Richard Louv is an anecdote machine. As we milled about near the door of a Seattle cafe awaiting lunch-hour seating, he kept up a constant stream of witty, telling stories -- about "no running" signs on playgrounds, clueless environmental leaders, suffering outdoor-gear execs. I started fumbling for my recorder.
Richard Louv.
It's no wonder Louv's got a trove of such chestnuts: As a longtime journalist (he's written for just about every leading U.S. newspaper and magazine, and now has a regular column in the San Diego Union-Tribune) and the author of seven books about family, community, and nature, he's been talking to kids and parents about the maladies and inanities of modern life for years.
His latest book bears the self-explanatory title Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. After tens of thousands of years of children playing and working primarily outdoors, the last few generations have seen such interaction with nature vanish almost entirely. The implications -- for children's physical and mental health, and for the future of environmentalism -- are immense, Louv argues.
But he stresses that there is hope -- indeed, that response to the book has him more hopeful than he was when he began writing it. After all, in a world of intractable problems and social malaise, his encouragement to parents is simple and easily achieved: Take your kids outside. (Read part two of this interview in Gristmill.)
What led you to this particular subject?
This is my seventh book, and the second was called Childhood's Future. I went across the country to interview 3,000 parents and kids about the landscape of family life, which was radically changing. One theme that surprised me was this sense that something profound was changing in the relationship between children and nature.
One little boy said the reason he preferred playing indoors was that's where all the electrical outlets are. I heard that kind of thing over and over. And the parents were saying, "I don't understand -- how come the kids won't go outside?" The chapter I wrote about it got picked up by Sierra Magazine and Utne Reader.
Over the years I did some other books, but I kept watching the research on this. The empirical evidence for the split between children and nature is thin because longitudinal studies don't exist for the most part. Nobody thought to ask the question. We always assumed this relationship [between kids and nature] would be ongoing. Some of the researchers were referring to my chapter as anecdotal evidence, and I thought, if I'm an expert on this we're really in trouble.
What we do have is circumstantial and anecdotal evidence. We know what kids do: 44 hours a week plugged into electronic media, more time in the car, organized sports, all of that. We know what our own eyes and experience tell us.
What empirical research does exist?
There's empirical work measuring the radius kids tend to go away from their house. I think between 1970 and 1994 it shrunk to one-ninth of what it had been. There are a few studies like that.
The call of the wild.
But the really interesting research is linking nature to healthy child development. Oddly enough, this topic has not been studied. Now it's starting to be. A lot of it comes out of the biophilia hypothesis. In all the studies -- prisoners in prisons, people in the infirmary -- those who have a view of a natural landscape heal faster. Now they're observing kids playing on natural playgrounds, as opposed to concrete playgrounds. On a natural playground, children think more creatively and are much more likely to invent their own games and play more cooperatively.
There's research on attention-deficit disorder at the University of Illinois, ongoing studies showing that a little bit of exposure to nature decreases ADD symptoms -- even in kids as young as 5. The researchers suggest we add nature therapy to the other two traditional therapies: behavioral modification and Ritalin and other stimulants.
I would also turn it around and ask: Could it be that at least some of the huge increase in ADD has something to do with the fact we took nature away from kids?
While I plead guilty to romanticizing my childhood in the woods, this isn't an exercise in nostalgia. When you think about it, for tens of thousands of years children spent much of their childhood playing or working in natural settings. Within the space of two or three decades in Western society, particularly in the United States, that's in danger of ending. This is a radical change in a very short period of time. It's got to have important, perhaps profound implications for mental health, physical health, and spiritual health -- for who we are. We need to take the long view.
What forces have conspired to keep kids inside?
Game over.
Photo: iStockphoto.
Obviously electronics are part of it. Video games and television are fun, and very distracting, and very convenient for parents. I'm not a Luddite. I love my Macintosh -- probably too much, as my wife will tell you. I don't think that video games are the spawn of the devil. I do think it's a little tough to have a sense of wonder while you're playing Grand Theft Auto (which, by the way, I played with my sons -- they've never let me forget that I tried to run over everything in sight).
