Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (22 page)

Edmund Morris’s description of the boyhood years of the presidential patron of conservation, Theodore Roosevelt, suggests a similar genesis:

The bookish “Teedie” became aware of the “enthralling pleasures” of building wigwams in the woods, gathering hickory nuts and apples, hunting frogs, haying and harvesting, and scampering barefoot down long, leafy lanes. . . . Even in these early years, his knowledge of natural history was abnormal. No doubt much of it was acquired during his winters [reading] . . . but it was supplemented, every summer, by long hours of observation of the flora and fauna around him.

. . . Teedie’s interest in all “curiosities and living things” became something of a trial to his elders. Meeting Mrs. Hamilton Fish on a streetcar, he absentmindedly lifted his hat, whereupon several frogs leaped out of it, to the dismay of fellow passengers. . . . A protest by a chambermaid forced Teedie to move the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History out of his bedroom and into the back hall upstairs. “How can I do the laundry,” complained the washerwoman, “with a snapping turtle tied to the legs of the sink?”

We may owe Yosemite to that turtle. Like Roosevelt, writer Wallace Stegner filled his childhood with collected critters, often with no thought to the welfare of the species; such were the times. In his essay, “Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood,” he described the prairie town in Saskatchewan that was his home in his early years. His pets or temporary boarders included burrowing owls, magpies, and a black-footed ferret. He spent many of his young days “trapping, shooting, snaring, poisoning, or drowning out the gophers that gathered in our wheat field. . . . Nobody could have been more brainlessly and immorally destructive. And yet there was love there, too.”

In some ways, environmental organizations face the same force of attrition that newspapers now encounter with the aging of their readerships. On average, American newspaper subscribers are in their early and mid-fifties, and climbing, as subscription rates fall. The Sierra Club
members’ average age is now pushing fifty, and climbing. In a country whose young are more culturally and ethnically diverse than ever (and nature is valued in radically different ways and degrees among some of these cultures), environmentalists look increasingly old and white. All the more reason for environmental and conservation groups to triple their efforts to reach the young—a topic to be addressed in a later chapter. The immediate challenge, however, is for such organizations to ask themselves if their policies, and cultural attitudes, are subtly adding to the separation.

Other organizations, ones that have traditionally linked children to nature, must ask the same question.

Madhu Narayan was three months old when her parents, recent immigrants from India, took her camping for the first time. A few years later, they drove across the West, camping as they went. Narayan figures her parents didn’t have a lot of money, and camping was an inexpensive way to see their nation of choice. “We moved through days of beautiful weather, and then the rains came,” she says. During a lightning storm, the wind blew away the family’s tent, and they slept in the car listening to the banshees of wind and rain howl and crash through the woods. Even now, at thirty, Narayan shivers as she tells this story.

She was shaped by such elemental experiences and the mystery that rode with them. Today, as the outdoor education manager for a sprawling Girl Scouts region—covering the California counties of Imperial and San Diego—she wants to offer natural experiences to girls. But there’s a problem. The traditional perception of Scouting—for girls or boys—is that nature is the star of the show, the organizing principle, the raison d’être; but the
raison
is shrinking.

At Scout headquarters at San Diego’s Camp Balboa, an urban campground created in 1916, Narayan and Karyl T. O’Brien, associate executive director of the regional Girl Scouts Council, spread out a stack
of literature to describe the rich programs they provide to more than thirty thousand girls. Impressive, but over the past three years, membership in the region has remained flat, even as the population has grown precipitously. This region’s council markets itself aggressively. It offers such programs as an overnighter with the city’s natural history museum, a daylong junior naturalist program, and popular summer-camp experiences. But the overwhelming majority of Girl Scout programs are unconcerned with nature. Included (along with selling cookies) are such offerings as Teaching Tolerance, Tobacco Prevention, Golf Clinic, Self-Improvement, Science Festival, EZ Defense, and Financial Literacy. Camp CEO brings businesswomen to a natural setting to mentor girls in job interviewing, product development, and marketing.

