Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (21 page)

What specifically, I asked Dayton, can be done to improve the situation? His answer was not hopeful. “Not only is there a huge elitist prejudice against natural history and for microbiology, [but] simple economics almost rule out a change, because good natural history classes must be small.” Nonetheless, he hopes that greater public knowledge about the generational nature deficit will encourage politicians to “start demanding that universities teach the fundamentals of biology and explicitly define these fundamentals to include real natural history.”

Unfortunately, finding anybody with enough natural history knowledge to teach such classes will be difficult. Dayton suggests that higher education “offer the courses and hire young professors eager to do the right thing” and organize the older naturalists, fading in number, to mentor the young students “never offered the opportunity to learn any natural history.” At least one organization, the Western Society of Naturalists, has come forward with support for the training of young naturalists. If education and other forces, intentionally or unintentionally, continue to push the young away from direct experience in nature, the cost to science itself will be high. Most scientists today began their careers
as children, chasing bugs and snakes, collecting spiders, and feeling awe in the presence of nature. Since such untidy activities are fast disappearing, how, then, will our future scientists learn about nature?

“I fear that they will not,” says Dayton, staring out at that lost horizon. “Nobody even knows that this wisdom about our world has been driven from our students.”

R
ASHEED
S
ALAHUDDIN, A
high school principal who heads my local school district’s one-week outdoor-education program, sees the corrosive effect of nature-fear. “Too many kids are associating nature with fear and catastrophe, and not having direct contact with the outdoors,” he says. Salahuddin brings sixth-graders to the mountains and shows them the wonder. “Some of these kids are from Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. They view the outdoors, the woods, as a dangerous place. They associate it with war, with hiding—or they view it in a solely utilitarian way, as a place to gather firewood.”

Inner-city kids of all ethnic backgrounds show similar responses, he says. Some have never been to the mountains or the beach—or the zoo, even though it’s within sight of their homes. Some of them spend their entire childhood inside an apartment, living in fear. They associate nature with the neighborhood park, which is controlled by gangs. “What does this say about our future?” asks Salahuddin. “Nature has been taken over by thugs who care absolutely nothing about it. We need to take nature back.”

[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

—
NATURALIST
R
OBERT
M
ICHAEL
P
YLE

R
ECENTLY
, I
ASKED A
committed and effective environmentalist—a person active in the creation of Southern California’s ocean-to-mountains San Dieguito River Park—this question: When the park is completed, and the vast stretches of land and water are preserved, how will kids play in it?

“Well, they’ll go hiking with their parents . . .” He paused.

Would a kid be able to wander freely on this land, and, say, build a tree house? My friend became pensive.

“No, I don’t think so—I mean, there are plenty of more constructive ways to experience nature.” When asked how he first interacted with the outdoors, the environmentalist answered, sheepishly, “I built forts and tree houses.”

He understands the paradox here, but does not know quite what to do about it. Many of the traditional activities in nature are destructive. To some people, building a tree house or a fort in the woods is not much different than running quads across the dunes. The difference is one of degree: one way of experiencing joy in nature excites the senses, the other way drowns the senses in noise and fumes, and leaves tracks that will last thousands of years.

Working through such distinctions is not easy, but as the care of nature
increasingly becomes an intellectual concept severed from the joyful experience of the outdoors, you have to wonder: Where will future environmentalists come from?

If environmental groups, along with Scouting and other traditional outdoors-oriented organizations, wish to pass on the heritage of their movement, and the ongoing care of the earth, they cannot ignore children’s need to explore, to get their hands dirty and their feet wet. And they must help reduce the fear that increasingly separates children from nature.

Until recently, most environmental organizations offered only token attention to children. Perhaps their lack of zeal stems from an unconscious ambivalence about children, who symbolize or represent overpopulation. So goes the unspoken mantra: We have met the enemy and it is our progeny. As Theodore Roszak, author of
The Voice of the Earth
, has said: “Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people. . . . I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely . . . [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don’t shame them further.”

That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident—but more often than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world. One often overlooked value of children is that they constitute the future political constituency, and their attention or vote—which is ultimately based more on a foundation of personal experience than rational decision-making—is not guaranteed.

Take, as just one example, our national parks.

To a new generation, the idea of camping at Yosemite is a quaint notion and brings to mind those ancient reruns of Lucy, Desi, Fred, and
Ethel banging around in their Airstream trailer. Some of the largest parks are reporting a peculiar drop-off in attendance over the past few years—a trend that predates the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Such a decrease would seem to be good news for overcrowded parks choking on exhaust fumes. But there’s a hidden, long-term danger.

First, the numbers. Overall visits to the national park system, which had grown steadily since the 1930s, dropped approximately 25 percent between 1987 and 2003. With 3.4 million visitors in 2006, Yosemite National Park drew nearly 20 percent fewer people than its peak attendance ten years earlier, this despite California adding 7 million people in that period. The number of visitors topped out at the Grand Canyon in 1991, Yellowstone in 1992, and Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park in 1995. Mount Rainier National Park attendance dropped from 1.6 million visitors in 1991 to 1.3 million in 2002. Since the late 1980s, the number of Carlsbad Caverns National Park visitors plummeted by nearly half.