When I first started interviewing parents, I thought access to nature would be the most important reason kids aren't going outside. The woods I played in as a kid, in the suburbs on the edge of Kansas City, have been bulldozed. But if you go to the new edge of Kansas City, it looks just like where I grew up. Kids can walk out their back door into the woods if they want. Parents there say the same thing: kids aren't going outside. So access is important, but it's not at the top of the list.
The No. 1 reason parents give is: they're scared. Of "stranger danger." Child abductions. That fear is changing our lives. The irony is, when you look at the statistics on abductions, almost all are by family members, and the number of abductions has been going down for about a decade. There's a Duke University study from last year that says kids are safer outside the home than at any time since the 1970s.
If those numbers are going down, what's going up? I'm afraid it's people in our profession. I like to think it's those TV guys, but it's also print media. You watch CNN or Fox or MSNBC and they take a handful of really terrible crimes against children and repeat them over and over and over again. When they get done telling us about the crime, they tell us about the trial over and over and over again. It's no accident people think there's a bogeyman on every corner. We're literally being conditioned to live in a state of fear, and this predates 9/11.
So parental anxiety is really No. 1 on the list?
Yep. One of the things that's pleased me is, right after the book came out I started getting emails from parents who have been getting their kids outdoors. One woman wrote and said they'd made a deliberate decision as to where they lived; their kids were spending every weekend in tents out in the woods behind their house, running in to get food and running back out. She wrote, "Now I know why I'm doing what I'm doing and why it's right."
A lot of parents have been getting their kids outdoors based on nostalgia or instinct, but didn't have that body of evidence. We're an evidence-based society. So that evidence is really affirming to parents who are getting social pressure. What do you mean Johnny isn't enrolled in Suzuki violin lessons? What do you mean you let your kids build a tree house? Don't you know they could fall out?
This gets into the issue of comparative risk. Pediatricians will tell you they're not treating very many broken bones in kids anymore. What they are seeing now are repetitive-stress injuries in children, which generally last a lot longer, sometimes permanently, compared to most broken bones.
I don't know if it's a human thing or an American thing, but people's risk assessment is just awful.
Some of it is parents and institutions: if there's one thing they're almost as scared of as strangers, it's strange lawyers. It's the litigiousness of the society that's probably the reason schools put up "no running" signs on the playground.
Early in the book I have a chapter called "The Criminalization of Natural Play." Add up all the federal, state, and local laws -- and all the well-meaning and probably necessary restrictions on kids picking up horny toads and the like. Then add to those the enormous increase in covenants, conditions, and restrictions -- about 75 million Americans now live in communities covered by these things, to different degrees. On the first day of the book tour, a woman told me that her community association had just outlawed chalk drawing on sidewalks -- which, you know, does lead to cocaine use.
Try to put up a basketball hoop in some of these communities, let alone build a tree house. The message to kids and parents is very clear: nature's in the past. It doesn't count anymore. The future's in electronics. The bogeyman lives in the woods. Playing outdoors is illicit and maybe even illegal.
I'll never forget the cover story in Parade several years ago: "Dangerous Invaders in Your Neighborhood." There was a picture of a raccoon on the cover.
Wait, are you defending raccoons, sir?
[Laughs.] I am not now, nor have I ever been, a raccoon.
Most of what you cite are instrumental benefits: better at school, or more well-adjusted. Is that tactical?
That's what's been studied.
More rocks than you can poke a stick at.
But there's a chapter near the end of the book called "The Spiritual Necessity of Nature for Children." The most important word in the book to me is "wonder." The root of all spiritual life is that early sense of wonder. When was the first time you had that sense of wonder? It may have been something simple: one of my first memories is watching the dust fall in front of a window. But I also remember going out and turning over rocks, and seeing a universe of bugs that lived underneath -- a parallel universe.
There is another world. When a child listens to the leaves in the trees, they sense something bigger than their parents' problems. That's more important than keeping grade averages up.
One of the things that's surprised me: I thought I would get some grief from conservative Christians over nature worship. It's a deep issue among very conservative Christians.
Paganism.
