Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (27 page)

Begin with the non-glamour fish, he suggests. Crappie, carp, bullhead catfish—and most important, bluegills and other types of sunfish—any pan fish that make a kid’s heart jolt when the bobber goes under. Bend down the barbs on the hooks for safety: this also makes it easier to release fish unharmed. Speaking for the fish, I recommend catch-and-release, although taking a few fish home to clean and eat can be a valuable lesson about the source of food.

For my older son, Jason, fishing has value chiefly as a way to spend time with his family, in nature. But Matthew definitely has the fishing gene. He started his angling career at age three, fishing in the humidifier in his bedroom. Several years ago, I asked him to help me with an article about fishing and kids. The piece was published in the
Chicago Tribune
and several other newspapers. His advice is still good:

Fishing Tips for Parents from Matthew Louv (age 12)
:

1. Fish with your kid.

2. Let your kids go fishing, even if you don’t want to take them.

3. Let your kids buy supplies and tackle. That’s half the fun of fishing.

4. If your kids are young, take them to a place where fish are easy to catch and are small.

5. Let kids fish as long as they want. Let them get obsessed.

6. Let the kids go off and do their own thing. It can get to be incredibly annoying and/or frustrating if there’s an adult standing over them barking orders.

7. At least pretend to act excited when your kid catches a fish. It can
quickly ruin a day of fishing if the kid feels you don’t want to be there, and he’s just dragging you down.

8. If you know how to fish, don’t give your kid too much unsolicited advice, although it can be helpful if the kid is young.

9. Let your kid teach you how to fish; participate in the fishing. This can be quality bonding time.

10. Remember that fishing and spending time with family is just as, or more important than, homework.

11. Have fun; that’s the entire point of going fishing in the first place.

12. And whatever you do, DON’T LET YOUR KID THROW ROCKS IN THE WATER!

Today’s families are more likely to be confronted with moral questions, ones seldom asked in past decades, about children’s traditional hunting-and-gathering interaction with nature. These questions come with the territory of the third frontier—and reflect the changing relationship between humans and other animals. In 2000, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) declared fishing “the final frontier of animal rights.” The organization has targeted its anti-fishing campaign specifically at children. Activists have handed out anti-fishing fliers to children as they left schools; others protested at a Brooklyn children’s fishing derby, holding up signs that effectively accused the children of being killers. In 2000, Dawn Carr, anti-fishing campaign coordinator for PETA, and Gill the Fish, a six-foot-tall piscatorial partner dressed in a fish-suit, attempted to visit dozens of schools around the country. “Only one school let us in,” reported Carr. Undeterred, she and Gill stationed themselves just beyond school property. There, they passed out literature and told kids about the evils of fishing.

One PETA anti-fishing commercial features young Justin Aligata, who is a vegetarian, animal rights activist, and Boy Scout. “Scouting has taught me that Scouts should not harm the environment or animals in it. That is why I don’t think there should be a fishing merit badge,” he says. “Scouting is all about doing what is right and making a positive
difference in the world—that is exactly what I am doing by helping PETA speak up for fish.”

Even without PETA’s opposition, fishing is slipping as a pastime among young people. Some 44 million Americans still fish regularly, but the average age of anglers is rising, and the fishing tackle industry is concerned about a drop in some states in the number of young people fishing. “Every kid grows up with a mountain bike; it used to be a fishing pole,” says
Sports Afield
editor John Atwood.

Hunting is another traditional way that young people first interacted with nature. In 1997, states issued approximately 15 million hunting licenses, about a million less than in the previous decade. (Interestingly, women are responsible for maintaining hunting’s numerical viability; the number of women hunters doubled in the 1990s, to 2.6 million.) In 1998, after a spurt of school violence by young people (some using hunting rifles), essayist Lance Morrow wrote, “Sometimes a society makes a tectonic shift, some great half-conscious collective decision. That happened with smoking, which was once, remember, a glamorous ritual of romance and adulthood. . . . It may be happening now with hunting.”

Yes, there are alternative hands-on ways for children to experience nature, but when people who love nature argue for the end of hunting and fishing, without suggesting options equaling or surpassing the importance of those experiences to children, they should be careful what they wish for. By any measure, the impact of consumptive outdoor sports on nature pales in comparison to the destruction of habitat by urban sprawl and pollution. Remove hunting and fishing from human activity, and we lose many of the voters and organizations that now work against the destruction of woods, fields, and watersheds.

At the center of the fishing controversy is this question: Do fish feel pain? Without delving into the scientific controversy, suffice it to say that the answer to that question depends on your definition of pain and
suffering; the answer is not as clear as it may seem. Certainly, the definition is not settled. Those children who do fish (or hunt) in the future will do so under a growing cloud. Yet, in an increasingly de-natured world, fishing and hunting remain among the last ways that the young learn of the mystery and moral complexity of nature in a way that no videotape can convey. Yes, fishing and hunting are messy—even morally messy—but so is nature. No child can truly know or value the outdoors if the natural world remains under glass, seen only through lenses, screens, or computer monitors.

Fishing also offers generational connection. In a world in which children seldom follow their mothers and fathers into the family business or the parents’ professions, fishing is an avocation, a craft, a calling that a parent can deliver to the next generation. For so many families, fishing serves as glue that binds the generations, even if fishing fades.

My son Jason, twenty-five, now lives in Brooklyn. He spends hours exploring New York’s neighborhoods and parks and along the water’s edge. One evening, when I was visiting him in New York, we took a four-hour hike through Central Park. We stood for a long time on a bridge over the arm of one of the park’s ponds, staring into the opaque, green water, stilled by evening calm. We watched a fifty-something man with a ponytail make his way through the undergrowth to the shore and cast across the water. Suddenly a bass grabbed the lure, exploded into the air and tail-danced across the water. Jason and I both laughed with surprise, and I suddenly missed the many hours we fished together when he was a little boy.

