The Natural Patriot

A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.

What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.

It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.

But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.

But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.

After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.” 

Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.

What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?

Over the last few weeks, while piddling around the project site (i.e., yard), pulling weeds, attempting to ferret out the invaders from the natives, puzzling over bugs, and pondering where I might site a small pond (and how to sell the idea to my spouse), I’ve had occasion to dust off my venerable Golden Nature Guides, beloved little books of childhood.

For me, there are few physical objects that can conjure the idyllic, big wide world of childhood gone by than these wonderful little gems of natural history. They were frequent companions for me as a youngster and I still take them out with a certain reverence to look through the pages, one for each species, each a marvel of textual and pictorial concision, with a short description of the creature’s habits and natural history, a map of its distribution, and a simple but beautiful painting of it in its characteristic habitat. These books somehow hit on the perfect formula for conveying the beauty and fascination of living things to kids.

And we owe it all to a guy named Herbert S. Zim.

Not exactly a household name. But if you still have a dog-eared copy of one of the dozens of Golden Nature Guides that were eventually published over the decades starting in 1949, you will notice that virtually all of them were written, co-written, or edited by Herbert S. Zim. His curriculum vitae, in brief, from Wikipedia:

“Zim was born 1909 in New York City, but spent his childhood years in southern California. At the age of fourteen he returned to the east, and took his degrees (B.S., M.S., Ph. D.) at Columbia University. Zim wrote or edited more than one hundred scientific books, and in a thirty-year career teaching in the public schools, introduced laboratory instruction into elementary school science. He is best known as the founder, in 1945 (and for twenty-five years, editor in chief) of the Golden Guides, pocket-size introductions for children to such subjects as fossils, zoology, microscopy, rocks and minerals, codes and secret writings, trees, wildflowers, dinosaurs, navigation and more. He was the sole or co-author for many of the books, which were valued for their clarity, accuracy and attractive presentation—helped by the illustrations of his friend, Raymond Perlman.”

Consider the impact that this single unsung man (so unsung, in fact, that the pixelated snapshot above is the only one I could find of him online!) has had on the environmental awareness of an entire generation — perhaps even two or three generations — of American citizens. Who can say how many kids in the 50s and 60s and 70s decided, while browsing through one of these little books, to spend the afternoon outside hunting for caterpillars instead of yielding to the seductive stupor of the cathode ray tube? Who can say how many of today’s alternative energy entrepeneurs and scientists and educators and conservationists caught fire as a result of a spark generated by one of these books? I can’t, but I know one: me.

By way of illustration, three personal anecdotes:

When I was a kid, my family drove cross-country (in a van without air-conditioning that was prone to overheating in the desert and climbed the Rockies at about 18 mph, etc.), from Arlington, Virginia to LA, every three years, where we spent the bulk of three weeks visiting my aunt and her family. When I tell people this they think my parents were crazy. But it was a the adventure of a lifetime and an incomparable learning experience for kids. We saw a lot of the country, did a lot of camping, and my parents occasionally allowed us to visit the cheesy fake Indian trinket shops that were common along the dustier stretches of Route 66 in the olden days. One day when I was probably about seven (this would have been the late 1960s), we were visiting Walnut Canyon, which is somewhere in the southwest, and I convinced my parents to buy me the Golden Nature Guide to Rocks and Minerals. I felt so grown up to have a real book instead of a kid’s book. It was an early watershed moment in my life as a bookworm and naturalist.

Nevertheless, I was not destined to be a geologist. For one thing, rocks are dead. Or so they seemed to me. I found animals much more interesting. Second anecdote: Around the same time, in second grade, I became obsessed with turtles. I take this herpetophilia to be a common, though poorly understood, genetic trait located somewhere on the Y chromosome, since it is so commonly expressed among young boys. This is despite the fact that my white-bread suburban neighborhood turned out, to my dismay, to be nearly devoid of reptiles. I saw maybe two or three box turtles, and no snakes at all, in the wild while I was growing up despite frequent expeditions mounted for that purpose to the local park where I spent much of my youth. But I can remember sitting rapt with the pocket-sized Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, studying the pictures, memorizing what they ate, looking at the ingenious maps that showed purple where the summer (pink) and winter (blue) ranges overlapped. This genetic propensity has in fact been transferred to my son, who latched on to my antique Reptile guide in an uncannily similar way and spent a lot of time with it (it is now bound with duct tape).

