I finished Last Child in the Woods yesterday. Most of the last section consists of ideas to change the alienation of children from nature. The author has some very interesting ideas. One mistake he thinks environmentalists make is in discouraging fishing and even hunting--Louv thinks this can be an important gateway to interest in nature. He writes, "In an increasingly de-natured world, fishing and hunting remain among the last ways that the young learn of the mystery and moral complexity of nature in a way that no videotape can convey. Yes, fishing and hunting are messy--even morally so--but so is nature. No child can truly know or value the outdoors if the natural world remains under glass, seen only through lenses, screens, or computer monitors." He also writes of the bond that fishing can forge in families; I've seen this in my own. My husband's father loved to fish, and this became one of my husband's favorite memories of his father. He in turn has taken our sons fishing. It is a link with Grandpa which is especially important since Grandpa is no longer here.
Louv also discusses schools and how they present nature to children. His upshot is that most schools in America don't even try. He holds up European schools as doing a better job of this; in fact, I was so delighted with this quote from Finland's Ministry of Social Affairs and Health: "The core of learning is not in the information . . being predigested from outside, but in the interaction between a child adn the environment." Wow, that sounds very Charlotte Mason to me.
He also takes on city design and landscaping--and here I so agree with him. Leveling all the ground everywhere, making developments of identical houses with little cookie-cutter yards covered in nonnative grasses that must be kept mowed and trimmed--why do we do this? I live in one of these sorts of communities, and I hate it. I would much rather be on the edge of town, still close to the town things but with an edge of wildness--a small ravine, the edge of a woodland or meadow, a creek--this is how I grew up, in a town so small that nearly everyone was near the edge of town, vbg. Louv points out that there is no reason we HAVE to design towns like we do now--he brought up many ideas from planners. It's odd, many of them sound strangely like Nauvoo's large plots. :-)
I took my children yesterday to one of our area's "wild" parks. It is a few minutes' drive from my home; if only it were within walking distance I'd be thrilled. But instead of being leveled and planted with Kentucky Bluestem, it has areas of grass around a few playgrounds, and the rest is left close to wild, with a few benches scattered about. We sat, yesterday, looking down on a pond surrounded by meadow and woods, and just soaked up peace. We watched the butterflies, chased a small garter snake, surprised an enormous turtle on a log. I imagined towns with wedged sections like this scattered all throughout, with local residents keeping them trash-free and maintaining wildlife habitat--what a lovely thought.
An interesting part of Louv's book is his emphasis on what nature means in the spiritual life of a child--something I've never heard discussed by many leftist environmentalists. Listen to this quote:
"God communicates to us through each other and through organized religion, through wise people and the great books, through music and art, but nowhere with such texture and forcefulness in detal and grace and joy, as through creation, and when we destroy large resources, or when we cut off our access by putting railroads along river banks, by polluting so people can't fish, or by making so many rules that people can't get out on the water, it's the moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last Bible on earth. It's a cost that's imprudent for us to impose upon ourselves, and we don't have the right to impose it upon our children."
Or this one:
"We cannot care for God if we do not care for his creation. 'The extent tha twe separate our children from creation is the extent to which we separate them from the creator--from God."
I think of the stories President Hinckley has told, of things that affected him as he grew--watching the stars at night, working in the orchard, caring for trees. How I want this channel to God to remain open to my children, to this generation from which will someday come another living prophet--will he have such stories of nature to tell, that nurtured his beginning faith and spirituality?
I often don't know what I think of specific nature "controversies"--global warming, Arctic drilling, etc. But I do know this--the lives of our children are being impoverished by our keeping them inside, playing computer games and watching TV, and letting them outdoors only to play organized sports. They are missing out, and Last Child in the Woods is an important step in raising awareness and the beginnings of an action plan.