The most important reason for the decline, I believe, is the break between the young and nature—the transition from real-world experience to virtual nature. In 2006, Oliver Pergams, a conservation biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Patricia Zaradic, a research associate, analyzed the falling numbers. They reported that 97.5 percent of the drop in attendance is due to the increased time Americans spend plugged into electronics. They found that, in 2003, the average American devoted 327 more hours to electronic pursuits than he or she did in 1987. Pergams and Zaradic warn of what they call “videophilia”—a shift from loving streams (biophilia) to loving screens. But a Northern Arizona University study of the nation’s parks names two central barriers: shortage of family time and a widely held perception that parks are for viewing scenery, period. Other reasons include shorter vacations; the shrinking American road trip (from 3.5 to 2.5 days); a decline in park budgets and services; and increased
entrance fees, as of this writing as high as twenty-five dollars per car.

The idea of working at a national park once conjured up rustic romanticism in the hearts of young Americans. That perception may have changed. In 2007, the
Los Angeles Times
reported a new phenomenon: “Concession managers in Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks bring in hundreds of foreign workers annually from Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Southern Africa because, they say, they cannot recruit American youths to fill the dirtiest jobs in the parks kitchens and hotels.”

What park officials call “windshield tours” are replacing camping. In 2001, the number of visitors who camped in national parks dropped by nearly a third, to its lowest point in a quarter century. The drop-off in camping is especially evident among people younger than thirty, possibly because no one took them camping when they were kids. Consequently, they’re not taking their own kids camping. One California survey, cited by
Oregonian
reporter Michael Milstein, found that more than eight of ten campers became interested in the outdoors when they were children—but more than half of the camping parties surveyed had no children with them.

But
are
parks for kids anymore? For the
Matrix
generation, much of the natural mystery and risk of the outdoors has been surgically removed. As park officials work to make parks safer and more accessible, the outdoors often ends up feeling more like Disneyland than wilderness. Some kids end up disappointed that the parks aren’t
more
Disneyesque. When middle school students sent me their reflections on nature, one boy reported visiting Utah’s Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the world’s largest natural bridge, which was carved out of the cliffs above modern-day Lake Powell over thousands of years. “The bridge was somewhat disappointing. It was not as perfect as in the brochure,” the boy wrote. His parents enhanced the family vacation by renting Jet Skis.

Here’s the hidden danger. If park and forest attendance stagnates as
the visitor age rises, what happens to the future political constituency for parks and national forests? Not much, if visitor drop were the only change at hand. But that phenomenon appears to be occurring at the exact moment when development and energy interests are rapidly ratcheting up their pressure on the natural environment.

The broader issue involves the future of the stewardship ethic, in particular the shrinking genetic pool of environmentalists, conservationists, and other stewards.

In 1978, Thomas Tanner, professor of environmental studies at Iowa State University, conducted a study of environmentalists’ formative influences. He probed what it was in their lives that had steered them to environmental activism. He polled staff members and chapter officers of major environmental organizations. “Far and away the most frequently cited influence was childhood experience of natural, rural, or other relatively pristine habitats. But for some reason, you don’t hear many environmentalists expressing much concern about the intimacy factor between kids and nature,” says Tanner. For most of these individuals, the natural habitats were accessible for unstructured play and discovery nearly every day when they were kids.

Since then, studies in England, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Slovenia, Austria, Canada, El Salvador, South Africa, Norway, and the United States have confirmed and broadened Tanner’s findings. In 2006, Cornell University researchers Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies went beyond studying the childhood influences of environmentalists; they looked at a broad sample of urban adults, ages eighteen to ninety. The study indicated that adult concern for, and behavior related to, the environment derives directly from participating in such “wild nature activities” as playing independently in the woods, hiking, fishing, and hunting before the age of eleven. The study also suggested that
free play
in nature is far more effective than mandatory, adult-organized activities
in nature. Paradoxically, this suggests that organizers of nature activities should strive to make the experience as unorganized as possible—but still meaningful. Not an easy task to accomplish.

Children do need mentors, of course. In other surveys of environmental leaders, according to environmental psychologist Louise Chawla, most attributed their commitment to a combination of two sources in childhood or adolescence: many hours spent outdoors in “keenly remembered” wild or semi-wild places, and a mentoring adult who taught respect for nature.

“In story after story, activists told about a family member who took the child into woods or gardens and modeled appreciative attention to plants and animals there. What they did
not
demonstrate was fear, or heedless destruction. Even when people described hunting or fishing with their family as a child, their parents showed a quality of attention that was not purely instrumental,” writes Chawla. She tells that “a Kentucky lawyer who became a leading organizer of the struggle to save the wild and scenic Red River from damming mused about what made him different from proponents of the dam. Many of them, like him, must have grown up fishing and hiking in Kentucky’s woods and fields. ‘Maybe a lot has to do with who you go fishing with,’ he suggested. ‘Or who you’re talking to when you’re walking.’ In his case, he fished with a father who took time to ‘appreciate what’s there,’ who didn’t just catch fishing bait but watched the insects and worms and noticed the details of the surrounding plants and trees.” Chawla calls this the “contagious attitude of attentiveness.”

The childhoods of conservationists and naturalists are replete with stories of early inspiration, leading directly to their later activism. E. O. Wilson, the father of biophilia, addressed this in his memoir,
Naturalist
: “Most children have a bug period, and I never outgrew mine. Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”