Anecdote three: One of the standard operating procedures of the cross-country trips was that, periodically, we would take a rest stop and every kid (of which there were ultimately six, though we never made the trip as a complete group) got to choose a magazine or coloring book or something to keep them quiet for 6 or 8 minutes after we hit the road again. On this trip, I think I was about ten and, instead of getting the standard Mad magazine or puzzles or comic book, I chose the Golden Nature Guide to Birds. Paging though that book as we droned along the highway, through southern Canada if I remember correctly, was the first time I actually noticed that birds (and other animals) had distinguishing marks that could be used to identify them. Perhaps the first tentative roots of my later interest in taxonomy.

It appears that I’m not the only one with such fond memories. Evidently the original versions of the Guides have recently become “collectible“. Many have since been reprinted, albeit without the engaging covers of old, and are available from St. Martin’s Press.

Now then: I was appalled to read, as I was surfing the web in search of intel on Dr. Zim, that the famous PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame had disparaged the gentleman’s name — simply because as a lad PZ lost a library copy of Zim’s Golden Guide to Mammals and got into deep doo-doo with the librarian. Even today, these decades later, the Golden Guides have traumatic associations for him.

Note to PZ: Dude, Herb didn’t lose your book — you did! Suck it up.

So I am here to clear the man’s name. Let us lift a glass to the late great Herbert S. Zim, pioneer of biophilia and Natural Patriot: we salute you.

[Editor’s note: This just in — and in time for Earth Day (barely). I reprint below an extract from the new, second edition of Richard Louv’s classic and inspirational book, Last Child in the Woods.  The new edition is expanded and contains more practical suggestions (here are a few more), as described below. I intend to use them since this week is my son’s “TV turn-off week” (this also includes computers) suggested by his school. I sure had a lot of fun with dirt when I was a young’un.]

BEYOND NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER
It’s Time to Turn Consciousness into Action
By Richard Louv
Author of Last Child in The Woods

Got dirt? “In South Carolina, a truckload of dirt is the same price as a video game!” reports Norman McGee, a father in that state who bought a small pickup-load of dirt for his daughter and friends.

McGee is turning consciousness into action. So is Liz Baird, who keeps a “wonder bowl” available for her children.

When Baird was a little girl she would fill her pockets with natural wonders — acorns, rocks, mushrooms. “My Mom got tired of washing clothes and finding these treasures in the bottom of the washer or disintegrated through the dryer,” Liz recalls. “So she came up with “Liz’s Wonder Bowl”, and the idea was that I could empty my pockets into the bowl. I could still enjoy my treasures, and try to find out what things were, and not cause trouble with the laundry.”

McGee and Baird are among the thousands of parents who have joined — and are leading — an international children and nature movement. Sometimes known as Leave No Child Inside, the effort is bringing together people from all walks of life, who are creating grassroots regional campaigns, state and national legislation, and changes in their own families to help children become happier, healthier and smarter.

An emerging body of scientific knowledge links nature time to longer attention spans, better cognitive functioning, reduction of stress, and strengthened family bonds. What better way to enhance parent-child attachment than to walk in the woods together, disengaging from distracting electronics, advertising, and peer pressure?

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at Centers for Disease Control, recently describes the clear benefits of nature experiences to healthy child development, and to adult well-being.

“In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine,” he says. He believes that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Of course, there is still much we need to learn, such as what kinds of nature contact are most beneficial to health, how much contact is needed and how to measure that, and what groups of people benefit most. But we know enough to act.”

If you’re a parent who missed out on nature as a child, now’s your chance. Indeed, all the gifts of nature that come to children also come to the good adult who introduces a child to nature.

