When I was a kid, and our family was driving somewhere, I often had my eyes trained not on the natural palette of browns, blues, and greens out my window, but the black print on the white pages of whatever book I was currently reading. At times, this drove my father nuts. “Look out the window!” he’d say. “Life is passing you by!” (Actually, my father would never have said “Life is passing you by.” But memory is a funny thing, and now this is how I remember him talking. Hmm, faulty childhood memory… This may come up again…)
From reading Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods, I get the feeling that the role of fathers on long car trips (if I may be allowed to essentialize for a moment) have not changed, but the media have. No more are we worried about children losing their—their what? Childhoods, humanity, essential goodness?—in novels or comic books, but in movies and video games.
Enter Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, one of the most offensive books I’ve read in some time. Put simply, it represents the worst instincts of activism masquerading as research, the kind of thing that academics should ignore, but will certainly sell copies and maybe get you on Oprah. And it will give undeserved scientific confidence (is “scienciness” a word? paging Stephen Colbert…) to parents who want their kids to play outside more. Worst of all, it suggests a tie between ADHD and autism, and lack of exposure to nature, then foisting this poorly-evidenced claim upon a reading public saturated with parents whose children are being treated for them.
But wait! “This term is by no means a medical diagnosis,” he assures us on page 10, before going on to use the scientific connotations of that phrase, as well as comparisons to Ritalin and autism, and dubious-at-best claims that sure sound medical to me. On page 32, he quotes James Sallis as saying that “the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors,” while “an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems.” The evidence? Louv provides none. Why should he? He’s just telling us what one guy said, after all. “[N]ew studies suggest,” Louv tells us, “that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children’s cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.” Really? What research? Louv won’t tell us, and one begins to see a pattern. Last Child in the Woods is filled with tales about “recent research,” and what “studies suggest,” and what “some are worried” about. I would like to think that my high school juniors can see through rhetorical tactics like this.
One paragraph later, Louv ends the first part of the book with a discussion of his phrase “nature-deficit disorder,” and has the nerve to say “I hesitate to introduce this term. Perhaps a more appropriate definition will emerge as the scientific research continues.” In other words, I know it’s intellectually dishonest to make this comparison, but I want to give the impression of scientific validity and authority where none exists.
The problem with this isn’t that he’s wrong that we should do more to preserve the environment, or that children should spend more time outdoors. These are legitimate conversations we should have, and I suspect Louv and I would be on the same side in many of them. It’s that the evidence for every claim is disturbingly predictable: a grave proclamation from a questionable source, followed by an unnamed study, all drenched in nostalgia. This ensures that the book will convince nobody who isn’t already inclined to agree with him; fortunately for Louv, there is an unquenchable market for unembarrassed nostalgia.
Nor is Louv shy about claiming conversions. In “Leave No Child Inside,” a piece for Orion, he writes about Derek Thomas, then vice-chairman and CIO of Newland Communities. After reading Last Child, Louv says, Thomas “said he wanted to do something positive.” He invited Louv to speak at a conference of real estate developers; Louv gave a “sermonette,” in which he told the group that “they destroy natural habitat, design communities in ways that discourage any real contact with nature, and include covenants that virtually criminalize outdoor play—outlawing tree-climbing, fort-building, even chalk-drawing on sidewalks.” The developers then caucus, and come up with some possible solutions:
A half hour after Thomas’s challenge, the groups reported their ideas. Among them: leave some land and native habitat in place (that’s a good start); employ green design principles; incorporate nature trails and natural waterways; throw out the conventional covenants and restrictions that discourage or prohibit natural play and rewrite the rules to encourage it; allow kids to build forts and tree houses or plant gardens; and create small, on-site nature centers.
What Louv’s anecdote about the developer Derek Thomas and the “envisioning session” actually tells us is that nobody is against the idea of kids communing with nature. And after his speech, the developers realize they could leave some of the natural habitat intact! While not entirely taking them at face value, Louv does not seem to consider the unlikelihood of someone in that room standing up to say, “Screw nature and the kids, I need to pay for my summer home.”
Were he a lonely nostalgic, it would be easy enough to ignore Mr. Louv’s book. Instead, his book has become part of a movement that includes the “No Child Left Inside Act of 2007,” a demonstrably unserious document whose authors, unsatisfied with having written Louv’s ludicrous “disorder” into our lexicon, insist that it be written into law as well. I would like to say that their hearts are, like Louv’s is, in the right place. They position NCLI against NCLB (the full name of which has been so parodied that one might’ve hoped they would let it rest, but no). Again, with an ounce of intellectual honesty on their side, I would gladly join them. Many points they make are not only fair, but deserve national attention. As the No Child Left Inside Coalition puts it:
“Environmental education is critical now because of the complex environmental challenges confronting the nation and world, including human-induced climate change, air and water pollution and the loss of sensitive habitats.”
Elsewhere, on the same site:
“Parents, teachers and public health officials are growing increasingly alarmed at the rising incidences of childhood obesity, juvenile diabetes and related health problems. In all, about one in three children in America are overweight or obese. While the causes of such conditions are varied, it’s clear that one factor is that young people are spending less time outdoors, whether it’s because recess periods are being cut back or because kids spend more time inside after school and on the weekends.”
These are serious problems that deserve serious discussions, perhaps even legislative action; we are unlikely to have either one if groups like the NCLIC depend upon nonsense terms like “nature deficit disorder,” and unattributed statistics tying reduced Attention Deficit Disorder to contact with nature, as does this video from the NCLIC:
One might foresee how nature-worship becomes technophobia somewhat easily, and some NCLI advocates see a pretty obvious binary choice to be had here. Lowell Monke, Assistant Professor of Education at Wittenberg University, would have us “unplug” schools, and wrote an op-ed in Orion last year to that effect. “Nature is,” he said, “of course, the richest resource for firsthand experience.” Experience of what? He might’ve just as easily said, Libraries are, of course, the richest resource for literature. Or, in keeping with Louv’s and Monke’s tone, the richest resource for tapping into the expanses of human experience. But then he would be E.D. Hirsch. Like Hirsch, Louv and Monke present us with a version of their own ideal childhoods, an obviously white, middle-class, male version, and hold it up not only to be sought after but legislated toward.
Louv comes closest to admitting this, and getting to the core of his motivation for writing and activism, in an interview with the Washington Post from June of last year. After the author mentions the potential perils of “nature deficit disorder,” including being “more prone to a range of childhood problems, including obesity, depression and attention disorders,” Louv tries to reel in his fearmongering.
“I’m not saying that a child who grows up without nature is going to have terrible problems,” Louv said, “but if you look at the studies that show what nature does give kids, it’s unfortunate that so many children are missing out on that.”
Nobody is against kids going outside. Nobody is against community-building. There’s nothing wrong with having children interact with the elderly, or play, or daydream. But these are not arguments for “unplugging” schools. You can have these things without casting digital media as the villain, and without pseudomedical assertions and unsupported claims.
After I’d written most of this post, I was eating with my daughter. She pointed to a potted plant. “That’s a forest fern,” she said. “It doesn’t need very much sunlight.” Where’d she learn that, I asked. “What Plants Need: The Rabbit Who Knew,” she said. “And the cactus doesn’t need any water at all.” This is a five-year-old who loves nature–she was collecting cicada shells last fall–and also loves cartoons, and reading, and playing in all forms, with and without electronic media. I intend to share all of these things with her, not only those that occur outside, and hope that she will look back on all of them with equal nostalgia, even if it means one day she will regret that “so many kids are missing out” on what she had.
