Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (39 page)

Of course, creating new green towns, ones that directly reconnect future generations to nature, isn’t simply a town design challenge. Part of
the dilemma is that such settlements, to be truly green, should be connected to employment centers by transportation mechanisms beyond just the automobile—eventually even beyond autos with hybrid engines. No single community design will suffice; numerous, simultaneous approaches will be required, including green-urban infill, green towns, increased public transit options, and greater use of telecommuting and teleconferencing.

Ebenezer Howard would recognize such a settlement as a new take on the town-country, the Garden City of the future. Plans or trial projects for such towns already exist—more rural versions of Michael Corbett’s Village Homes project in Davis, California. For example, CIVITAS, a Vancouver-based, internationally recognized, multi-disciplinary land planning company, was engaged to create a visionary concept for the long-term sustainability of 325 acres of existing agricultural land known as the Gilmore Farms within an agricultural land reserve in Richmond, British Columbia. According to CIVITAS, the plan calls for two compact villages placed on existing farmland, organized around a series of public spaces including a market street. Farmland around the villages would use intensive farming techniques and grow specialty crops. “The concept also provides an opportunity to develop nature preserve areas in the form of ecology parks, wildlife viewing, environmental studies and sanctuaries.”

Another CIVITAS project, Bayside Village, in Tsawwassen, British Columbia, calls for an “ecological village: a small-scaled housing cluster with the ambiance of a cohesive country hamlet” with smaller “and more humane” road widths “than those in standard suburban subdivisions.” Native plant species and landscaping will provide new habitat for songbirds within the residential areas. The ecological village single-family residential neighborhood will be “set within vast areas of enhanced wildlife and bird habitat including cultivated agricultural fields, pastures, a nature park, a waterfowl marsh and a songbird buffer area adjacent to the foreshore.”

A skeptic might contend that such new towns sound better on paper than they would prove to be in reality, and that they are, in fact, euphemistic Trojan-horse developments that could open the countryside to further sprawl. Considering the spotty history of planned communities and new town developments, the skeptic would have a point. But if the approach is not piecemeal, if green urbanism principles are applied with the force of law and green-town development boundaries set, the result could be positive, indeed. At the very least, such concept towns remind us that there is more than one way to build a town.

Let me return to why such futuristic thinking is important to the relationship between children and nature. In our family lives, and our schools, and in all the environments in which we now live, we can do much—right now—to encourage the nature-child reunion. But in the long run, unless we change cultural patterns and the built environment, the nature gap will continue to widen. Moreover, the goal of this prescription must be not only to maintain the current level of health, but to dramatically improve it—to create a far better life for those who follow. We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the Earth while we expand our culture’s capacity for joy. The writer Peter Matthiessen has said, “There’s an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.” Such sorrow is understandable on one level, but inappropriate given that long horizon of the possible, of the regenerative, of a new frontier.

No future is inevitable. Those children and young people who now hunger to find a cause worth a lifetime commitment could become the architects and designers and political force of the fourth frontier, connecting their own children and future generations to nature—and delight. Am I out on a limb here? Of course. But that, as the saying goes, is where the fruit is.

The girl, whose name is Elaine, passes a row of public bicycles, and ducks under the branches of the pecan trees that ring the village. And suddenly she is in another world; she runs along the path through the knolls carpeted by wild onion, Indian hemp, columbine, and sky-blue aster—she knows the names of all these plants. She looks for tracks on the sandy path, and finds them: jackrabbit and quail. She places her hand over a coyote track, and compares the size of the toe marks to her own fingers
.

She climbs one of the little knolls on hands and knees, holding her breath, and peeks over the edge, pushing aside milkweed. She sits in the grass and watches the sky and wonders if the clouds are moving or if she, on the earth, is turning. She reaches into her day pack and takes out her book. She lies back in the grass, and opens it, and reads
:

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief . . .”

She feels the morning wind on her skin
.

She hears bees
.

A half hour later she opens her eyes and the clouds are gone. She sits up
.

The light is different. On a ridge to the north, she sees one, two, now three antelope. “Pronghorn,” she whispers, relishing the feel of the word. They slowly turn their heads in her direction. To the west, Elaine sees the little electric combines moving out to seed the native grain. And far to the east she sees the movement of dark shapes. “Bison,” she whispers. “Buffalo.” She decides she likes the word buffalo more, and says it again
.

While she has slept, the world has changed
.

A child said What is the grass? fetching

it to me with full hands
;

How could I answer the child? I do not

know what it is any more than he
.

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity
. . .

—G
RETEL
E
HRLICH

W
HEN MY SON
Matthew was four, he asked me, “Are God and Mother Nature married, or just good friends?”

Good question.

During the course of researching this book, I heard many adults describe with eloquence and awe the role of nature in their early spiritual development, and how that connection continued to deepen as they aged. Many were committed to sharing that connection with their children, but faced challenges: how to explain the spirituality of nature—or, rather, our spirituality
in
nature—without tripping on the tangled vines of biblical interpretation, semantics, and politics. These can be real barriers to communicating the simple awe we felt as children as we lay on our backs seeing mountains and faces in clouds. It also inhibits progress toward a nature-child reunion.

There is a path out of this bramble.

