Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (40 page)

Joan Minieri worked for several years for an interfaith environmental organization in New York City. Nature informs her spiritual life and her commitment to others, even though she lives in a busy city. Minieri’s testament underscores the need for urban nature, and more of it. Also a parent, she understands the necessity of parental enthusiasm for nature, and the need to be “intentional about nourishing it,” as she says. Her spiritual life is rooted in Catholicism, though in recent years she has also been practicing Buddhist-inspired meditation, which cultivates refuge in silence. “As parents, Frank and I see it as our responsibility to bring our children to nature, just as my parents saw it as their responsibility to bring me to church,” she says. “We teach our daughter, Alin, to pray. But connecting her with nature offers such an important touchstone and a context for her prayer, a place to learn about love and respect for all of life—to see, touch, and smell where it all comes from, and to understand why she’ll be called to do her part to take care of things.”

Minieri smiles and adds, “I hope that, as she grows, she will continue to so clearly and truly love bugs.”

For other parents, the spiritual importance of nature is best described as an ethical issue. Some parents see an experience in nature as essential to their children in that regard. For example, fishing is a
controversial topic to some people, but others see it as one way to introduce their children to ethical questions about conservation, our relationship with other animals, and life and death.

This certainly rings true for Seth Norman, one of the country’s best fly-fishing writers. Norman introduced his stepson to fishing, an activity that offered a context for amazement—but at the same time taught his son
not
to romanticize or deify nature. When I asked him to describe his spirtual life in nature, he turned the question on its head. “Here’s one idea I wish that I had encountered a lot sooner: the more often I see savagery in the wild—mixed in, of course, with everything beautiful—the more I appreciate people,” he said. “Forests and deserts, I discovered to my vast confusion, were nothing like the Garden of Eden. Wild things killed wild things, and there was no justice in the way this happened. To my surprise, people couldn’t control much of this: it took me years to understand that my all-powerful father really couldn’t save some of the orphans I brought home.”

He also remembers asking some hard questions of God, as a child in nature. “I still do. Grasping the Grand Scheme is demanding for adults; for kids raised on Disney, it’s simply shocking to discover that it takes a bunch of Bambis to feed a Lion King, and that Mowgli’s wolves would eat Thumper and all his sibs. Eventually, most of us figure out that it’s people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics—and even the idea that nature itself is something worth preserving. We choose to be shepherds and stewards, or we don’t. We will live wisely—preserving water and air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we’re only beginning to understand—or we won’t, in which case Nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite, and utterly indifferent.”

Nature introduces children to the idea—to the
knowing
—that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist alongside their own. John Berger, who was born in London in 1926 and now lives in the French countryside, is known as an art and film critic who writes eloquently about how human beings experience reality, how
we
see
. In
About Looking
, he writes that our fellow animals first entered the human imagination as messengers and promises, with magical, sometimes oracular, functions. Living parallel lives, animals “offer man a companion different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.” The Hindus, for example, envisaged the Earth being carried on the back of an elephant and the elephant on a tortoise. Anthropomorphism, “the residue of the continuous use of animal metaphor,” was central to the relationship between humans and other animals. But anthropomorphism fell into disrepute during the past two centuries as animals became used as raw material, as test subjects, their DNA combined with machines. As wild animals have gradually disappeared from our lives, “in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy,” writes Berger. Yet, never have so many households, at least in the richest countries, owned so many pets. “Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by [animal] imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals,” writes Berger. Though children have always played with toys made in the image of animals, “it was not until the 19th century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods.”

Over this time, the animal toys shifted from symbolic to realistic. The traditional hobby horse was first a rudimentary stick “to be ridden like a broom handle; in the 19th century, the symbolic hobby horse evolved into the realistic rocking horse, shaped as a close reproduction to a real horse, painted realistically, sometimes with parts made of real leather, and manes of hair, and designed to closely reproduce a horse’s galloping. In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” Or has it? Often when I would tuck my sons into bed, one of us would pick up a stuffed animal and make it speak: a cotton koala, a polyester monkey, a fabricated fish, each available for consultation, each of them
with a name and character. Science may frown on anthropomorphism, but children do not: each decade, stuffed animals seem to populate more of the human environs; they appear in their rows and mounds in every corridor of every airport, in mall stalls, in zoos and museums and even fast-food restaurants. Berger writes that these playtoys “address our loneliness as a species, our powerful yearning, this spiritual hunger, which at its very core is a faith in the invisible.” He adds, “Even as wildness fades from our children’s lives they signal their hunger—or, perhaps more accurately, we sense their hunger. We come full circle, and nurture their souls with totems, with the anthropomorphic symbols of the parallel lives all around us.”

Nearly every parent—even the most rational, who also speak with or for teddy bears—can report some spiritual moment in their own memory of childhood, often in nature. Or they can relate experiencing similar moments in their own children’s early years. Yet the spiritual necessity of nature to the young is a topic that receives little notice. The absence of research may suggest a certain nervousness. After all, a child’s spiritual experience in nature—especially in solitude—is beyond adult or institutional control.

Some religious institutions and belief systems resist and distrust the suggestion that nature and spirit are related. Suspicious of environmentalism as an ersatz religion, they perceive a creeping, cultural animism. This belief, which runs deep in American culture, is perhaps one of the least acknowledged but most important barriers between children and nature.

