Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (34 page)

In the recent past, even nature writers ignored the nature within urban or suburban realms. “As recently as 1990, you could read all 94 writers and 900 pages collected in the
Norton Book of Nature Writing
and barely comprehend that most people spent most of their lives in cities,” reported the
Los Angeles Times
, in a glowing article about one of the prophets of this urban-nature movement, naturalist Jennifer Price, author of
Flight Maps
. In that book, Price argues that, “You cannot expect to preserve wilderness or endangered species unless you think about how to make the places where most people live sustainable.” This movement goes far beyond the traditional focus on parks and reaches toward a new definition of urban planning, architecture, and the restoration of that which has been lost. The
Times
describes a “vast and probably unstoppable conglomeration of community groups, architects, urban planners, engineers, writers, bureaucrats and politicians that is now out to restore the river [the Los Angeles River system] to something more than a ditch.”

Times are changing. Wolch talks about “re-enchanting the city” by bringing animals back in. Her views are steeped in a philosophy of animal rights; in fact, she may view the primary beneficiaries of a renaturalized city as being the animals themselves. “Agreement about the human/animal divide has recently collapsed,” she writes. “Critiques of post-Enlightenment science have undermined claims of human-animal
discontinuity, and exposed the deeply anthropocentric and androcentric roots of modernist science. Greater understanding of animal thinking and capabilities now reveals the astonishing range and complexity of animal behavior and social life, while studies of human biology and behavior emphasize the similarity of humans to other animals. Claims about human uniqueness have thus been rendered deeply suspicious.”

Some of us, myself included, are less comfortable with a total rearrangement of the relationship. We’re not quite ready to pass laws requiring equal housing for possums. Nonetheless, we do acknowledge that a de-natured urban or suburban environment is not good for children or the land. Rather than some kind of polemical realignment, what we seek is simply a reattachment. Even a truce would be progress.

Cities and suburbs are still wilder than we think, with deeper roots than we know. In 2002, the
New York Times
reported that remnants of virgin forests still stand in the Bronx and Queens—a 425- to 450-yearold, 75-foot tulip tree in Queens is the oldest living thing in New York City; in Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx, according to the
Times
, “rare birds and vegetation flourish among trees that have been growing since the 1700s.” Just as we, counterintuitively, must now plan unstructured time and supervise opportunities for solitude for the young, we must now also manage our urban regions as if they were wildlife preserves. “Where we have a large opportunity for gain is to see that people and animals coexist in a lot of areas. The largest unmanaged ecosystem in America is suburbia,” writes wildlife biologist Ben Breedlove, a noted designer of sustainable communities.

Indeed, the peculiar and growing proximity of wild animals and urban/suburban dwellers is one of the defining characteristics of the time, ironic because this is occurring even as young people disengage from nature. The urban/suburban influx of wild animals could stimulate a rethinking of who lives in the city, and why. Wolch writes: “The fast-expanding metropolitan edge brings a wide range of species—including predators—into back yards and public spaces, much to the consternation
of residents unfamiliar with their behavior and unprepared for their presence. . . . The presence of wild animals thus often triggers public debate and conflict, lawsuits over wildlife-related injuries, contested hunts and extermination efforts. In short, what do you do with a mountain lion in the middle of Santa Monica?” As she points out, the destruction or domination of nature is unpopular or unacceptable with much of the public, “yet the arts of coexistence with wild animals remain unfamiliar.”

According to Wolch, the growing public awareness that “conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, resource-intensive environments, [is] leading some cities to pass regulations emphasizing native species to reduce resource dependence and create habitat for wildlife.” She also points out that there is a growing number of grass-roots struggles in urban regions focused on the protection of specific wild animals or animal populations, and on the preservation of urban canyons, woodlands, wetlands, and other wildlife habitats. Even as science commodifies the bodies of humans and other animals, Wolch and others have detected a growing public sensitivity to wild animals as beings in their own right.

