Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (14 page)

The changes of the seasons, the play of light on the river, the color and coolness of the woods began to have the profound meaning to her that they would retain throughout her life. When she was a young girl, she wrote a half century later, “there was nothing that gave me greater joy than to get one of my young aunts to agree that she would get up before dawn, that we would walk down through the woods to the river, row ourselves the five miles to the village in Tivoli to get the mail, and row back before the family was at the breakfast table.”

She disappeared into the woods and fields for hours, where she would read her books and write stories filled with awe and rooted in the metaphors of nature. In “Gilded Butterflies,” a particularly fanciful short story Lash recounts in his book, Eleanor unconsciously describes her own future. In her story, she is lying on her back in the long grass one hot summer day, when she is startled by the voices of butterflies. “Curiosity sharpening my ears I began to hear what they were saying.” One butterfly blurts out, “Pooh! I’m not going to sit on a daisy always. I have higher aspirations in life. I am going to know a great deal and to see everything. I won’t stay here to waste my life. I mean to know something before I’ve finished.” For Eleanor, literature, nature, and dreams were forever linked. We can only imagine how this little girl would have
developed without her time in nature, but surely her fragile power needed protection as it grew, and time and space to hear an inner voice.

For Beatrix Potter, the connection between the mystery of nature and imagination is even more direct. Potter, one of the most famous children’s authors, exhibited ruthless collecting abilities. As her biographer Margaret Lane tells it, Beatrix and her brother “were not squeamish, and there was a toughness about some of their experiments which would have surprised their parents.”

The two siblings “smuggled home innumerable beetles, toadstools, dead birds, hedgehogs, frogs, caterpillars, minnows and sloughed snake-skins. If the dead specimen were not past skinning, they skinned it; if it were, they busily boiled it and kept the bones. They even on one occasion, having obtained a dead fox from heaven knows where, skinned and boiled it successfully in secret and articulated the skeleton.” Everything they brought home, they drew or painted, and sewed the pieces of drawing paper together to make their books of nature. The depictions were realistic for the most part, “but here and there on the grubby pages fantasy breaks through. Mufflers appear round the necks of newts, rabbits walk upright, skate on ice, carry umbrellas, walk out in bonnets . . .”

Nature offers a well from which many, famous or not, draw a creative sense of pattern and connection. As Moore points out, nature experiences “help children understand the realities of natural systems through primary experience. They demonstrate natural principles such as networks, cycles, and evolutionary processes. They teach that nature is a uniquely regenerative process.” An appreciation of these patterns is essential in fostering creativity, which of course is not the sole domain of the arts, but of science and even politics.

Richard Ybarra, a political operative from California and son-in-law of the late labor leader Cesar Chavez, describes Chavez’s seemingly inexhaustible power of spirit and energy and how his early childhood prepared him for a deep understanding of natural—including human—systems:

He always had a connection to nature that went back to his days growing up on a farm on the Gila River. He always had the river connection. Even his magical life-twists carried him full circle back to the very river region where his life began. His dad raised him to understand the land, soils, water and how things work. His mom raised him to know about herbs and all that nature produced. It is obvious in so many ways that his genius was very much derived from life’s simplest and most basic processes and systems. He could always see with great clarity, no matter the complexities or challenges.

Of course, not everyone with childhood experience in nature is affected in this particular way, and not every child who is touched becomes a Chavez, Roosevelt, Potter, or Clarke—or, thankfully, Joan of Arc. Creativity draws from other immersions as well. When Matthew and I explored the biographies of more recent creators, mentions of nature as inspiration began to fade. Creative people who came of age in the 1970s—rock stars among them—seldom described inspirational childhood experiences in nature. So, it seems, creativity occurs without natural influences, but it may have a different tempo.

Economist Thorstein Veblen once offered an alternative way to define serious research. Its outcome, he said, “can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before.” By this definition, Edith Cobb was a good researcher. She offered a deep box of loose parts, and influenced a generation of childhood researchers.

In 1977, after years of dedicated (if not strictly scientific) research, Cobb published her influential book,
The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood
. Though she had a degree from the New York School of Social Work, Cobb was not a sociologist; her expertise came mainly from her many hours of observing and documenting children at play, and her years of reflection on what she had learned about children’s relationships with nature. She based much of her analysis on a collection of
some three hundred volumes of autobiographical recollections of childhood by creative thinkers from diverse cultures and eras. She concluded that inventiveness and imagination of nearly all of the creative people she studied was rooted in their early experiences in nature.

Drawing also on her observations of children’s behavior, Cobb posited that the child’s “capacity to go out and beyond the self derives from the plasticity of response to environment in childhood.” She wrote, “In the creative perceptions of poet and child we are close to the biology of thought itself—close, in fact, to the ecology of imagination. . . .” Creative thinkers, she believed, return in memory to renew the power and impulse to create at its very source, a source which they describe as the experience of emerging not only into the light of consciousness, but into a living sense of kinship with the outer world. These experiences, Cobb believed, take place primarily in the middle years of childhood. “Memories of awakening to the existence of some potential, aroused by early experiences of self and world, are scattered through the literature of scientific and aesthetic invention. Autobiographies repeatedly refer to the cause of this awakening as an acute sensory response to the natural world.”