Suzanne Thompson is keenly aware of the impact of environment on human behavior. A few years ago, Suzanne, who is in her early fifties, looked around her rather sterile Southern California neighborhood and decided it was unsafe for kids. Their parents seldom ventured out except to go to work. This meant that children playing out front were more vulnerable to unsavory passersby, so she ripped up her front yard, built a courtyard with a river-rock wall around it, put out some Adirondack
chairs, and announced to her neighbors that they could use the courtyard as a place to socialize. When I visited Thompson’s neighborhood courtyard one early evening, her neighbors sat with their drinks, and the kids sat on the wall or played out on the darkening grass. With her simple creative act, she recast the spirit of her neighborhood.

She loves spending time in nature and encouraged her daughter to do the same. But like many religiously conservative Christians, she is suspicious of any cultural emphasis on the spirit-nature connection and what she calls the “environmental agenda.”

“The Lord created and placed humans in a garden with a mandate to enjoy it, manage it with authority, in subjection to the Creator,” she says. At the core of the creation story, she believes, is the “truth that humans are made in the image of God, sharing some of the capacities unique to God, such as freedom to choose, creativity, authority over creation.” Without an informed biblical foundation, she believes, concern for the environment falls prey to sentimentalism; idolotry of nature; bioegalitarianism (which “elevates animals, devalues humans”); and biocentrism (which “disregards the Biblical notion that where human needs and non-human needs are in conflict, priority goes to meeting the human needs”). Thompson sees it as “essential for children to interact directly with nature before being presented with abstractions about its importance. It’s not whether they will care. . . . It’s also about why.”

Yet, a new movement within environmentalism suggests that her faith and an intensified effort to protect nature, and expose children to it, are not at odds.

We cannot care for God if we do not care for his creation. “The extent that we separate our children from creation is the extent to which we separate them from the creator—from God,” says Paul Gorman,
founder and director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, headquartered in Amherst, Massachusetts. In Gorman’s view, “Any religious faith that acts as an accomplice to this separation is heretical and sinful. Many of us are coming to share this radical view.” Radical, yes, but not fringe. Gorman’s organization, formed in 1993, is an alliance of major Jewish and Christian faith groups and denominations. Its four founding partners include the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network. Gorman describes a growing, faith-based environmental movement—one that defies liberal or conservative stereotypes.

This coalition isn’t new. In 1986, I visited Whatcom County, Washington, a heartbreakingly beautiful farming region steeped in Dutch religious traditions. There, Concerned Christian Citizens, a non-profit group, campaigned against abortion and for the environment. “We have the ethic of Christian stewardship,” the organization’s director, Henry Bierlink, told me. “The American attitude toward the environment has been shaped by the Biblical edict to ‘subdue the Earth.’ But we believe that God gave us the responsibility to care for the land, not subdue it, that we are only visitors on the land, and that we need to pass it on with care.” Whatcom County’s culture religiously walked its ecological talk. Many farmers there refused to sell their land to developers, and instead worked with the Trust for Public Land to protect their green pastures forever. In a cover essay for the magazine
Nature Conservancy
, Gorman describes how this ethic is spreading, especially since 1990, when Pope John Paul II suggested that Christians were morally responsible for the protection of God’s creation.

Today, in Arkansas, when a synagogue celebrates Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish New Year of Trees, kids plant the seeds of native grasses. Meanwhile, Catholic bishops of the Pacific Northwest issue a pastoral letter declaring the Columbia River watershed a “sacred commons . . . a revelation
of God’s presence . . . [that] requires us to enter into a gradual process of conversion and change.”

Some religious traditions might consider such talk blasphemous animism—nature worship. But in Raleigh, North Carolina, the
News and Observer
reports how one Baptist church’s “environmental mission group” sells worm-composting bins at the church’s alternative Christmas fair and holds a “kids and nature connect” camp. Places of worship around the country now offer courses in biblical ecology, where they teach the lessons of biodiversity to be found in Genesis. “The debate has moved on,” Gorman says. “It would be understandable for some people to hear the language of dominion and see it as causal of a rapacious attitude. But human beings didn’t need scripture to rape the natural world. Yes, it’s important to think in terms of stewardship instead of domination, but I have always made the point that given the power of human agency over nature now, we have dominion whether we like it or not.”

Just as many places of worship are going green, environmental organizations are increasingly likely to evoke the spiritual. The Nature Conservancy, for example, describes its land purchases as acts of redemption. The Trust for Public Land says it translates “the soul of the land into the soul of the culture.” Bill McKibben, author of the 1989 environmentalist classic,
The End of Nature
, has since suggested an imaginary newspaper headline that would sum up our age perfectly: “‘Humans Supplant God; Everything Changes.’” So what does it mean when Sunday school begins to sound like Ecology 101 and environmentalists (many of them church-allergic) begin to sound like street preachers? Good news for both.

We should not underestimate the power of this new synergy to shape the relationship between the next generation and nature.

Faith-based environmentalism can create strange bedfellows and powerful unions. In 2003, Gorman and a group of evangelicals launched
the now-famous “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign, directed against gas-guzzling SUVs. In 2002, the National Council of Churches and the Sierra Club sponsored a joint TV ad opposing oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (That same year, the Senate narrowly rejected drilling in the refuge.) Potentially, places of worship could be more important institutions than schools in connecting the young with the natural world. “More and more people of faith, as they grow in their awareness of the connection between nature and religion, are bringing nature into the discussion,” says Gorman. “But you have to start with parents. First and above all is for parents to understand this connection itself. The future is not about designing curriculum. It’s about awakening to creation. Kids have to feel that this connection is vital and deep in their
parents
. They see through us all the time. They know what is fake and feigned. As the connection becomes more vivid to us, our commitment to it becomes more authentic, and children respond to that authenticity. The most important thing is the
awakening
. That joy of awakening and discovery is what it’s like to be a child.” The recommitment to the spirit-nature connection must be that kind of process. “And it can be. And it’s wonderful.”