Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary on Peter Kahn’s “Encountering the Other” Robert Michael Pyle Gray’s River, Washington Citation: Pyle, Robert Michael. (2005). “Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary on Peter Kahn’s ‘Encountering the Other’.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 398-xxx. Peter Kahn’s close encounter with the wild via hard, sharp objects in a backcountry river certainly caught my attention. My foot still hurts just thinking about it. I was also taken with how he is blessed with such a loving and prescient young daughter. Most of all, I read his essay as an eloquent entry in a gathering conversation about the separation of modern humans from the wild matrix of the world itself. The great publicity and enthusiasm for Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin 2005) shows that many people, including child development specialists, are thinking along these lines. Even the Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled, “Plugged in, But Tuned out: Getting Kids to Connect to the NonVirtual World” (Jeffrey Zaslow, October 6, 2005). When I introduced the concept of the “extinction of experience” before an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in 1975 and published it the following year, some people scratched their heads, yet many others expressed eager agreement with my premise: the depletion of diverse natural and cultural experiences within people’s easy radius of reach (much smaller for the very old, very young, disabled, and poor) can lead to alienation, apathy, and lack of involvement in conservation, therefore to further extinctions: a cycle of disaffection and loss, sucking the life out of the land, the passion out of the people. Since I elaborated the idea in The Thunder Tree (Houghton Mifflin 1993), interest and understanding has mushroomed in direct proportion to the loss of children’s special places of connection and the explosion of electronic blandishments. Another decade on, few children have tangled habitats close to home, or a free hour a day unplugged from soccer or a scintillating screen of some sort with which to explore them. Thanks to parents’ fears of abduction, fewer still anymore own the freedom of the day (“Bye, Mom, see you at dinner!”) such as many in my generation did—boys and girls. No wonder the time is right for Louv’s book, Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary… 399 and for general recognition of the new condition named in his subtitle: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. Time, too, when “no child left behind” must be augmented by “no child left inside,” if we're to retain any hope of keeping the wild in the child. Peter Kahn’s essay is his own experiment in blending personal ethic and experience with ideas and factual evidence, and it is an elegant and successful one. Out of the canyon of bliss and injury, Kahn travels literally and metaphorically to the high ridge Nabokov posits where “the mountainside of scientific knowledge meets the opposite slope of artistic imagination.” From there, through the accommodating medium of a rattlesnake seen close and well, he enters the Other and re-realizes its essentiality. But he worries that teleological reasoning, should it become widespread, might remain vacuous or flaccid “because of the paucity of content.” I'm afraid this has already come to pass. A great deal of contemporary environmental thought, none more so than the New Age variety often called “Deep Ecology,” too often suffers from deep ignorance of the actual working parts of the world. Practitioners adopt and preach an admirable ethical framework that seeks to suppress biocentricism; this is right and meet. But because many may be no more acquainted with natural history than with NASCAR, they are no more able to “speak cogently about the teleos of nature” than to understand ecology deeply. And when Paul Shepard (quoted by Kahn) laments “failed ontogenies” that “yield havoc” entirely out of “compliance with the wild world,” he is presaging Nature Deficit Disorder. When Peter and Zoe get back to civilized safety, he watches her reading a magazine and reels at the sexually-charged...
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Jul 1, 2005
A.P Robinson + 3
Open Access