Many years after Edith Cobb wrote her pioneering and controversial work, environmental psychologist Louise Chawla—who had been inspired to specialize in this area by
The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood
—closely examined Cobb’s research. Although she found it flawed in technique, she was intrigued by the questions it raised. She concluded Cobb’s theory must be amended to allow for different degrees of experience. It is possible, she writes, that the developing consciousness of all children involves what Cobb described as a dynamic sense of relationship with their place. “Only in some children, however, is this experience so intense that it burns itself into memory to animate adult life.” For example, businesspeople and politicians report less emphasis on nature experiences in early childhood than do artists. This does not mean that early childhood experiences in nature do not shape future
politicians or captains of industry; they may just be less likely to report them. Certainly the biographies of Edison and Benjamin Franklin suggest that the very foundations of modern industry and design grew first in the waters and woods and farmlands of childhood.

Chawla has not rejected Cobb’s theory, but argues instead that the relationship between creativity and environment is more complex than Cobb imagined. For example, transcendent childhood experiences in nature were “never reported when a child did not enjoy freedom within an alluring natural or urban environment.” Transcendence did not require spectacular scenery, “but could be evoked by environments as small as a patch of weeds at the edge of a sleeping porch, or during freedom as brief as an escape [into nature] during a school outing.”

Chawla’s own research further suggests a deep but still vaguely understood link between creativity and early experiences in nature. “The good thing, from what we are finding, is that nature isn’t only important to future geniuses,” she says. So-called regular people also report these transcendent moments in nature. “Many threads come together to form the final creative fabric, and experience in nature is one of them.”

In her more recent work, Chawla explores “ecstatic places.” She uses the word “ecstatic” in its original meaning. The contemporary synonym is delight or rapture, but the word’s ancient Greek roots—
ek statis
—as some sources have it, mean “outstanding” or “standing outside ourselves.” These ecstatic moments of delight or fear, or both, “radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives,” as Chawla eloquently puts it, are most often experienced in nature during formative years.

Author Phyllis Theroux wrote a moving description of an ecstatic moment she had on a sleeping porch, as she watched a clump of weeds lit by morning sun, the cockleburs “like bumblebees quivering on harp wires . . . golden, translucent, amazing sheaves of wheat. The light drove down the shafts of the stalks, making a cool fire of the dew that collected at the roots. My eyes would contemplate the cockleweeds
without searching for the adjectives that even now elude me. I would simply hang off the mattress, staring at the sight, getting my bearings, not knowing why.” Theroux continued:

Could it be, and this is the question of a speculative, unmarveling adult, that every human being is given a few signs like this to tide us over when we are grown? Do we all have a bit or piece of something that we instinctively cast back on when the heart wants to break upon itself and causes us to say, “Oh yes, but there was this,” or “Oh yes, but there was that,” and so we go on?

Reviewing the conditions in which ecstatic memories are made, Chawla was “struck by the fragility of their setting.” Ecstatic memories require space, freedom, discovery, and “an extravagant display for all five senses.” When these requirements are met, even in cities, nature nurtures us. And behind these requirements hover “that difficult-to-define yet effusive quality of loveliness. . . . This combination of conditions cannot be taken for granted.” Ecstatic places offer our children, and us, even more than Cobb suggested. As Chawla explains, ecstatic memories give us “meaningful images; an internalized core of calm; a sense of integration with nature; and for some, a creative disposition. Most of these benefits are general human advantages, whether or not we make our way in the world as creative thinkers.”

Most children today are hard-pressed to develop a sense of wonder, to induce what Berenson called the “spirit of place” while playing video games or trapped inside a house because of the fear of crime. Asked to name their favorite special places, children often describe their room or an attic—somewhere quiet. A common characteristic of special places is quietness, peacefulness, Chawla emphasizes. So finding wonder outside of nature is surely possible. But electronics or the built environment do not offer the array of physical loose parts, or the physical space to wander.

Many years ago, I interviewed Jerry Hirshberg, founding director and president of Nissan Design International, the Japanese auto company’s design center in America. This was one of several such centers established by Japan’s car manufacturers up and down the California coast. When I asked Hirshberg why these centers existed, he explained that the Japanese know their strengths and ours: their specialty was tight, efficient manufacturing; ours was design. The Japanese, said Hirshberg, recognized that American creativity comes largely from our freedom, our space—our physical space and our mental space. He offered no academic studies to support his theory; nonetheless, his statement rang true, and it has stayed with me. Growing up, many of us were blessed with natural space and the imagination that filled it.

America’s genius has been nurtured by nature—by space, both physical and mental. What happens to the nation’s intrinsic creativity, and therefore the health of our economy, when future generations are so restricted that they no longer have room to stretch? One might argue that the Internet has replaced the woods, in terms of inventive space, but no electronic environment stimulates all the senses. So far, Microsoft sells no match for nature’s code.

Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees. What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family’s garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by morning sun, like bumblebees quivering on harp wires? What then?

Creativity is so difficult to define and measure, so subjective by definition. Surely this limits our ability to apply scientific inquiry. Therefore, part of this discussion must take place where control groups never venture, in the realms of the poet, artist, or philosopher. Nature may inspire different kinds of creativity and different art than the built
environment. Contemporary urban poets have moved away from Wordsworth and the Romantics, whose metaphors were shaped by sublime natural forces, whose rhythms were so often set by the cycles of nature. The newer language of art emanates from the human-built environment, from the street, from computers. This urban or electronic expression of creativity speaks to and for modern ears and eyes, and it has its own rhythms and metaphors.

Parents who wish to raise their children in a climate conducive to modern—or postmodern—creativity do well to expose them to that world, but not at the exclusion of the natural world.