Book Review: Last Child in the Woods
First posted in December, 2006

I've just finished reading Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv.  The book has had some good press in the past few months.  I myself came to read it after I saw an article about how the superintendent at Yellowstone National Park is starting an initiative she calls No Child Left Inside (I both love and hate the pun), which she decided to launch after reading Last Child in the Woods, a book about how children are losing touch with the natural world.


The Problem

Interestingly enough, today's children may understand the natural world better in a clinical way than they used to - today's children know about greenhouse gasses and global warming, threats to the Amazon rainforest, and what it means when a species is threatened or endangered - but they don't know nature first-hand (average eight-year olds, the book contends, are better able to identify cartoon characters than native species, such as beetles and oak trees, in their own community). Parents don't allow children to roam at will anymore (by the 1990s, the book states, the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970), computers and television keep children inside and sedentary, and people in general are more fearful of crime. Green spaces are manicured and children are told to stay out so as not to disturb the aesthetic. Children are discouraged from climbing trees in parks or community space out of liability concerns. Vacant, overgrown lots are dangerous places children shouldn't be encouraged to frequent. Urban sprawl has consumed many strips of nature that once existed adjacent to the city, and infill - the practice of building on open lots within the city to preserve greenbelts adjacent to the city from urban sprawl - is consuming what available land might be converted to green space within cities.

There's a very succinct quote that Louv heard out of the mouth of a fourth grader named Paul that sums up the problem rather well: "I like to play indoors better, 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

Now, I fully acknowledge that I spend too much time indoors, too much time on the computer. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that I work outdoors. I see nature and experience the wind on my face everyday. This book is making some scary - and very real - observations about the general population. Visitation to national parks is falling. Why? It may not just be higher gas prices.

Why should we care? There are human issues, like rising obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder, and depression in children (as well as adults). Not to sound heartless, but those are individual problems, for individual children, of which I've been aware. However, I'd never given much thought to how the collective effect of detaching children from the natural world will have grave consequences for us all: who will be the stewards of tomorrow's planet? Who will care about taking care of this when I'm gone? And I thought things looked grim now...

Last Child in the Woods does a fantastic job of laying out the facts, but it also tells qualitative stories that speak volumes about today's society. The facts scare me, and the anectdotes make me sad. Here's an excerpt that particularly touched me, and I'd like to set it aside:

     During the next hour, as I asked the young people about their relationship with the outdoors, they described some of the barriers to going outside - lack of time, TV, the usual suspects. But the reality of these barriers did not mean that the children lacked curiosity. In fact, these kids spoke of nature with a strange mixture of puzzlement, detachment, and yearning - and occasional defiance. In the years to come, I would hear this often.
     "My parents don't feel real safe if I'm going too deep into the woods," said one boy. "I just can't go too far. My parents are always worrying about me. So I'll just go, and usually not tell 'em where I'm going - so that makes 'em mad. But I'll just sit behind a tree or something, or lie in the field with all the rabbits."
     One boy said computers were more important than nature, because computers are where the jobs are. Several said they were too busy to go outside. But one girl, a fifth-grader wearing a plain print dress and an intensely serious expression, told me she wanted to be a poet when she grew up.
     "When I'm the woods," she said, "I feel like I'm in my mother's shoes."
     She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty - and refuge. "It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it's polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's like you're free when you go out there. It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad - and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why."
     The she described her special part of the woods.
     "I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I' d take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."
     The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.
     "And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me."
     Over time I came to understand some of the complexity represented by the boy who preferred electrical outlets and the poet who had lost her special spot in the woods. I also learned this: Parents, educators, other adults, instititions - the culture itself - may say one thing to children about nature's gifts, but so many of our actions and messages - especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver - are different.
     And children hear very well.

I wonder what that little poet in the plain print dress will do when she grows up. I wonder if she'll be like me. I wonder how many children like that are left in the western world.


The Solution?

Last Child in the Woods is worth reading, regardless of whether or not you have children. Louv does a fantastic job of pointing out what should be obvious - except that the problem has, I think, snuck up on us, so quietly that very few of us took notice. In this respect I highly recommend the book, though I do feel he goes on and on about the same problems for chapters, basically reiterating the same points again and again. I suspect he might do this so that he can use most or all of the many anecdotes he's collected and the research he's done, but I found myself skimming by mid-book when the deceased equine was being pummled yet again. I found myself saying, "Okay, okay, enough already - I know this is horrible, but how do we fix it?"