Several years ago, a group of religious leaders that included a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and an imam met in my living room to discuss parenting. At that meeting, Rabbi Martin Levin, of Congregation Beth-El, offered a wonderful description of spirituality: to be spiritual is to be constantly amazed. “To quote the words of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great teacher of our age,” he said,
“our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Heschel would encourage his students to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

In the old texts, a child’s spiritual life was assumed. Abraham began his search for God as a child. The Bible tells us that “God’s glory above the heavens is changed by the mouths of babes and infants.” Isaiah fore-saw a future time when “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and a little child shall lead them.” Jewish mysticism describes the fetus as privy to the secrets of the universe—forgotten at the moment of birth. And in the Gospels, Jesus said, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The visionary poets William Blake and William Wordsworth, among others, connected the child’s spirituality to nature. As a child, Blake announced that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting in a tree (and he received a beating for it). He also reported a tree filled with angels who sang from the branches. Words-worth’s poetry describes the transcendent experiences of children in nature. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” he wrote:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream
The earth, and every common sight,
    To me did seem
    Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Of course, there were those who considered such thinking sentimental claptrap. Sigmund Freud, an atheist, considered such mysticism a regression into what he called the “oceanic experience” of the womb. As Edward Hoffman wrote in
Visions of Innocence: Spiritual and Inspirational Experiences of Children
, “Freud regarded childhood as a time in
which our lowest, most animalistic impulses are strongest.” Children were, in Freud’s view, instinct-driven vehicles for incestuous longings for self-gratification. So much for winged angels in the trees.

Carl Jung, Freud’s closest intellectual ally, broke with him in 1913, and offered a view of the human psyche influenced by Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and fairy tales, among other factors. Jung believed that human beings become attuned to visionary experience in the second half of their life. “Late in Jung’s career, though, he seemed to shift his position somewhat,” according to Hoffman. In his autobiography,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, Jung even recalls how, at the age of seven or nine, he would sit alone on a boulder near his country home, asking himself: “Am I the one who is sitting on top of the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” However, other than such recollections about his own childhood, Jung had little to say about childhood spirituality. “In this respect,” according to Hoffman, “he was unfortunately typical of the whole current of mainstream psychology and its therapeutic offshoots.”

Even William James, who, as the founder of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, possessed a keen interest in religious experience, never really turned his attention toward the early years. Not until the 1960s and 1970s did the topic gain much interest, notably in Robert Coles’s book,
The Spiritual Life of Children
. The narrower topic of nature’s influence on childhood spirituality has been given shorter shrift. Ironically, much of the current work on the influence of nature on childhood cognition and attention is rooted in James’s work.

Hoffman is one of the few psychologists to attend this area. A licensed clinical psychologist in the New York area, he specializes in child development. While writing a biography of Abraham Maslow (who created the famous Hierarchy of Needs in the late 1960s), he discovered that the preeminent psychologist shared Hoffman’s view that even small children grappled with questions of a spiritual nature. Maslow died before he could elaborate on his findings. Hoffman pursued them, interviewing
children and several hundred adults who described their spontaneous childhood experiences “of great meaning, beauty, or inspiration . . . apart from institutional religion.” He writes, “Most fundamentally, it now appears undeniable that some of us (perhaps far more than we suspect) have undergone tremendous peak—even mystical—experiences during our early years. In this respect, conventional psychology and its allied disciplines have painted a badly incomplete portrait of childhood and, by extrapolation, of adulthood as well.”

The reports he collected from children indicate (as do Coles’s studies) that a variety of exalted or transcendent experiences are possible during childhood. Among the triggers are heartfelt prayer or more formalized religious moments; the result can be “a visionary episode, a dream experience, or simply an ordinary moment of daily life that suddenly became an entry point to bliss.” Aesthetics can be a gateway, too: witness child composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. Most interesting, however, is Hoffman’s finding that most transcendent childhood experiences happen in nature.

Nature was the seed of Janet Fout’s spirituality, and she has replanted it for her daughter. When Janet looks back on her childhood in nature, she sees it not only as the source of her environmental activism—her work protecting the mountaintops of West Virginia—but also as nourishment for her own spirit. Her favorite place to visit was a dairy farm run by her aunt and uncle. There, her imagination and spirit took flight.

Off she would dash—to the barn, the henhouse, a hillside, meadow, or creek to explore the rich, natural treasure trove that lay before her. Whether she was watching the birth of newborn kittens or mourning the loss of a baby bird found featherless and cold on the ground, nature provided Janet with ample opportunity to feed her curiosity about life—and taught her about the inevitability of death.

“I still am awed by celestial happenings like comets, eclipses, and meteor
showers,” she says. “And as I gaze on these heavenly wonders, I somehow connect to the countless humans or human-like others who did the same eons before my birth. The infinite cosmos and its mysteries help me keep my life in perspective. More than ever, the commonplace of nature fills me with amazement—every bird feather with its one million parts. As a child, I found unfettered joy in nature and still connect with my deepest joy beside a flowing stream or beneath a canopy of stars.” Janet says she senses something in nature beyond adequate description: “God longing for Him/Herself,” she says. Her grown daughter, though she lives in a far more urban environment, senses this presence, too.