The divide between past and future is seen best at the Girl Scout camps in mountains east of the city: one is billed as traditional, with open-air cabins and tents hidden in the trees; the newer camp looks like a little suburbia with street lights. “I flipped when I learned that girls weren’t allowed to climb trees at our camps,” says O’Brien. Liability is an increasing concern. “When I was a kid, you fell down, you got up, so what; you learned to deal with consequences. I broke this arm twice,” says Narayan. “Today, if a parent sends a kid to you without a scratch, they better come back that way. That’s the expectation. And as someone responsible for people, I have to respect that.”

Scouting organizations must also respect, or endure, outrageous increases in the cost of liability insurance. This is not only an American phenomenon; in 2002, Australia’s Scouting organizations Girl Guides and Scouts Australia reported increases of as much as 500 percent in a single year, leading the executive director of Scouts Australia to warn that Scouting could be “unviable” if insurance premiums continued to rise.

Considering the mounting social and legal pressures, Scouting organizations deserve praise for maintaining any link to nature. Narayan pointed out that most of the two thousand girls who attend summer
camps are touched by nature, even if indirectly. “But we now feel compelled to put tech labs in camps or computers in a nature center, because that’s what people are used to,” says O’Brien. Scouting is responding to the same pressures experienced by public schools: as family time and free time have diminished, Americans expect these institutions to do more of society’s heavy lifting—more of its social, moral, and political juggling. Ask any Boy Scout how difficult that act can be.

Justly or not, the public image of the Boy Scouts of America has shifted from that of clean-cut boys tying knots and pitching tents to one of adult leaders who ban gays and expel atheists. Like the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts struggle to be up-to-date—and marketable. At the new National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas, displays use virtual-reality technology to allow visitors to climb a mountain, kayak down a river, and conduct simulated rescues on mountain bikes. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) activists launched a campaign to convince the Boy Scouts to drop their fishing merit badge. In 2001, the
Dallas Morning News
reported that some Boy Scout councils across the country were selling off wilderness camps to pay their bills.

For the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, it’s not easy being green.

Today’s parents push such organizations toward ever safer, more technological activities. Scouting struggles to remain relevant, to be a one-stop shop, to offer something for just about everyone. That may be a good marketing policy. Or not. (An astute book editor once told me: “A book written for everyone is a book for no one.”) As the scope of Scouting has widened, the focus on nature has narrowed. But a slim minority of parents and Scout leaders is beginning to argue for a back-to-nature movement. “They’re usually the older adults,” says O’Brien, “the ones who can remember a different time.” Could this set of adults offer a targeted marketing opportunity to future capital campaigns? Rather than accept nature’s slide, or suggest that non-nature programs be dropped to make way for the outdoors, why not ask these adults to build a whole new nature wing to Scouting? Interesting possibility, said
O’Brien. In fact, it makes sense not only as a marketing tool—define your niche and claim it—but also as a mission.

Scout leaders emphasize that Scouting is an educational program that teaches young people about building character, faith traditions, mentoring, serving others, healthy living, and lifelong learning. Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell surely sensed that exposure to nature nurtures children’s character and health. The best way to advance those educational goals (and, in a marketing sense, revive Scouting) is a return to the core orientation to nature—an approach that many parents and Scout leaders support.

Narayan is one of them. “In my first counseling job, with another organization, I took children with AIDS to the mountains who had never been out of their urban neighborhoods,” she says. “One night, a nine-year-old woke me up. She had to go to the bathroom. We stepped outside the tent and she looked up. She gasped and grabbed my leg. She had never seen the stars before. “That night, I saw the power of nature on a child. She was a changed person. From that moment on, she saw everything, the camouflaged lizard that everyone else skipped by. She used her senses. She was
awake
.”

The protection of nature depends on more than the organizational strength of stewardship organizations; it also depends on the quality of the relationship between the young and nature—on how, or if, the young attach to nature.