Yeah. And I took that seriously. Well, as it turns out one of the big proponents of the book is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Whatever one's spirituality, I think we all understand deep down that a sense of wonder is the beginning of it.
How can urban and suburban areas capture the benefits of getting kids outside?
Not every kid can go to Yosemite or the Cascades. There are kids in my home city of San Diego that haven't seen the beach. We have to do two things.
First, we have to look at how to increase the amount of nature in urban areas through green urbanism. It's more popular in Western Europe than here, but interesting, wonderful kinds of eco-cities are being designed. In fact, China's gonna outpace us on that. We need to bring nature into the city, erase the artificial line between urban and natural. I also have a speculative chapter called "Where the Wild Things Will Be" about the potential resettlement of Great Plains towns that have emptied out with new kinds of eco-towns. I know I'm out on a limb on that -- but that's where the best fruit is.
More simple than waiting for green architecture is what's called "nearby nature." Perhaps you have a ravine behind your house, or a little woods at the end of the cul-de-sac. That is hugely important to children. Adults sometimes can't see the importance of it because they expect nature to be so much bigger, but to that child, that ravine is a universe. Paying attention to that -- protecting those little spaces in cities -- is a step in the right direction.
In older cities there's often more nature than we suspect. Can you imagine a city building Central Park today? They're still finding new species in Central Park. In newer cities, everything is over-manicured, over-controlled. What is a kid supposed to do? I'm just as concerned about kids growing up in those kinds of neighborhoods as I am about inner-city kids.
There does seem to be a huge class-based gap in the amount of nature and unstructured play available.
I went with some gang members up to a nature preserve in the mountains near San Diego. These were really tough guys in their late teens, early 20s. They were with the Urban Corps and had been brought up to cut trails. The first morning in the woods, I realized these guys were terrified. People in these kinds of programs often report that phenomenon. One guy said, "It's too noisy out here." I said, "What are you talking about? You're from a neighborhood where you hear gunfire in the background." He says, "Yeah, but there's about four or five sounds in my neighborhood and I know what they all mean. There are a lot of sounds out here and they seem to mean something, but I don't know what it is."
Watching these young guys was wonderful -- as the day went on, the cynicism left their eyes and the flat affect fell from their faces. By the end of the day, these were 8-year-olds jumping over a creek. The people who work in these programs see that little miracle all the time. No kid in America or anywhere else should go without that miracle.
Read Louv's thoughts on getting kids excited about environmentalism in part two of this interview, on Gristmill.
Read a review of Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods.
Ask Umbra on trash, toxics, and tots
Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1
Seventh Generation launches anti-toxics campaign with wee gimmick
Comments
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:40 pm
30 Mar 2006
His remarks about covenants stirred my blood. My neighborhood has none. It is the most interesting place to walk through you will ever see. Wealthy neighborhoods with covenants are mind-numbing places to walk or drive through, filled with stuffy people trying to out do each other with their status symbols.
Seattle has a policy about tree houses: "Go for it!" I built one for my daughter that is a dusy, a few feet from the city sidewalk in a neighbor's tree (with their permission of course). Their baby will one day put it to use as well.
I disagree in that isolated, sterile green spaces in neighborhoods would fit the bill. The fields and woods I explored were filled with surprises, crayfish, red-bellied snakes, garter snakes, praying mantises, you name it. The city parks filled with trees were of no interest. You have got to have more than just city parks.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/7/9/181017/2895
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Lonna Posted 10:17 pm
30 Mar 2006
We have lived in New Zealand for the past 3 summers (their winters), and my children and I have been amazed at the beauty of the natural South Island. The kids ski the Southern Alps, hike hours through native forests to waterfalls where they can drink right from the stream, 4X4ed to hidden valleys full of caves and rare ferns, ridden on boats across huge, clean lakes, taken boat tours on underground stream through glowworm caves, touched stallagtites, fed rare, wild birds like the Kea (the only Alpine parrot in the world, found only on the South Island of New Zealand), and touched strange insects like the large Wetas that live in cave mouths or in the forests.
I say "Good on 'ya, Mate! for encouraging our children to exchange video games for butterflies and T.V. for real, up-close views of plants, birds, mammals, insects, etc.