Young people are acting, too, by becoming natural leaders in the movement. For example, a seven-year-old girl in Virginia rounded up her friends and enrolled them in her own Girls Gone Wild in Nature Club. Together they organize backyard campouts and bug hunts.

In Mississippi, teenager Josh Morrison founded Geeks in the Woods for his friends and fellow geeks everywhere. He defines “geek” as a “gaming environmentally educated kid,” and says he and his friends are “tired of being labeled” tech addicts ” can have their PlayStations and their outdoor time too: “We could be the generation that makes a U-turn back to . . . a balance between virtual reality and what sustains all life . . . nature.”

FIVE ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE TODAY

1. Go for a family walk when the moon is full. There’s a whole new set of animals, sights and sounds out there. Listen to animals calling. Owls and bats are looking for prey. Watch for things glowing, like worms and fungus on trees. And look up at the stars.

2. Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there. Identify them with the help of a field guide. Return to this universe once a month, lift the board and discover who’s new.

3. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature. Then help them find their own: leaves beneath a backyard willow, the bend of a creek, the meadow in the woods. Let it become their intimate connection with the natural world.

4. Revive old traditions. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. Go crawdadding — tie a piece of liver or bacon to a string, drop it into a creek or pond, wait until a crawdad tugs.

5. Invent your own nature game. One mother’s suggestion: “We help our kids pay attention during longer hikes by playing “find ten critters” — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, and other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.”

Adapted from LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS by Richard Louv, copyright 2008. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

In our families and our communities, it’s time to take action. That’s why the new, expanded 2008 edition of “Last Child in the Woods” contains a “Field Guide” with 100 Actions that families and communities can take, along with discussion questions, a report on the movement, and other resources for parents, educators, conservationists, business people and community leaders.

For more information, see the Second Edition of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder“. To help build the movement, please join the Children & Nature Network.

Richard Louv, recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal (and an honorary Natural Patriot!), is the author of seven books. The chairman of the Children & Nature Network, he is also honorary co-chair of the National Forum on Children and Nature.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

The NYT has a great article about Doug Tallamy, a fellow ecologist at the University of Delaware who studies insects.  He and his wife are on a mission to reclaim their farm from aggressive invasive plant species and make it hospitable again for . . . maggots.  Why maggots?  because chickadees love to eat them. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the frightful scene that develops in your fetid garbage can, but rather the larvae of native flies that burrow into goldentod stems and other plants in the yard. And not just maggots but the menagerie of inconspicuous creeping and crawling and flitting creatures that metamorphose into butterflies and that nourish the birds. 

Theirs is a personal project of ecological engineering to support biodiversity.  It resonated with me immediately since, in the warming weekends of spring, I like to go out and whack back the vines and pull out the invasive privet thickets that sprout up everywhere, and clear patches around native saplings that are struggling under honeysuckle, and so on. 

“Restoration ecology” is not quite the appropriate term since some of the plants they foster are not native to their specific region.  On the other hand, they do support native insects, and therefore higher levels in the food web.  And in any case, as climate change and other environmental impacts progress, we need to shift our focus to “emerging ecosystems”.  While remaining (or becoming) aware of the sometimes forgotten baselines of how nature used to look and work, we also need to incorporate the reality that geographc ranges of species are shifting, some invaders are here to stay, and some natives are disappearing inexorably.  How do we maintain biodiversity and functional, resilient ecosystem in this new world order? 

The answers are not yet clear.  But efforts like those of the Tallamys are  small experiments toward finding the answers. Doug has written a book about this, “Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens“, which I very much look forward to reading.  His basic thesis is deceptively simple: bugs are the key link in the food chain.  And bugs tend to be extremely finicky eaters.  Many are strict specialists on one or a few types of plants.  This means that yards and gardens filled with ornamental plants introduced from elsewhere often support only invasive pest species and not the native insects adapted to local conditions and enjoyed by local birds and other animals.  Encouraging native plants — and insects — is a concrete way to restiore ecological balance to the patches of land over which we personally have stewardship. 

