Children for 1,000 generations grew up exploring fields, itching with poison oak and discovering the hard way what a wasp nest looks like. That’s no longer true.
As I read Nicholas Kristof last night, that line jumped out at me, and I thought of my own childhood. There were still empty lots, some of which were heavily wooded, when we moved to Larchmont in 1948 when I was 2. Across the street was a semi-recluse in the midst of several acres of heavily wooded land. Beyond Sandy Rothman's house at the bottom of Lafayette were several more up to and across the border with New Rochelle. Some of the neighbors had left part of their property not totally cleared. But by 1963 when I graduated from high school, I was already noticing how little of that was left.
In How to lick a slug Kristof describes exploring the natural world with his daughter, and how rare that is for kids today. Let me look both at his words, and remember more of my own youth.
I am a baby boomer, born in 1946, the leading edge of of the generation of which Obama is one of the last. Kristof quote Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, as saying that our generation
"may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water."
Himself born in 1959, Kristof, like the president, is at the tail end of the boomers. He also grew up on a farm, and his next tparagraph provides the raw data that describes the changing context for American children:
Only 2 percent of American households now live on farms, compared with 40 percent in 1900. Suburban childhood that once meant catching snakes in fields now means sanitized video play dates scheduled a week in advance. One study of three generations of 9-year-olds found that by 1990 the radius from the house in which they were allowed to roam freely was only one-ninth as great as it had been in 1970.
I think back to when I was 9. Our house was on a corner, the street address Huguenot Drive, our driveway on Lafayette Road. Lafayette had a cul-de-sac at its end, but Madison branched off and headed towards the train tracks. It was around when I was 9 or ten that it was closed off, meaning the entire stretch of more than a quarter mile going in either direction was free of traffic, a playground for the many children living in the houses. By the time I was 9 the New England Thruway had been largely constructed, and some of the open land owned by the Town of Mamaroneck (of which Larchmont was a part) along Jefferson Street, behind the Apt and Bers properties, was cleared and the exit for Larchmont was being constructed. I saw the disappearance of undeveloped land, the loss of place to wander.
Of course, by the time I was 9, I went away in the summers. It started when I was 8, when my sister and I first went to Interlochen, for 8 weeks at what was then called National Music Camp. There was a state park adjacent to the camp, itself very wooded. We not only studied music and arts, and took advantage of the two lakes to swim, boat, canoe and in my case learn to sail, we camped. And on the boys' side, almost at the far end of the lake, was the cabin of Walter Hastings, noted naturalist, who had consulted with Walt Disney on some of his nature documentaries. Hastings had built a museum with his fabulous collection of things like butterflies. And as small children - and sometimes not so small children - we learned about the natural world from a man who was passionate about it.
Louv describes something he calls "nature deficit disorder." The column mentions how watching fish can lower one's blood pressure, something my wife knew about two decades back when she gave me a now-abandoned fish tank for my birthday: it did help slow me down a bit.
Kristof has another paragraph that caught my attention:
One problem may be that the American environmental movement has focused so much on preserving nature that it has neglected to do enough to preserve a constituency for nature. It’s important not only to save forests, but also to promote camping, hiking, bouldering and white-water rafting so that people care about saving those forests.
I find striking omissions in the list of activities in that paragraph, for I do not find birding, hunting or fishing, all of which are important in maintaining constituencies for preserving the natural world. My wife is like her father, a passionate fly fisherman. And she also periodically goes birding with him. For the F-I-L, that passion has connected him with history. One of his companions for birding years ago was Horace Alexander, a British Quaker who had headed their relief efforts in India, been a friend of Gandhi whom he hosted on that notables visit to England in the 1940s to negotiate about Indian independence. For Horace and my wife's father, that history faded into nothingness compared to the intensity of the feathered creatures they tracked together.
Friends who hunt often tell me about how it is the connection with the natural world that matters to them. The hours spent reacclimating to it as they track their prey, and how they come to respect the natural world by reconnecting with it. I have never been inclined to hunt, but remember that many responsible for preserving natural lands were themselves committed hunters - Teddy Roosevelt for example.
In my visit to SW Virginia last weekend for the Wise health fair, I experienced a landscape that is still very wild, despite having previously been savaged for timber and more recently - and viciously through mountaintop removal - scarred in the pursuit of coal. Too many streams have been buried, others poisoned, in the pursuit of wealth through coal. But there are still vast areas of woodlands, and those who live there, including children, are still able to wander in woods, to experience the natural world as a regular part of their living, something decreasingly common among those living in urban settings. And in the suburbs? Is there anything less natural than the preternaturally green expanses of lawn so much a part of our suburbs> I wonder how much of nature we destroy beyond what we could easily see, with all the chemicals so many use in order to achieve the verdant vista such settings seem to demand.