He has some answers. And, well, I didn't like them. This was a huge let-down and disappointed me greatly.

One of the things he advocates - at least in the United States - is redistributing the population nationwide so that population density will be more evenly dispersed, the environmental pressure on the land less, and opportunities for youth to encounter nature more likely. Areas of the contiguous western states, he argues, have lost population over the past century - some areas have less than two people per square mile - and those areas could be used for this initiative. For instance, a 1898 book by Ebenezer Howard entitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow put forth the idea of large groups of citizens creating joint companies to purchase economically depressed agricultural land for the purpose of establishing new towns (the ballpark figure is 32,000 people on 1000 acres), with these towns being surrounded by 5,000 acres of greenbelt, and towns connected by rail or highway.

What don't I like about this? It's sort of akin to how conservation agencies manage backcountry use: if you have a lot of people frequenting the backcountry, do you let them camp wherever they want, thus spreading out the impact, or do you concentrate the use in a set number of areas, thus dooming those areas but in the process protecting most of the resources from impact and facilitating the rehabilitation of used space by being able to concentrate your mitigation strategies in a few areas? I like that people like cities. It means that they crowd themselves up in nice little spaces, creating more harsh - but more limited - footprints.

Louv acknowledges this:

     A skeptic might contend that such new towns sound better on paper than they would prove to be in reality, and that they are, in fact, euphemistic Trojan-horse devleopments that could open the countryside to further sprawl. Considering the spotty history of planned communities and new town developments, the skeptic would have a point.

Additionally, I don't think that most of the US population is interested in going back to the land.  I have a lot of friends who live in cities.  A few of them wax poetically about my lifestyle in a remote area, but, more frequently, people comment on how they can't fathom how I do it (and do it happily).

And I probably should also come clean and admit that part of my reservation about this solution is selfishness - I live in an area of low population density and I have to admit that I don't want a bunch of people invading my space.  (Not that I think there's any real threat, but as I write this, I'm returning from a week and half away during which I've not had many moments of solitude and it drives home the realization that I can't wait to get back to my little ghost town.)

There's another chapter - albeit very short - that rather upset me. It addressed the interplay between religion and conservation. First off, it assumes that "religion" equals "people who read the Bible." He goes on at length about how nature inspires spiritual development, which I'll grant, but he's careful to throw in a few bits about the fine line between protecting God's creations and worshipping nature as God. He puts forth the idea that perhaps environmental conservation groups are going about things all wrong by trying to appeal to the logical, secular, scientific side of people because most Americans would probably be more ameniable to helping environmental causes if they thought they were protecting "God's creation."

First off, this chapter is either (A) exceptionally biased toward his own faith or (B) an effort to cover his rear with the fundamentalists, of which there are many - paticularly in the United States, his target audience. But to have so many carefully picked quotes about how it's wrong to worship nature as God, you're alienating the pantheists, pagans, and the like; this may be of little consequence, since by their very faiths the rest of his arguments equal preaching to the choir, but it may serve to estrange these groups to the point where they stop listening to his arguments for how to correct the growing disconnect between children and nature. 

While I do think that there's a certain degree of dominionist thinking among the Abrahamic religions, and while I do think that we need to bring those groups around to thinking green, that's not where the entire problem rests, and by catering exclusively to them, I think environmental groups would actually alienate a number of other groups which also need to be brought 'round to sustainable thought. By expressly equating spirituality with Judaeochristian thought, you're antagonizing anyone outside those faiths. Perhaps he figures there aren't enough of those people to matter - but see, the thing is, we need everyone to think about the future of our planet. This is not a time for sectarianism.

But the status quo isn't working. So what are we to do? 


My Two Cents

One aspect of my last job, when I worked in education and interpretation, was touching the lives of children and getting them outside. I showed them that an entirely different world (but entirely connected to our own) exists when you examine the grass growing at your own feet, even if you live in the city. I still get to do that in my present job, now and then, but it's more rare now. I miss that.