Landscape urbanism is one conceptual framework for such thinking. Ruth Durak, director of the Kent State University Urban Design Center, offers this definition:

Landscape urbanism is a call to turn urban design inside out, starting with open spaces and natural systems, to structure urban form instead of buildings and infrastructure. . . . The idea of landscape urbanism reorders the values and priorities of urban design, emphasizing the primacy of the void over built form and celebrating indeterminacy and change over the static certainty of architecture. It recalls nature’s restorative cycles and tries to put them back to work in the city.

Another, more popular term gaining cachet is green urbanism, an approach that goes beyond the current American vogue of the “new
urbanism”—which has, until recently, focused less on urban ecology than on building somewhat better suburbs—even beyond the sustainable-cities movement, which is focused more on energy concerns. In fact, a green urbanism movement is growing quickly, particularly in Western Europe.

Huck Finn has left the territories and gone to the Netherlands. That must be him in the photograph, that boy on a wooden raft, poling his way down a stream-like canal with banks of reeds and willows in Morra Park, an ecovillage in the city of Drachten.

You won’t often see that kind of scene in today’s America. Here, people still “tend to think that true nature can only be found on the pristine, remote extremities of civilization and that these places have little to do with the everyday human world,” writes William McDonough, a visionary architect from Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leading American proponent of sustainable, regenerative community design. Oddly, such thinking raises hives on both the thick hide of mass developers and the prickly skin of some environmentalists. Mass developers want to give us one option and call it choice. Some environmentalists grump:
Why, if people start thinking they can regenerate nature in cities, they’ll use that as an excuse for suburban sprawl
. That may be a legitimate concern but, as McDonough puts it, dominant urban/suburban design is “so impermeable to nature [that] it is all too easy to leave our reverence in the parking lots of national parks.”

By contrast, cities and suburbs in parts of Western Europe are becoming more livable and loveable by protecting regenerating nature. There’s Huck, happily on the water, in Morra Park, as evidenced in Timothy Beatley’s book
Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities
, cited earlier. In Morra Park’s closed-loop canal system, storm-water runoff is moved by the power of an on-site windmill, and circulated through a manufactured wetlands where reeds and other vegetation
filter the water naturally—making it clean enough for residents to swim in.

A similar Dutch development called Het Groene Dak (The Green Roof) incorporates a communal inner garden, “a wild, green, car-free area for children to play and residents to socialize,” writes Beatley. At a similar suburban ecovillage in Sweden, “large amounts of woodland and natural area have been left untouched.” To minimize impact on nature, homes are built on pillars and designed “to look as though they had been lowered out of thin air.”

He describes an astonishing array of European green-city designs: cities with half the land areas devoted to forest, green space, and agriculture; cities that have not only preserved nearby nature, but reclaimed some inner-city areas for woods, meadows, and streams. These neighborhoods are both denser and more livable than our own. Nature, even a suggestion of wildness, is within walking distance of most residences. In contrast to “the historic opposition of things urban and natural,” he writes, green cities “are fundamentally embedded in a natural environment. They can, moreover, be re-envisioned to operate and function in natural ways—they can be restorative, renourishing and replenishing of nature.”

“Greenroofs” are increasingly common. Covered by vegetation—native grass or even trees—such roofs provide protection from UV rays, clean the air, control storm-water runoff, aid birds and butterflies, and cool homes in summer and insulate them in winter. The higher initial cost of such a roof is outweighed by its longevity. From above, the green looks like an expanse of fields. Increasingly, architects incorporate construction requirements for “greenwalls” of ivy and other plants, which naturalize a building and prevent graffiti.

Designers are creating “often quite wild and untamed” green spaces, says Beatley, while increasing human population densities. This is promoted not only by architects, but also at the urban-planning level. In Helsinki, Finland, for example, an extensive system of green space extends
in a mostly unbroken wedge from the center of the city to an area of old-growth forest north of the city.