I have never had the patience for fly-fishing. But my summers at Interlochen deepened my love of wandering in the woods that had been born by the easy accessibility of undeveloped stands near my childhood home. One thing that drew me close to my wife's family is that about 1/2 of their third of an acre on which they lived 3 decades ago had not been cleared, was still wooded, with the wildlife one can still encounter in suburban areas. In some ways it reminded my of my childhood.
Arlington, Virginia, where I have lived since 1982, is heavily populated - over 200,000 people now in about 26 square miles. That is an area slightly larger than Manhattan, so perhaps our density pales in comparison, but trust me, one gets a sense of how packed together we can be. The County has made a real effort to keep open spaces, and there are some wonderful parks, some heavily wooded, scattered throughout the area. We live 1/2 mile from an entrance to I-66, and yet not far from there is a beaver pond. We have in our years in our house, into which we moved in 1984, seen not only the usual raccoons, skunk, and occasional possums, but rabbits, otters, foxes, and even coyotes, which have moved East from the Blue Ridge - we are, thanks to I-66, only a bit over an hour from Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive. Children in Arlington have ready access to the natural world, although in one sense Kristof is right - I cannot imagine most Arlington parents allowing their kids to wander on their own the way I did when I was 9 and my sister was 11.
We will still periodically go to Shenandoah National Park, travel along Skyline Drive, and park the car - then wander down a trail. We have on other vacations wandered through parts of national forests and other parks. Sometimes one can get far enough away from the road on which one came in to be totally alone, without other humans, at least until someone comes hiking over an adjacent trail. Then, if one is still, one can watch - and hear - the forest come alive. It can be transforming. It is an experience that should not be denied to any child.
In our adult wanderings we have seen many kinds of creatures. I remember once walking down from a height in the Joyce Kilmer forest in NC, Leaves on the Current was walking ahead of me. As she passed one point, three feet ahead of me, I saw movement on the side of the trail. And as I walked by from the movement slithered out a rather large snake, perhaps 40-42 inches long - whose markings I later affirmed were those of a timber rattler. We were in his territory, and so long as we did not step on him, he would leave us alone - thank God! He was a majestic creature.
In my childhood we saw and heard lots of birds and squirrels. There were the raccoons and skunks, from whom garbage had to be secured. We would encounter a few garter snakes, and in the woods hear the occasional owl. There were plenty of bugs, especially given the number of homes which had gardens. While we were not in the midst of the natural world, we also were not isolated from it. Combined with our summers in Michigan, my sister and I developed some familiarity with the natural world, a comfort level, a healthy respect for it.
We have a bird feeder outside our front door. We had a birdhouse on the side, now somewhat engulfed by the shrubbery. Every year we have mockingbirds who nest in our shrubbery. But over a thousand vehicles a day pass in front of our house, which is on a bus route and is the main ambulance route to the hospital that is two blocks away. It is remarkable that nature has not been totally overwhelmed by the intensity of human activity, that there are still so many encounters available to those who remain open, patient enough to watch and to listen.
Kristof argues for preserving trails as well as protecting nature, in order to provide an accessible means for people to reconnect with the natural world. I do not disagree.
But might it not be even better to take more care to preserve or restore more natural settings even in the midst of suburban development? Yes, perhaps it is a bit more expensive to build a house without knocking over all the trees, but think of the value added to a property that has mature trees.
We do not have children of our own. My wife's nieces and nephews do not have the same access she and her siblings did to undeveloped patches on their own property, but they do regularly get experiences of the natural world, woods and seashores.
If we wish to preserve the world, we must value it. Somehow I hope that in our attempts to "improve" education we recognize that not everything worth learning occurs in the classroom, subject to mass-produced tests. There is something of great value to wandering through woods, with minimal adult supervision, merely enough to ensure safety.
Kristof frames it in knowing that if you lick the underside of a banana slug your tongue goes numb. That is one measure.
For me it is something else. It is remembering back to when I was 9, when I might swing on a vine over the woods across the street. It was the discovery that I was not unconnected with the natural world, which I could never hope to fully dominate, but which had then, and has now, the capability of imbuing me with wonder and delight. I may not have children, but I would wish that experience available to the children of others, no matter how advanced your years might be.
peace.