Having attempted at a grass roots level to inspire a connection between children and nature, the one thing I learned is that the change really needs to occur at an individual level.  This is going to make inspiring an entire generation more difficult.  Louv's aforementioned thoughts on inspiring Judaeochristians to appreciate Earth as God's creation is right on the mark - but only for a portion of the population.  That sort of thinking needs to be tailored to each and every group out there - one might go so far as to say it needs to be tailored to each and every person out there - to be truly successful. 

If there's a farther-reaching, less-grassroots approach out there that will appeal to the masses and instill in them an appreciation for (and consequently a longing to protect) nature, I'd love to hear what it is.  Giving everyone experiences in nature - an aspect of Louv's back to the land proposal - might be the ticket, but I think that spreading out the world's population is impractical and goes too far.  You can't take a child out of Harlem and plop them down on a farm in the middle of Kansas and expect them to suddenly embrace environmentalism - they'll go insane and hate you for taking them away from everything they know.  But if you accompany that child on the subway for a ride down to Central Park and let them spend an afternoon lying in the grass adjacent to the turtle pond every once in awhile, you might inspire them to care.  Sit fifty feet away and keep an eye on their welfare, but let them play on their own or with friends.  Answer their questions, encourage them to think and explore and experience.  Every child will form their own connection, make their own unique friendship with nature. 

Then again, if every child simply had the opportunity to have a caring adult that encourages such quality experiences - natural or otherwise - the world would be a far different place.  I know we can't do this for every child.  I'm at a loss, but I'm hoping someone figures out what we as a society can do.

And for what it's worth, one of the prettiest public parks I've ever seen was in Harlem... but it was surrounded by a tall iron fence and locked off from the public most of the time to protect it from harm.  This is the very sort of thing that sends kids a message: "Hands off, we don't trust you in here, you'll mess up the prettiness."  Every time I walked past that park I longed to get inside and feel the grass under my feet, but I never got the chance to experience that.  I know that it's not locked off to protect it from children, but what does an eight year old know?  I wonder how many kids walk past that park and get the idea that nature is for the priviledged.


Thanks, Louv

One of the things I'm thankful that this book has done is that it has reminded me of the varying levels of natural contact. Nature doesn't have to equal Vast Wilderness. The little poet in the plain print dress reminds me of the girl I once was (a girl which I firmly believe still exists inside me).  As a very small child in the city, I took naps in the grass of our yard on sunny afternoons. I spent a lot of time smelling the peonies out back when they were in bloom. I explored the tiny tract of woodland behind my great-grandmother's home with wonder - it seemed so incredibly vast when I was girl, but looking back I realize it was but a stand of trees, a few plants left as a buffer to keep neighbors from having to look at one another.

None of it was Nature the way I experience Nature now, but back then - to me - it was.

Once I had access to wilder areas as a teen in the southern Appalachians, it wasn't a grand jump for me to feel comfortable exploring the woods or isolating myself on a boulder in the center of the river so I could watch the world beneath the water's surface. I did crazy things like rescue poisonous snakes from swimming pools because I didn't want the snake to drown and I didn't want anyone to get hurt (my mother was surprisingly forgiving of such acts of heroism, even when I brought my rescue to her in a paper bag to show her my good deed). Had my mother given much thought to the fact that the area near our home supported a very healthy black bear population, she probably would never have let me wander off alone, but fortunately for me, she did - and I bushwacked the woods around our home looking for alternative routes to clearings I knew. When she didn't feel like taking me to the pool or the tennis court for my lesson, I'd walk the two miles - on a narrow, curving, mostly forested mountain road - listening to the ravens and the wind in the trees.

That's still not Nature the way I experience Nature now, but back then - to me - it was.

One experience is a springboard to the next.  Bushwacking the woods next to my home led to being brave enough to hike trails further from home, which led to hiking five miles into the woods to go camping by myself for a couple of days.  Solo camping led to being more comfortable outside; I planned larger and larger trips, deeper and deeper into the woods.  Eventually, it meant that I could handle myself for lengthy stretches with minimal support, such as being dropped off by plane in the middle of the country's largest national park for a week of fieldwork as an archaeologist.

But over all those years, from one experience to the next, I slowly lost track of what it meant to experience nature.  Nature doesn't have to equal Vast Wilderness.  It can, but it doesn't have to. 

This book has reminded me to examine the grass growing at my own feet and observe the entirely different - but connected - world that resides therein.



[ TOP OF THIS PAGE | MORE REVIEWS | HOME ]