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Summary
Summary
The Book That Launched an International Movement
"An absolute must-read for parents." -- The Boston Globe
"It rivals Rachel Carson's Silent Spring ." -- The Cincinnati Enquirer
"I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are," reports a fourth grader. But it's not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It's also their parents' fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools' emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.
As children's connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity.
In Last Child in the Woods , Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply--and find the joy of family connectedness in the process.
Now includes
A Field Guide with 100 Practical Actions We Can Take
Discussion Points for Book Groups, Classrooms, and Communities
Additional Notes by the Author
New and Updated Research from the U.S. and Abroad
Richard Louv's new book, Our Wild Calling , is available now.
Author Notes
Richard Louv, recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal, is the author of seven books. The chairman of the Children & Nature Network, he is also honorary co-chair of the National Forum on Children and Nature
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Louv had an unnerving epiphany. He realized that, as a baby boomer, he was among the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water. He was among the last Americans who were inclined and allowed to play freely outdoors, that is, to romp, explore, and dream in nature. This is a radical change, and Louv set out to determine the consequences. The result is an eye-opening book of discovery that charts why and how we have become alienated from the rest of the living world and what harm this separation is doing children. In an increasingly indoor culture, Louv observes, American kids are growing up bereft of the awe and inspiration immersion in nature provides, mesmerized, instead, by the slick realm of the screen. Louv parses the many reasons for this shift and quantifies the deleterious mental and physical health effects attributable to what he calls nature-deficit disorder. Time spent in nature, researchers find, lowers stress and is intrinsic to learning and creativity. Experiencing ecstatic moments in nature also engenders more environmentally sound ways of living. Drawing on a remarkable array of artistic, philosophic, and scientific sources and writing with clarity and warmth, Louv presents a groundbreaking inquiry (updated and expanded from its original 2005 edition), that not only identifies a social malady with far-reaching impact but also offers commonsensical and pleasurable cures while tallying the profound benefits of renewing the bond between children and the great outdoors.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
In the film Immortal Beloved, the young Beethoven floats on his back in a pond, staring up at the cold points of light in the night sky, as the "Ode to Joy" from his 9th Symphony plays. The scene has stayed with me because it encapsulates that extraordinary euphoria experienced in childhood, often alone and often in response to nature. The American journalist Richard Louv has written Last Child in the Woods, a bestseller in the US, as a cri de coeur for our children (ie the cosseted young of the developed world). He has coined the term "nature deficit disorder" to describe how they no longer spend time alone, exploring nature. Louv passionately believes that this way of life can make a child less confident, less competent physically and mentally, sedentary and therefore often obese. Our literature is steeped in the idea of the childhood self in nature as the source of creative inspiration. The New Zealand poet James K Baxter believed that there was for the poet a physical place from childhood (in his case a cave set high above the sea) where poetry had its origin, to be returned to in the imagination. For Auden it was "the murmur of underground streams" in a "limestone landscape". For both Blake and Wordsworth, the connection between the child in nature and the creative act took on a spiritual dimension. As Louv puts it, "In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace." Louv believes that we have begun to over-parent. Even children's leisure time is carefully controlled. Key to the problem is the contemporary culture of fear. We keep our children close because we fear abduction, and yet a child is no more likely to be taken by a stranger today than 30 years ago. Louv estimates that the area beyond which children are not allowed to stray without adult supervision has shrunk by up to 89%. There is also the rise in anxiety about personal injury. Even here in the UK, a much less litigious society than America, "health and safety" seems to have become a bar to everything from climbing trees to running in the playground. Louv describes a world in which we are detached from the source of food, where there are no biological absolutes, where there is an ambivalent relationship between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, in which new suburbs constantly shrink open space. "A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rainforest - but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move. . . For a whole generation, nature is more abstraction than reality." But while painting this bleak picture, Louv is determinedly upbeat. He points to what he calls "green urbanism" in western Europe, the creation of urban areas which foster rather than destroy wildlife. Think of London, bristling with parks, bird sanctuaries, reservoirs, wetlands. Looking to the future, Louv advocates the development of green urbanism towards the "zoopolis" - the city conceived as part of the natural world, sustaining wildlife, with schoolchildren escaping the sanitised classroom and learning directly from nature. He believes that, ultimately, cities must shrink in size and that many of us will return to a semi-rural way of life. Will this utopia ever come about? Who knows? But on a more modest scale, Louv cites many instances of schemes to improve urban environments and the school playground, including the "eco-schools" movement in the UK. Perhaps a sense of solitude - of being alone with the "self" - is the key to the development of the creative imagination (which engenders both scientific and artistic invention). It seems important to leave children to get on with their own thing, although Louv stresses that the "thing" shouldn't be watching TV: he says that for each hour a pre-school child spends watching television a day, they are 10% more likely to develop attention deficit disorder. Get them reading, Louv says: the child who reads independently enters a world free from parental involvement and control. If, like me, you can't head for one of the Hebrides to raise rugged, self-sufficient, artistically creative children, what is to be done? It seems that we must give our children a sense that they control their world. Let them fiddle about at home under their own cognisance (without the telly on). Try to get them to experience nature every day on their own terms. Nature, whether on the shores of Lake Windermere or in your tiny back garden, is beautiful. Deny your child nature and you deny them beauty. Get them outside into the garden or park or even further afield and shoo them to what you regard as a safe distance, like Leontes in The Winter's Tale, admonishing them to "Go play, boy, play". Caption: article-child.1 Our literature is steeped in the idea of the childhood self in nature as the source of creative inspiration. The New Zealand poet James K Baxter believed that there was for the poet a physical place from childhood (in his case a cave set high above the sea) where poetry had its origin, to be returned to in the imagination. For Auden it was "the murmur of underground streams" in a "limestone landscape". For both Blake and Wordsworth, the connection between the child in nature and the creative act took on a spiritual dimension. As [Richard Louv] puts it, "In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace." Louv describes a world in which we are detached from the source of food, where there are no biological absolutes, where there is an ambivalent relationship between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, in which new suburbs constantly shrink open space. "A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rainforest - but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move. . . For a whole generation, nature is more abstraction than reality." But while painting this bleak picture, Louv is determinedly upbeat. He points to what he calls "green urbanism" in western Europe, the creation of urban areas which foster rather than destroy wildlife. Think of London, bristling with parks, bird sanctuaries, reservoirs, wetlands. - Steven Poole.