After a while, Jason said, “You know, Dad, when I walk through the older neighborhoods, with the old brick and all that organic change, I sometimes get the feeling I had when I was a kid exploring the canyon behind our house.”

It pleases me that Jason finds forms of nature beneath the surfaces, where others may see none.

For families not attracted to fishing or hunting, wonderful alternatives exist. One is wildcrafting, a term that originally meant gaining skill and knowledge about wilderness survival, but has come to be used more specifically as the hunting and gathering of plants in their wild state, for food, herbal medicines, or crafts.

This isn’t your mother’s leaf pressing, but a sophisticated interaction with nature, requiring patience, careful observation, and a cultivated knowledge of species identification. Wildcrafting also comes with its own set of ethical issues.
Utne
magazine, in an article on wildcrafting entitled “The Guerrilla Gatherers,” pointed out that wildcrafting in protected wilderness areas is technically illegal. Wildcrafting organizations counsel parents and children to ask themselves such questions as: Are you collecting in a fragile environment? Is the plant rare, threatened, or endangered—or are such plants near enough to be damaged? Is wildlife foraging the stand? Is the stand growing, shrinking, or staying the same size? John Lust, in
The Natural Remedy Bible
, advises that wildcrafters “harvest where the plant appears to be thriving, as that is where we will be able to find the strongest plants,” and to “be sure to leave enough so that the plant can easily recover its growth.”

Careful wildcrafting, he argues, can be practiced “in such a way as to aid the growth of wild plants by judicious thinning and pruning.” Wildcrafting’s value is enhanced because it presents the ethical issues inherent in childhood hunting and gathering. Responsible wildcrafting connects children to nature in a direct way, helps explain the sources of food, and teaches them the basics of sustainability.

An even less invasive activity is wildlife viewing. Some folks watch raccoons in the backyard; others take trips of hundreds of miles to see a single bird species. Unfortunately, the number of Americans participating in traditional forms of recreational wildlife watching decreased between 1991 and 2001, from 76 million in 1991, to 66 million in 2001,
according to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s “National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife.”

One branch of wildlife watching is growing.
World Watch
reports, “Birding has become one of the continent’s fastest growing outdoor pastimes.” Birding has traditionally been a hobby for mature adults. In contrast to some other outdoor activities, birding may be gaining ground among some groups of young people, according to
Birding
magazine. Part of this growth is due to the advent of compact field guides, and advances in camera technology make birding easier than in the past. Digital cameras dramatically reduce the cost of experimental photos of worms, beetles, and small feet. In 2001, the percentage of birders between sixteen and twenty-four years old increased from 10.5 to 15.5 percent of bird watchers; but the percentage of birders between twenty-five and thirty-nine actually fell from 31.8 to 24.3 percent.
Birding
surmised that “the busy family-rearing years of twenty-five to thirty-nine years old do not permit as much involvement in birding as they did a few years ago.”

For a child who is primarily an audile learner, or who has poor eyesight, birding could be an especially wonderful way to experience nature. Little Teddy Roosevelt, with his poor eyesight as a child, could imitate hundreds of birdcalls, and did so even as an adult.

Birding does not need to be an elaborate or expensive endeavor.
Mothering
magazine offers some useful advice:

Don’t rush to the library for a book; let your young scientist learn to see and record the information firsthand. . . . Make a list or chart to note down the same observations for each different type of bird. In this way, your child will learn to rely on firsthand observations and knowledge building. . . . Learning about birds might lead your youngster to take an interest in other earth sciences: Why not help your child plant several rows of beans in the garden using different composts and fertilizers, or watch and compare three different types of
trees budding? The goal is to encourage your youngster to observe, question, and answer.

Is wildlife watching the twenty-first-century expression of our urge to hunt?
World Watch
associate editor Howard Youth offers a more complex explanation: “When only a few hundred members of a species remain, those last members may ironically attract thousands of humans who paid little attention when the species was common: witness the crowds that gather to observe captive pandas, gorillas, or California condors.”

Nature journaling is also a useful tool for young people. The great naturalist writers John Muir and Aldo Leopold kept nature journals. Beginning at age eleven, Bill Sipple, an ecologist with the Environmental Protection Agency, kept a journal—now two volumes totaling over twelve hundred pages. Early explorer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft trekked across the Ozarks in 1818, and later published a detailed account of his journey. His journals depict a different landscape from what we see today. He vividly described the lush expanses of prairies and his encounters with herds of elk and bison. For more than 150 years, New England anglers have been keeping fishing logs and fishing diaries—and the ecological record kept in these logs is now key to the protection of wild trout streams.

Outdoor journaling is something a family can do together, and it offers reason and focus for being in nature. Linda Chorice, assistant manager at the Missouri Conservation Department’s Springfield Nature Center, points out that journaling demands no special equipment, only a pad of paper or spiral notebook, several pencils, and a pencil sharpener. “While your journal may never be published as a historical document, it will serve as a personal record of your outdoor experiences, allowing you to accurately relive your memories each time you open its cover,” she says.

All of these activities can teach children patience and respect for the other creatures on the planet, even if the lessons take a little time to accrue.

Not long ago, I learned how one father, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., exposed his kids to nature—through catching, releasing, and watching. Kennedy made his name as an environmental lawyer working with Riverkeeper, an organization that was created to protect the New York City watershed and that has helped bring the Hudson River back from its watery, polluted grave. One of Kennedy’s most notable accomplishments was the New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and the city’s watershed consumers to ensure the purity of the city’s water. As the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Kennedy has worked on environmental issues throughout the Western Hemisphere. In his spare time, he likes to take his five young children scuba diving in the Hudson. He does something called “buddy diving.”