And that is an exciting and hopeful message.  We often feel helpless when confronted with all the bad news about environmental degradation.  Here is something we can do personally to sustain biodiversity.  Nurture native plants and the creatures that depend on them.  One yard at a time. Power to the people (and other organisms)!

Well, it’s not over yet (thankfully), so this should really be in present tense.

What is perhaps most important, to me, is what I didn’t do this year — which is stumble through the long, hectic, progression of travel, last-minute shopping, shipping, sleeping on relatives’ beds or couches, packing, getting on the plane again, etc.  Instead we had (are having) what might superficially seem to be a boring holiday season. At home.  Just the three of us, mostly, quiet days, eating leftover turkey and cranberry sauce (of course we miss our other loved ones, so it’s a trade-off).  Tilling the spring garden plot on an unseasonably warm Christmas Eve. 

And reading.

It’s been heavenly. I get so little time to read these days.  OK, I am a geek.  Not only did I spend much of Christmas Day (and into the night) reading, I was reading about the end of the world. But it’s all good — I’m used to this kind of fare by now.  On the Big Day I devoured, in its entirety, Ronald Wright’s “A short history of progress“.  Which is not such a feat: only 132 pages of large-format text (not including notes) and a real page-turner.  Covers a lot of the same ground as Jared Diamond’s ”

That’s the name of a new documentary on the state of the Earth to air this coming Tuesday and Wednesday nights (23 and 24 October) on CNN. 

Normally, I shy away from anything that might be considered advertising.  But this looks like a good show.  And it got a little boost from the fact that NewsBusters (”Exposing liberal bias in the media”) is falling over themselves to dis it before it shows, with articles in the top slot just above their Ann Coulter banner ad, followed by the characteristic long string of thoughtfully considered, grammatically creative comments (sample: “And just how many scientists constitutes this majority? Save a SeAL, club a liberal!!”).  Although the show covers deforestation, species loss, and overpopulation, the bile from the right stems mainly from CNN’s pushing that tired old myth of global warming, dreamed up by Al Gore and the vast left-wing conspiracy of scientists (and somehow including such arch-liberals as Newt Gingrich, Rupert Murdoch, President Bush, and evangelist Pat Robertson, among others).  

CNN must be doing something right. 

On the other hand, what marketing guru decided to schedule the show’s 2nd installment on the opening night of the World Series?!  Might have to record it, if I can figure out how to do that . . .

The series also includes a set of Resources for Educators.

Yes, that Newt Gingrich. I admit this is hard for me, as a lifelong Democrat. But bear with me.  

In our better moments, we all like to talk about finding common ground and fostering bipartisanship and all that stuff.  So I am trying to walk the walk here.  If we can put aside his social agenda for a moment, one has to recognize that Newt Gingrich has been one of the more compelling voices on the right in terms of the role of science in American policy, consistently arguing that generous investment in science and education is among the key factors in making this country strong, economically robust, and flexible in the tumultuous new millennium.

Probably many of us who remember him from his Speaker-of-the-House days have forgotten, or were never aware, that Gingrich is a bona fide environmentalist.  So much so that conservative think tanks have found it necessary to keep an eye on him – fearing that his support for the Endangered Species Act and  National Instutute of the Environment have brought us dangerously close to the end of western civilization as we know it.  All the code words are there: “junk science”, “property rights”, “unreasonable regulation”.  As one conservative think-tanker commented, disapprovingly, on Newt’s establishment of a House task force on the environment:

“Then Gingrich gave Republicans with views similar to those of liberal environmental organizations equal representation on the task force with Republicans holding conservative/limited-government views”

Horrors — equal representation! What is America coming to?

According to Wikipedia, Gingrich started his career as a Professor of History at the University of West Georgia (where he was denied tenure, which may have something to do with his lifelong antipathy toward the “intellectual elite“). Interestingly, the book jacket lists him as having been an “environmental studies professor.” At any rate, it is clear that the environment has been a key, substantive issue for Gingrich over the long haul.