Excerpts
Excerpts
INTRODUCTION One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, "Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?" I asked what he meant. "Well, you're always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp." At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something I'd be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood-- and, I fear, too readily discount my children's experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important. He was right. Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact. Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment-- but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. That's exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child. As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered those woods even in my dreams. A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest--but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move. This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child--and adult--development. While I pay particular attention to children, my focus is also on those Americans born during the past two to three decades. The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature. Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions. As likely as not today, "summer camp" is a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp. For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear --to ignore. A recent television ad depicts a four-wheel-drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly beautiful mountain stream--while in the backseat two children watch a movie on a flip-down video screen, oblivious to the landscape and water beyond the windows. A century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier had ended. His thesis has been discussed and debated ever since. Today, a similar and more important line is being crossed. Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom--while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Wellmeaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields. In the patent-or-perish environment of higher education, we see the death of natural history as the more hands-on disciplines, such as zoology, give way to more theoretical and remunerative microbiology and genetic engineering. Rapidly advancing technologies are blurring the lines between humans, other animals, and machines. The postmodern notion that reality is only a construct--that we are what we program--suggests limitless human possibilities; but as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience. Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature-- in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature. Reducing that deficit--healing the broken bond between our young and nature--is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes--our daily lives. The following pages explore an alternative path to the future, including some of the most innovative environment-based school programs; a reimagining and redesign of the urban environment--what one theorist calls the coming "zoopolis"; ways of addressing the challenges besetting environmental groups; and ways that faith-based organizations can help reclaim nature as part of the spiritual development of children. Parents, children, grandparents, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, environmentalists, and researchers from across the nation speak in these pages. They recognize the transformation that is occurring. Some of them paint another future, in which children and nature are reunited-- and the natural world is more deeply valued and protected. During the research for this book, I was encouraged to find that many people now of college age--those who belong to the first generation to grow up in a largely de-natured environment--have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand what they have missed. This yearning is a source of power. These young people resist the rapid slide from the real to the virtual, from the mountains to the Matrix. They do not intend to be the last children in the woods. My sons may yet experience what author Bill McKibben has called "the end of nature," the final sadness of a world where there is no escaping man. But there is another possibility: not the end of nature, but the rebirth of wonder and even joy. Jackson's obituary for the American frontier was only partly accurate: one frontier did disappear, but a second one followed, in which Americans romanticized, exploited, protected, and destroyed nature. Now that frontier--which existed in the family farm, the woods at the end of the road, the national parks, and in our hearts--is itself disappearing or changing beyond recognition. But, as before, one relationship with nature can evolve into another. This book is about the end of that earlier time, but it is also about a new frontier--a better way to live with nature. Excerpted from Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments | p. xi |
Introduction | p. 1 |
Part I The New Relationship Between Children and Nature | |
1 Gifts of Nature | p. 7 |
2 The Third Frontier | p. 15 |
3 The Criminalization of Natural Play | p. 27 |
Part II Why the Young (and the Rest of Us) Need Nature | |
4 Climbing the Tree of Health | p. 39 |
5 A Life of the Senses: Nature vs. the Know-It-All State of Mind | p. 55 |
6 The "Eighth Intelligence" | p. 71 |
7 The Genius of Childhood: How Nature Nurtures Creativity | p. 86 |
8 Nature-Deficit Disorder and the Restorative Environment | p. 99 |
Part III The Best of Intentions: Why Johnnie and Jeannie Don't Play Outside Anymore | |
9 Time and Fear | p. 115 |
10 The Bogeyman Syndrome Redux | p. 123 |
11 Don't Know Much About Natural History: Education as a Barrier to Nature | p. 133 |
12 Where Will Future Stewards of Nature Come From? | p. 146 |
Part IV The Nature-Child Reunion | |
13 Bringing Nature Home | p. 163 |
14 Scared Smart: Facing the Bogeyman | p. 178 |
15 Telling Turtle Tales: Using Nature as a Moral Teacher | p. 189 |
Part V The Jungle Blackboard | |
16 Natural School Reform | p. 203 |
17 Camp Revival | p. 227 |
Part VI Wonder Land: Opening the Fourth Frontier | |
18 The Education of Judge Thatcher: Decriminalizing Natural Play | p. 237 |
19 Cities Gone Wild | p. 245 |
20 Where the Wild Things Will Be: A New Back-to-the-Land Movement | p. 271 |
Part VII To Be Amazed | |
21 The Spiritual Necessity of Nature for the Young | p. 291 |
22 Fire and Fermentation: Building a Movement | p. 307 |
23 While It Lasts | p. 315 |
Notes | p. 317 |
Suggested Reading | p. 329 |
Index | p. 333 |
A Field Guide to Last Child in the Woods | p. 345 |