. They will need to be students of their places and competent to become, in Wes Jackson’s words, ‘native to their places.’”