So I have now finished reading his book, A Contract with the Earth, co-authored with Terry Maple, Professor of Pyschology, Behavior, and Conservation at Georgia Tech and former Director of Zoo Atlanta.  The book is pretty easy going, really an extended essay.  And it is excellent. Much of this stuff has been said before, but rarely from a voice that carries (or carried at one time) so much weight with the large conservative American constituency that “environmentalism” or “creation care” or whatever you want to call it so desperately needs. The proposed Contract with the Earth consists (presumably not coincidentally) of Ten Commandments Commitments:

1. Take the Lead (message to the “sole superpower” remaining on earth, whose leadership has, to put it politely, dropped the ball on environmental issues)

2. Reward a new generation of environmental entrepeneurs (employing the core conservative approach of market-based approaches to innovation)

3. Retire or rejuvenate old technologies (Coal comes to mind)

4. Transform the role of government (Again, near and dear to conservatives, and a long-term Newt issue.  But these guys also recognize that some problems cannot be solved by the market alone and that some government regulation is necessary, hence Newt’s long-time support for te Endangered Species Act)

5. Become an aspirational and inspirational Nation (here’s where the Patriotism comes in)

6. Position America to meet the challenge (”We must be prepared to anticipate and quickly respond to present and future threats.  The high priority of the environment must be affirmed.”)

7. Encourage scientific and technical literacy (I’ll drink to that, as I have said before)

8. Invoke the spirit of collaboration and cooperation (Who can argue with that?  I only wish Newt had discovered this lofty goal before leading his scorched-earth attack on the Clinton White House back in his glory days.  But let’s not go there . . .)

9. Support the environment through philanthropy and investment (”A coordinated, strategic philanthropy will support the increasing priority of environmental events and issues.”)

10. Enlist the Nation (”executives in government, business, science and the arts must rally to mobilize all citizens to pursue proactive, environmental policies and practices at home and in the workplace . . . Every one of us, meek and mighty, is needed to reach our goal of a cleaner, healthier Earth”)

There is a lot of good stuff here, along with, inevitably, some fluffy rhetoric and some substantive issues I would question.  The wonkish details of how such a revolution might transpire have been expressed better elsewhere (e.g., here and here), but of course, that is not the goal of this book.  What is important is its compelling case that working toward a harmonious and sustainable symbiosis with the rest of life is not only the central and most important practical challenge of this century, but that it is a moral and patriotic imperative.  The message is expressed with the concise, emotionally stirring, and intellectually compelling prose we’ve come to expect from this master political operator, and each chapter ends with the “talking points” one expects in a political manifesto.  It is incredibly refreshing to hear these obviously heartfelt and well-reasoned arguments from a hard-core conservative.  Like author Tom Friedman, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, and Republican Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, Gingrich and Maple are showing that natural security must be a fundamental part of patriotism. And it must unite people from across the political and ideological spectra.

So I say: Kudos to Newt Ginrich and Terry Maple, two premier Natural Patriots.  And Let’s hope their ideas take root and grow.

The latest issue of Seed magazine is a must read, announcing the winners of the 2nd Annual Seed Science Writing Contest, which addresses the question: “What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?”  Lest you think that this is a fringe geekosphere question, both the 1st and 2nd place winners, as well as the cover article by Chris Mooney (alas, not available free online, although you can hear an interview with him on NPR here) make compelling cases that scientific literacy is the critical issue of the coming century. As Mooney puts it in his essay, “Dr. President”:

“Under George W. Bush–the man who pronounced climate science ‘incomplete’, who misled the nation in his first major address about the availability of embryonic stem cells for research, who claimed that Iraq was collaborating with Al Qaeda–America’s relationship with reality itself reached a nadir.  At the same time–and perhaps not coincidentally–the fortunes of the nation have suffered and the prospects of many Americans, of the American dream itself, have diminished . . . Along with the neglect of science has come a broader neglect of expertise, competence, and even functional government . . . Americans desperately need to be encouraged once again, as they were at other times in the nation’s history, to take an interest in the vital, exploratory world of science.  The next president must foster that interest . . . Reason, logic, a consideration of fact, and healthy skepticism–all of which are tenets of the scientific approach–are critical to a successful democratic government”