Keep spreading your wonderful ideas. I am a cancer survivor, writer, and photographer, and my books all have some type of nature theme (you can check them out on my website at http://www.lonnawilliams.com or type my name in at http://www.amazon.com).
All the best!
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EcoReason Posted 2:02 am
31 Mar 2006
So far, however, these efforts seem to be limited geographically and demographically. They seem to be limited to places where chunks of forest and/or seashore are available nearby - rural and ex-urban America. As a result, they mostly serve the economic elite and/or the social majority. I think some might say, 'well, that is because those are places where nature is,' dismissing the possibility that wild nature can be found in cities.
But wild nature can be found in the city and probably shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as "sterile green places." Recent studies are showing the importance of any exposure to the wild in kids' emotional and intellectual development. Francis E. Kuo a social psychologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has published findings showing that even the mere presence of a tree outside the window of a child living in the ghetto improves self-discipline, behavior, and academic achievement ("Views of Nature and Self-Discipline: Evidence from Inner City Children," Journal of Environmental Psychology 21 (2001)). I think we should take these kinds of studies seriously and think about ways to put more wild nature all over our urban habitats - street trees, boulevards, flower pots, bird houses, parks and greens, etc. - starting with the inner city. And we should encourage urban schools to use these urban wilds as their outdoor classrooms. Every practical exposure to wild nature we can create is going to contribute to the changes we seek.
Peace,
Kip
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:38 am
31 Mar 2006
Most cities have their parks filled with trees. They are shady, but boring places. They just don't cross the necessary threshold for curiousity and discovery needed by young minds.
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EcoReason Posted 6:15 am
31 Mar 2006
And any conscious encounter with the wild, again, so says Henry, brings value, because it lifts the spirit, ennobles the mind, and provides the most delightfully complex referent for one's thoughts and ideas. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Thoreau. Francis Kuo's research supports this idea. There is much more value in urban nature (and in working very hard to enhance urban nature) than the U.S. environmental movement's 'wilderness' fetish allows. And it doesn't diminish wilderness one iota to recognize that fact.
Peace,
Kip
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:22 pm
31 Mar 2006
I don't think we have a genetic propensity for biophilia as E.O. Wilson wants to believe.
I think a love for nature is largely a result of early childhood imprinting. Most kids go through a "bug" phase if given the opportunity to see bugs. There is nothing more interesting than a bug when you are three or four. But most outgrow the fascination and that is the end of that. Some of us never do. Maybe we are anomalies. Maybe our brains are hypersensitive to discovery and diversity.
It is similar to the music you learn to like. If a parent loves Elvis, or classical, and plays this music consistently as their children grow up, odds are real high that their children will learn to love the same music. When I had a father, he was always dragging home animals to show us. Usually baby animals displaced by his bulldozers. Maybe I was imprinted.
How important is it that people love nature? I honestly don't know. I wish more people did, to help promote my desire to save it. Humanity is destroying the biodiversity of the planet. Will it hasten our own demise? I actually doubt it. Destroying nature may actually allow us to hang in there even longer. A world of stripped bare of biodiversity, leaving only people, their pet cats and dogs--shiver.
Life is mostly a power struggle. If nature is going to be saved, as happened with the end of slavery and the beginning of the civil rights movement, it will have to be forced down the throats of those who stand to gain short term profit from its destruction because that is human nature. Wilson got that part right in his book on human nature.
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caniscandida Posted 7:26 pm
31 Mar 2006
Louv and Biodiv are rather grim about what wrongs we have done to our urban children. My feeling is, visiting the green areas of cities regularly and often, and visiting wilder areas outside of cities also regularly if less often, is not a bad way of starting a young person out on understanding life on earth.
It is a big ethical question, anyway, to what extent a parent ought to inculcate his/her values into a child. That is never going to be absolutely possible. In countless ways we can suggest to our children the things that are important and valuable to us. Let us not underestimate their intelligence. A smart, thoughtful parent will be able to get across to his children why he wishes that they all live in a city, on the one hand, and why he loves, say, the Porcupine caribou herd, on the other.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:08 am
01 Apr 2006
Those are not my words. You have also confused my opinions with Louv's.