About one-quarter of the land area in Zurich, Switzerland, is in forests. Granted, much of this space was grandfathered into these cities by the conversion of old royal estates to public use, but green urban activists didn’t stop there. Many cities are restoring streams and creeks previously tamed by concrete or routed underground. Zurich’s goal is to uncover and restore forty kilometers of urban streams and line them with native trees and vegetation.

A web of bikeways and lanes connects all neighborhoods and major destinations in the city of Delft, Netherlands. One plan in the Netherlands calls for capping a two-kilometer stretch of highway with an eco-roof for pedestrian, bicycle, and wildlife connections.

Another trend is the creation or purchase of urban farms. The city of Göteborg, Sweden, owns sixty farms at its fringes, some open to the public—including pick-your-own berry and vegetable farms, a visiting or petting farm for children, and another offering a riding stable for people with disabilities. Small areas of pasture, livestock, and farm buildings are even being sited at the core of new housing clusters.

Schools, too, are being transformed. Zurich is redesigning its schools, breaking up concrete surfaces around the buildings and planting trees and grass. Through a system using mirrors, students in the classrooms of one school can see and monitor the solar voltaic system and the life of the greenroof. Proponents say such design goes beyond aesthetics; children and adults in these more natural settings concentrate better and are more productive.

In his campaign to encourage such green urbanism in the United States, Timothy Beatley is increasingly interested in its impact on children. During the years he and his wife lived in the Netherlands, they were struck by how free the children were—how they were less endangered by traffic, how they could ride public bikes and public trams, and get around on their own. They were impressed by the increasing
number of new developments that include wild places specifically for kids to play—where they could dig, or build a pond or build a little fort. “The fear just wasn’t there,” he says. “We also noticed that there was less resentment toward parents—we seldom heard kids saying, ‘Oh, my Mom won’t let me go anywhere.’ Maybe part of this is cultural; you see fewer commercial messages to kids there. But a lot of the reason is design. Now that we’re back in the U.S., and have small children of our own, we’re much more aware of the importance of creating a different way of living, one more connected to nature.”

While many Americans may consider such ecotopian thinking bizarre, even threatening, green urbanism in Western Europe proves that an alternative urban future is possible and practical, and has given hope to pioneers in American cities who agree with McDonough that cities should be “sheltering; cleansing of air, water, and spirit; and restorative and replenishing of the planet, rather than fundamentally extractive and damaging.” Who knows? If such thinking spreads, Huck might even come home to the territories.

Two decades ago, I visited Michael Corbett where he lived, in the future. Corbett and his wife, Judy, had bought seventy acres of tomato fields in the college town of Davis, California, in 1975. There, they built Village Homes, the first fully solar-powered housing development in America, and one of the modern world’s first examples of green urbanism.

As Corbett escorted me around this two-hundred-home neighborhood, I was struck by the inside-out nature of the place. In Village Homes, garages were tucked out of sight; homes pointed inward, toward open green space, walkways, and bike paths. In a typical planned community, then and now, you find martially trimmed postage-stamp yards and covenants that prohibit or restrict variations on the developer’s
original theme. At Village Homes, I saw a profusion of flowers and vegetable gardens. Grapevines on roofs thickened in the summer, providing shade, and thinned in the winter, letting the sun’s rays through. Residents were producing nearly as much edible food as the original farmer had. Instead of a gate or wall, orchards surrounded this community. Corbett’s teenage daughter, Lisa, elaborated: “We’ve got a group of kids called ‘the harvesters.’ The orchards are set aside for the kids; we go out and pick the nuts and sell them at a farmer’s market at the gazebo in the center of the village.”

As we walked through the development, Corbett stopped at the far edge. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he pointed beyond the almond trees at the periphery and across the street, to a condominium development that was not part of Village Homes. Its surfaces were almost entirely white stucco, glaring in the sun. A small child pumped his tricycle slowly across a white cement parking lot. “Look at that kid over there,” Corbett said. “He’s kind of limited where he can go, isn’t he? Where’s he going to go?”