In the same vein, here is 1st place winner Thomas W. Martin’s essay “Scientific Literacy and the Habit of Discourse“.  Some excerpts:

“‘Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective.’ The reason science does manage to be astonishingly effective is not because large groups are automatically wiser or less prone to self-deception than individuals. History adequately demonstrates that, if anything, the opposite is more nearly the case. Science works because its core dynamics—not its methods or techniques per se—are rooted in pitting intellects against one another. Science eventually yields impressive answers because it compels smart people to incessantly try to disprove the ideas generated by other smart people.  The goal of science is to find those ideas that can withstand the long and hard barrage of evidence-based argument . . . Several current presidential candidates have insisted that they oppose the scientific account of earth’s natural history as a matter of principle. In the present cultural climate, altering one’s beliefs in response to anything (facts included) is considered a sign of weakness. Students must be convinced that changing one’s mind in light of the evidence is not weakness: Changing one’s mind is the essence of intellectual growth. By forcing students into evidence-based debates with one another, this mode of interaction, like any other, can become habitual. After being consistently challenged by their peers, most students eventually see that attempts to free themselves from facts are a hollow, and fundamentally precarious, form of “freedom.”  In an era in which we tremble at offending the sensibilities of our neighbors, students must comprehend that it is not only possible but absolutely vital that we criticize each other’s ideas firmly yet civilly . . . We do our children no favors by going easy on them—or, more to the point—allowing them to go easy on each other. Nature has a way of being far tougher.”

And finally, an excerpt from Steven Saus, 2nd place winner with “Camelot is Only a Model: Scientific Literacy in the 21st Century“:

“A literate person is not a walking dictionary, but someone who has enough knowledge about the language to be able to read. Being able to examine our models, critically evaluate them, and even discard them is far more scientifically literate than being able to regurgitate facts for a standardized test . . . Ultimately, our models and descriptions of reality must be subject to two overriding criteria: How useful is this model, and how much does this model resemble our observations?  Scientific literacy requires an understanding that science is only a model. We have to be able to jettison our models when our critical thinking leads us to that conclusion.  Our society has largely lost that understanding. We desire immutable facts and constant certainties. We want clean, hard edges to our world and our knowledge about that world. Politicians, educators, and business leaders crave quantitative metrics that can be compared, compiled, and correlated. As agenda-driven pundits have attacked scientific thought, we have countered their extremism with our own. Both attackers and defenders blur the distinctions between theories, facts, and hypotheses. A scientifically literate society knows none of that is necessary. The edifice of science is not in danger of crumbling; it is under constant renewal. Each generation’s orthodoxy was the prior’s heresy.”

Noble thoughts all. Maybe it’s just me–it’s hard to imagine such an obviously sensible approach to the world taking root in the dank cesspool of superstition, paranoia, partisan thuggery, and general venality of modern American politics.  But hope springs eternal.  Maybe this time Americans really will get sick of it all. And why not?  They seem to have figured this out in other civilized countries. 

Wake up America!  

During my idyllic vacation two weeks ago, I pulled out a book that had been sitting on my table for some time: Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods.  Based on the somewhat off-puttingly pedantic subtitle (”Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder”) I had been procrastinating.  But once I started I could hardly put it down. I think it will prove to be a seminal work in environmentalism.

Yesterday, at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in San Jose, I had the privilege of seeing Mr. Louv speak in a session and panel discussion entitled “No Child Left Indoors” (see my previous post on this topic here).  I was spellbound and inspired. It has been the highlight of the meeting for me.  This guy is my new hero.  Here’s to Richard Louv, Natural Patriot.  In fact, I will go out on a limb and say this:

If you care passionately about the environment, and you read only one book in the coming months, read this one!

