Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (19 page)

Parents may now buy a cheerfully colored, three-ounce bracelet called the global positioning system (GPS) personal locator, and lock it on their child’s wrist. If the water-resistant bracelet is cut or forcefully removed, its continuous signal activates an alarm and notifies the manufacturer’s emergency operators. At least at first glance, resistance to global personal tracking seems not only futile but also selfish—because we love our children and want to protect them. But guaranteed safety, or the illusion of it, can only be bought at a dangerous price. Imagine future generations of children who have been raised to accept the inevitability of being electronically tracked every day, every second, in every room of their lives, in the un-brave new world. Such technology may work in the short run, but it may also create a false sense of security and serve as a poor substitute for the proven antidotes to crime: an active community, more human eyes on the streets, and self-confident children.

Stranger-danger isn’t the only reason families draw the boundaries of children’s lives tighter. Children and adults are even beginning to see nature as our natural enemy—a bogeyman, a stand-in for other, less identifiable reasons for fear.

Has our relationship with the outdoors reversed, or more accurately, regressed? Earlier generations of Americans were not sanguine about their chances of survival in the great outdoors. As development encroaches on their territories, wild animals do sometimes attack humans—and remind us why many of our forebears perceived nature as a threat.

Parks, once viewed as refuges from urban ills, are becoming suspect—at least in the media. A few years ago, a motel handyman confessed to the FBI that he killed three Yosemite sightseers just outside the national park, and later decapitated a naturalist in the park. Other recent stories may have jarred Americans’ confidence in the outdoors. In Washington’s Olympic National Park in 1998, there were eighty-two car break-ins, forty-seven cases of vandalism, sixty-four incidents involving drug and alcohol abuse, one sexual assault, and one aggravated assault with a weapon. The park’s rangers now carry semiautomatic weapons. Also in 1998, in the Great Smoky Mountains, a deranged landscaper who enjoyed singing gospel music shot and killed National Park Service ranger Joe Kolodski. Elsewhere, two park rangers were shot, one fatally, in Oregon’s Oswald West State Park.

Movies tap into this fear. The 1930s Wolfman seems mild compared with the terror exploited in the lengthening string of summer-camp slasher films or
The Blair Witch Project
, a horror movie set in the forest.

Jerry Schad, a naturalist of repute and the author of a series of
Afoot and Afield
guides to the Southern California backcountry, works tirelessly to help young people bond with the natural world. He reports:

Every semester I invite the students in my Survey of Physical Science course at Mesa College on a trip to Mt. Laguna Observatory. The students
are required to write a short report on what they learned or what impressed them the most. As the years go by, fewer and fewer students have any notion of what is out there one hour east of San Diego. Relatively few now have ever seen the Milky Way until (perhaps) the date of the trip. Most are very impressed with what they see and learn, but for a significant number the trip is downright frightening. Several have mentioned the trees in the forest at dusk in the same sentence as
Blair Witch Project
.

Real dangers do exist in nature, but the threat is greatly exaggerated by the media. Reality is different. Take the park scare, for example.

Joe Kolodski was only the third U.S. Park Service ranger killed in the line of duty in the agency’s eighty-two-year history. As the
Seattle Times
reports, the crime rate in the Olympic National Park “wasn’t exactly a crime wave,” considering that the park counted 4.6 million visits. No city that size could claim so little crime.

In fact, the crime rate is falling in most wilderness parks. From 1990 to 1998, reported robberies in the national parks dropped from 184 to 25, murders from 24 to 10, and rapes from 92 to 29. Yosemite is, in fact, one of the safest of the nation’s parks. The killing of the young naturalist in Yosemite, though tragic, was the first murder reported there in a decade.

Worried about lions, tigers, and bears? The number of attacks is minuscule. Or West Nile virus? Mosquitoes, who love a good night-light, can transfer that bug indoors, too. And the brown recluse spider—often more deadly than any rattlesnake—prefers staying indoors. Brown recluse spiders take refuge in clothing that has been placed on the floor; they bite when trapped and pressed between the individual’s skin and clothing. We may fear the outdoors, but kids may generally face more dangers in their own home. The Environmental Protection Agency now warns us that
indoor
air pollution is the nation’s number one environmental threat to health—and it’s from two to ten times worse than outdoor air pollution. A child indoors is more susceptible to
spores of toxic molds growing under that plush carpet; or bacteria or allergens carried by household vermin; or carbon monoxide, radon, and lead dust. The allergen level of newer, sealed buildings can be as much as two hundred times greater than that of older structures.
Pediatric Nursing
journal reports that those indoor ball-pit playgrounds at the fast-food restaurants can spread serious infectious diseases: “Although these commercial food establishments must adhere to the Food and Drug Administration’s model of sanitation and food protection,” none of their guidelines followed the “Centers for Disease Control recommendations for cleaning and disinfecting the areas in which these children play.”

Ironically, a generation of parents fixated on being buff is raising a generation of physical weaklings. Two-thirds of American children can’t pass a basic physical: 40 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls ages six to seventeen can’t manage more than one pull-up; and 40 percent show early signs of heart and circulation problems, according to a recent report by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

So where is the greatest danger? Outdoors, in the woods and fields? Or on the couch in front of the TV? A blanket wrapped too tightly has its own consequences. One is that we may end up teaching our children, in the same breath, that life is too risky but also not real—that there is a medical (or if that fails, a legal) remedy for every mistake. In 2001, the
British Medical Journal
announced that it would no longer allow the word “accident” to appear in its pages, based on the notion that when most bad things happen to good people, such injuries could have been foreseen and avoided, if proper measures had been taken. Such absolutist thinking is not only delusional, but dangerous.