It is my opinion (not Louv's) that urban parks and gardens have "little" to teach or inspire kids about nature. The word "nothing" makes its first appearance with your comment above. Like most everything else in life, it's a matter of degree. My take would be to improve on access to nature, yours I believe is that existing city parks and gardens are adequate.
Louv and Biodiv are rather grim about what wrongs we have done to our urban children
Again, it is Louv, not me, promoting the idea that our children are suffering from nature deficiency.
It is a big ethical question, anyway, to what extent a parent ought to inculcate his/her values into a child.
Exposing children to nature, letting their natural propensity for curiosity and wonder to take it from there, is a far cry from inculcating them. The word "inculcate" would be more appropriate to describe, say... what is happening in many of America's home schools, which also double as religious indoctrination camps.
As for rats in subways, Louv makes a good point in that imprinting can go both ways. I could see how kids exposed only to disease carrying sewer rats and cereal boxes full of cockroaches could develop an aversion to nature. I wrote a piece last summer about a visit to one of Seattle's best urban parks. The signs warning us to stay away from the water were not necessary--the garbage floating in it combined with the stench was enough. Similarly, cemeteries, although filled with trees and flowers, might not be the best places to teach children about nature.
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Green Lorraine Posted 2:34 pm
01 Apr 2006
I have no doubt that Richard Louv's book will prove invaluable as an educational aid in dealing with the modern malais of disconnected youth - he is spot on - even to recognizing the problem of the litigous society we have created.
A bicycle helmet might very well be an essential investment in our physical health, but reconnecting with nature is an essential investment in our spiritual health too - far more important, in my view.
Much of my youth was spent in prayer and history classes - neither of which benefited my spirit to anywhere near the degree of reconnecting with nature... and many children in our society are now unfortunately excluded from an association with their grandparents.
I think Naomi's comments are very sad - and can but hope that they do not preclude too many children from the benefits of reconnecting with nature.
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caniscandida Posted 5:41 pm
01 Apr 2006
Also, it is an often-reported anecdotal experience of many urban children, that when they are taken to some sort of state park, far from the city, on a field trip, their greatest impression is how horrible the biting and stinging insects are, and how they wish to return to the city, where there are no such insects, and never to go back to that dumb old park ever again. That is anecdotal, mind you, but I can assure you, I have heard kids say things like that. Unfortunately, that should be held against the teachers, for their ill-preparedness in warning and defending their young charges.
So I allow, after all, that you are right, in mistrusting the environmental sympathies of children raised in cities. I was initially defending a rather well-educated class of parents, who understood their responsibility to be to give their kids a balanced education. I did not say "city parks and gardens are adequate" for that purpose, but they are most certainly a good part of a start. Nevertheless, I agree with you, there is not nearly enough in the experiences of very many of our urban children to encourage them to value wilderness and biodiversity.
What is called for, clearly, is NOT anti-Eastern, anti-urban contempt on the part of environmentalists from "better places." What is called for is more well-designed green spaces in old cities; and much better environmental education of our children.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:58 am
02 Apr 2006
Roaches are ubiquitous, especially in warmer climates and lower economic brackets. I kept roaches in jars on occasion--the ones the size of a man's thumb that would fly across the room at night during breeding season. My mom indulged me any way she could, letting me keep anything I wanted for a pet--except poisonous snakes.
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fgoodwin Posted 1:10 am
03 Jul 2006
Fred Goodwin
Boy Scout volunteer
San Antonio, TX
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fgoodwin Posted 6:58 am
02 Aug 2006
In his view, Scouting has lost its outdoor focus and is trying to be all things to all people (he says this more with respect to Girl Scouts, but he says BSA suffers from some of the same lack of focus).
To some extent, I think we have forgotten the "outing" in Scouting. But it varies by Troop and Pack. My son's Troop goes camping every month, but I don't know that such camping leads to the same sense of the wonder of the outdoors that I got as a kid by just wandering, unsupervised, in the woods.
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