I often wonder: What am I attached to here in Southern California, other than good friends, good work, and the weather? Certainly what attaches me is not the man-made environment, or most of it, a landscape sliced and diced beyond recognition. I do love the parks and older neighborhoods of my city, particularly on those mornings when the fog softens their edges. And I love the beaches. The Pacific Ocean, resisting change, remains the last wilderness for surfing Southern Californians.
It is dependable, always there, but at the same time offering mystery and danger—and some of its creatures are larger than human size or ken. I do not surf, but I understand the attachment surfers feel to the ocean, and once this attachment is made, it is never lost.

When I drive east into the mountains, through Mesa Grande and Santa Ysabel and Julian, I know that these places have entered my heart. They have a mystery distinct from anywhere on Earth. But then always, always, a voice in me says, Don’t get too attached. Because of urban/ suburban sprawl, I have the sense that the fields and streams and mountains that I love here could be gone the next time I drive to the country, and so I cannot entirely commit to them. I wonder about children who either are never attached to nature, or learn to mistrust that attachment early. Do they exhibit similar characteristics or responses?

For twenty-five years, psychologist Martha Farrell Erickson and her colleagues have used what they call “attachment theory,” an ecological model of child development, as the framework for their ongoing longitudinal study of parent-child interaction. They apply those ideas to preventive intervention with parents in high-risk circumstances. The family’s health, related to the health of the surrounding community, has become a growing concern to Erickson.

“The way we usually talk about parent-child attachment is that we rarely see the absence of attachment, even when parents are unreliable, unresponsive, or erratically available. Rather, we see differences in the
quality
of attachment. For example, a child with a parent who is chronically unresponsive (let’s say a depressed parent, for example) will protect himself from the pain of rejection by detaching, acting disinterested in the parent—developing what we call an anxious-avoidant attachment.”

I suggested to her that some of the same responses or symptoms associated with attachment deficit occur with a poor sense of attachment to land. In my own experience, the rate of development in my part of the country is so fast that attachment to place is difficult; to many of us
who came here decades ago (in my case from Kansas), Southern California captures the body, but not the heart. In the world of child development, attachment theory posits that the creation of a deep bond between child and parent is a complex psychological, biological, and spiritual process, and that without this attachment a child is lost, vulnerable to all manner of later pathologies. I believe that a similar process can bind adults to a place and give them a sense of belonging and meaning. Without a deep attachment to place, an adult can also feel lost.

“It’s an intriguing idea to approach a child’s relationship with nature from the perspective of attachment theory,” Erickson said. She continued:

Children’s experience with the natural world seems to be overlooked to a large extent in research on child development, but it would be interesting to examine children’s early experiences with nature and follow how those experiences influence the child’s long-term comfort with and respect for the natural world—comfort and respect being concepts that are central to the study of parent-child attachment. Given the power of nature to calm and soothe us in our hurried lives, it also would be interesting to study how a family’s connection to nature influences the general quality of family relationships. Speaking from personal experience, my own family’s relationships have been nourished over the years through shared experiences in nature—from sharing our toddler’s wonder upon turning over a rock and discovering a magnificent bug the size of a mouse, to paddling our old canoe down a nearby creek during the children’s school years, to hiking the mountains.

A
TTACHMENT TO LAND
is not only good for the child, but good for the land as well. As naturalist Robert Finch asserts: “There is a point . . . in our relationship with a place, when, in spite of ourselves, we realize we do not care so much anymore, when we begin to be convinced, against our very wills, that our neighborhood, our town, or the
land as a whole is already lost.” At this point, he argues, the local landscape is no longer perceived as “a living, breathing, beautiful counterpart to human existence, but something that has suffered irreversible brain death. It may still be kept technically alive—with sewage treatment plants, ‘compensatory’ wetlands, shellfish reseeding programs, lime treatments for acidified ponds, herbicides for . . . ponds, beach nourishment programs, fenced-off bird sanctuaries, and designated ‘green areas’—but it no longer moves, or if it does, it is not with a will of its own.”