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall
.

—T
HOMAS
H
UXLEY

D
AVID
S
OBEL TELLS
this story: A century ago, a boy ran along a beach with his gun, handmade from a piece of lead pipe. From time to time, he would stop, aim, and shoot at a gull. Today, such activity would be cause for time spent in juvenile hall, but for young John Muir, it was just another way to connect with nature. (Muir, it should be noted, was a bad shot, and apparently never killed a seagull.) Muir went on to become one of the initiators of modern environmentalism.

“Whenever I read Muir’s description of shooting at seagulls to my students, they’re shocked. They can’t believe it,” says Sobel, co-director of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch New England Graduate School. He uses this example to illustrate just how much the interaction between children and nature has changed. Practitioners in the new fields of conservation psychology (focused on how people become environmentalists) and ecopsychology (the study of how ecology interacts with the human psyche) note that, as Americans become increasingly urbanized, their attitudes toward animals change in paradoxical ways.

To urbanized people, the source of food and the reality of nature are becoming more abstract. At the same time, urban folks are more likely to feel protective toward animals—or to fear them. The good news is
that children today are less likely to kill animals for fun; the bad news is that children are so disconnected from nature that they either idealize it or associate it with fear—two sides of the same coin, since we tend to fear or romanticize what we don’t know. Sobel, one of the most important thinkers in the realm of education and nature, views “ecophobia” as one of the sources of the problem.

Ecophobia is fear of ecological deterioration, by Sobel’s definition. In its older, more poetic meaning, the word “ecophobia” is the fear of home. Both definitions are accurate.

“Just as ethnobotanists are descending on tropical forests in search of new plants for medical uses, environmental educators, parents, and teachers are descending on second- and third-graders to teach them about the rainforests,” Sobel writes in his volume,
Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education
. “From Brattleboro, Vermont, to Berkeley, California, schoolchildren . . . watch videos about the plight of indigenous forest people displaced by logging and exploration for oil. They learn that between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than ten thousand acres of rainforest will be cut down, making way for fast-food, ‘hamburgerable’ cattle.”

In theory, these children “will learn that by recycling their
Weekly Readers
and milk cartons, they can help save the planet,” and they’ll grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth, “voting for environmental candidates, and buying energy-efficient cars.” Or maybe not. The opposite may be occurring, says Sobel. “If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation. In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots.” Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder. He offers this analogy of dissociation: In response to physical and sexual abuse, children learn to
cut themselves off from pain. Emotionally, they turn off. “My fear is that our environmentally correct curriculum similarly ends up distancing children from, rather than connecting them with, the natural world. The natural world is being abused and they just don’t want to have to deal with it.”

To some environmentalists and educators, this is contrarian thinking—even blasphemy. To others, the ecophobia thesis rings true. Children learn about the rain forest, but usually not about their own region’s forests, or, as Sobel puts it, “even just the meadow outside the classroom door.” He points out that “It is hard enough for children to understand the life cycles of chipmunks and milkweed, organisms they can study close at hand. This is the foundation upon which an eventual understanding of ocelots and orchids can be built.”

By one measure, a rain-forest curriculum is developmentally appropriate in middle or high school, but not in the primary grades. Some educators won’t go that far, but they do agree with Sobel’s basic premise that environmental education is out of balance. This issue is at the crux of the curriculum wars, particularly in the area of science. One teacher told me, “The science frameworks bandied about by state and local education boards have swung back and forth between the hands-on experiential approach and factoid learning from textbooks.”

If educators are to help heal the broken bond between the young and the natural world, they and the rest of us must confront the unintended educational consequences of an overly abstract science education: ecophobia and the death of natural history studies. Equally important, the wave of test-based education reform that became dominant in the late 1990s leaves little room for hands-on experience in nature. Although some pioneering educators are sailing against the wind, participating in an international effort to stimulate the growth of nature education in and outside classrooms (which will be described in later chapters), many educational institutions and current educational trends are, in fact, part of the problem.

John Rick, who was quoted earlier in these pages about his community’s restrictions on natural play, is a dedicated educator who left engineering to teach eighth-grade math. Rick is dismayed that nature has disappeared from the classroom, except for discussions of environmental catastrophe.

I asked Rick to describe an imaginary classroom saturated with the natural sciences and hands-on nature learning. “I keep coming back to a class devoid of nature,” he answered. “Unfortunately, a class devoid of nature looks just like any classroom you would walk into today. We have industrialized the classroom to the extent that there is no room for nature in the curriculum.” Curriculum standards adopted in the name of school reform restrict many districts to the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. These are vital subjects, of course, but in Rick’s opinion—and I share it—education reform has moved too far from what used to be called a well-rounded education. Rick elaborated:

The society we are molding these kids toward is one that values consumer viability. The works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold are seldom if ever taught to children in the public schools. Even in the sciences, where nature could play such an important role, the students study nature in a dry, mechanized way. How does the bat sonar work, how does a tree grow, how do soil amenities help crops grow? Kids see nature as a lab experiment.

The alternative? I imagine a classroom that turns outward, both figuratively and literally. The grounds would become a classroom, buildings would look outward, and gardens would cover the campus. The works of naturalists would be the vehicle by which we would teach reading and writing. Math and science would be taught as a way to understand the intricacies of nature, the potential to meet human needs, and how all things are interlaced. A well-rounded education would mean learning the basics, to become part of a society that cherished nature while at the same time contributing to the well-being of mankind. Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile.
Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?