The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

Abstract

200 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 16 No. 1 (2006) ISSN: 1546-2250 Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder Louv, Richard (2005). Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books; 336 pages. $24.95. ISBN 1565123913. Author and journalist Richard Louv’s stated purpose here is to document the radical transformation of the culture in which American children grow up, a transformation in which “young people are being taught to avoid direct experience in nature.” The New York Times review of this book (McKee 2005) alluded to the unsettling implications of these changes in the review title, “Growing up Denatured.” Indeed, what is winning this book popular attention is the catchy term “nature deficit disorder,” coined by Louv and his editor at Algonquin Books. It is a clever way to define this change as pathological (which it is), and to shift onto those who would neglect nature the burden of proof to justify how this neglect benefits children’s welfare. Just as Hurricane Katrina has provided a convenient, though tragic, wedge to force a reluctant citizenry to discuss global warming, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) provides Louv a vehicle for the discussion of the broader issues and implications of children’s changed relationship to the natural world. ADD is prevalent among the mental disorders suffered by nearly eight million children in the United States. It is a persistent and disturbing pattern of inattention or hyperactivity, and an issue of heightened concern among parents and educators. ADD is increasingly treated with powerful and largely untested drugs such as Ritalin. However, new empirical research indicates that being in a natural green environment boosts a child’s attention span and actually alleviates symptoms of ADD. In particular, Louv cites Taylor, Kuo and Sullivan (2001), researchers at the University of Illinois, to show that the greener the setting, the more the relief. This research supports Louv’s personal claim that, as a child, “the woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.” Louv summarizes the restorative effect of nature identified by Rachel and 201 Stephen Kaplan (1998) through research based on William James’ work on involuntary attention. His weaving of personal story with thorough research throughout the book is a very effective means of engaging the lay reader on both personal and potentially political levels. What Louv makes clear in his summary of the research is how little we actually know beyond anecdote about children and the outdoors. In fact, not much has changed since Roger Hart noted in Children’s Experience of Place (1979) how much more we know of the natural history of most animals than of human children. “Who is going to pay for that research?” Louv cynically asks. “What toy can we sell for natural play?” As pressure for academic performance mounts, and as “good intentions” mandate that we supply children with ever more computers, television, car travel and inside activities, we have not, until recently, sought to quantify the effects of the loss of what Yale psychologist Stephen Kellert terms “direct experience of nature” (Kahn and Kellert 2002). Louv wants us to consider that cost: “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.” Much of the academic debate about children and nature is derailed at the definitional stage. What is nature? The material world and all its objects—including machines and man? Or is nature everything apart from man and the manmade (and therefore a fragile wilderness that must be protected from humans)? Humans are part of the wildness, Louv says, the “energy and richness of wild systems,” thereby endorsing with John Milton via Gary Snyder the poetic proposition that nature is a “wilderness of sweets (p. 8).” Nature means, in this book, natural wildness: “biodiversity, abundance—(whether) related loose parts in a backyard or a rugged mountain ridge” (p. 9). Louv thus comes down on the side of nature as phenomenological richness and the freedom to explore, citing Nicholson’s (1971) theory of loose parts, Robin Moore’s (1997) advocacy for natural...