The book documents the profound changes that have occurred – largely unnoticed, or at least largely without recognition of their importance — over the short period of a single human generation in the relationship between people and nature, and the equally profound implications of those changes for nearly every aspect of modern life: our physical health, our psychological health, spiritual identity, our sense of community.  Louv documents with a seamless blend of both scientific documentation and heartfelt, poetic sense the consequences of our increasing estrangement from the rest of the universe, and the especially destructive impact that this has on kids.  He has put his finger squarely on the strong but inchoate sense of discord that has been growing in so many Americans over recent decades: something fundamental has gone wrong with American childhood, but what is it?

There are of course many aspects of life that have changed in recent decades, and fingering any one of them definitively as the culprit would be difficult. But Louv makes a compelling case that a major part of the problem, an ultimate cause underlying many of the proximate symptoms, is the estrangement of kids from nature and the outdoors. 

How have we missed this?  Modern environmentalism has focused so much on the impacts humans have on nature that it has largely ignored the impacts that nature has on humans.  Those impacts are now coming into focus and they are turning out to be deep, broad, and important.  And this stands to reason: for the entire sweep of human history and prehistory — from the African savannah millions of years ago to my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s – kids have spent most of their childhoods outside.  That is, up until the last two decades.  Now, as every parent recognizes with distress, kids are sitting in front of a glowing screen for much of the day.  And we’re frightened to let them out of our sight for even a few minutes. We have taken children out of their natural habitat.  It’s hard to imagine that this could happen without affecting their physical, psychological, and spiritual health.  And, indeed, strong evidence suggests that we have affected their health, and our own, profoundly.  To illustrate, consider just two telling observations:

The greatest increase in childhood obesity in American history has taken place in the last two decades, despite the fact that this same period has witnessed the greatest increase ever in organized sports participation by kids.  Clearly, playing soccer a few times a week is not making up for the many hours that kids formerly spent running around outside, playing creatively, building treehouses, etc.

Why are so many kids on ritalin, a phenomenon that would have seemed unthinkable when I was a youngster?  As Louv points out, there are thousands of studies documenting the effects of pharmaceuticals on attention-deficit-disorder (ADD), but only six studies relating experience in nature to ADD. Why? Perhaps because there is no money to be made by sending kids outside, and thus no vested interest to fund such studies.  Yet the few studies that do exist show that nature experience often has beneficial effects on kids’ behavior even without drugs.  And that is on top of the various other benefits of being outside and active.

So whose fault is it that kids are cooped up indoors playing Nintendo all day?  Surely not their own.  They are responding to the message that we adults are sending them, whether overtly or subliminally, whether personally or through our restrictive homeowners’ covenants and cable TV saturation coverage of the handful of child abduction cases each year. We are sending the message that Nature is in the past, that the boogeyman is out there in the woods, and that it’s probably illegal to play there anyway.  Yes, I’m guilty too.  I’ve talked with my son many times about the threats facing wildlife and wild habitats.  At the age of ten he is well aware of global warming and endangered species.  Louv suggests that indoctrinating kids with this information may be counterproductive, serving less to educate them toward stewardship than to instill a sense of hopelessness. Instead, Nature should be a bright, inviting world of wonder for them.

But here’s the most important thing: the greatest beauty of the book is that, rather than generating the angst and sadness that have become the constant companion of those of us concerned about the natural world around us, this book achieves what would seem an impossible feat: It is a beacon of hope.  We can and must turn this around and change the world.  And here’s what we can do:

1) Educate ourselves and the public about how important nature is to the physical, psychological, and spiritual health of children and adults.

2) Accept the responsibility of taking kids outside.  The 1950s are gone, for better or for worse.  Kids will never again play outside for hours at a time unsupervised.  We will have to take them there.  Go fishing, hiking, camping, even hunting.  The hidden gem is that all the benefits of creativity and health that accrue to kids also go to adults.  

3) Support, morally and financially, the programs and people that help kids connect to nature – scouting programs, etc.  For example, there is a growing movement to incorporate nature experience into the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind act.  This should be supported.

Louv also emphasizes that we need to be careful about how we talk with kids about nature and the future of the environment.  He emphasizes two things that resonate with kids of all ages.  First, their own health – physical, psychological and spiritual – is connected intimately with nature.  “The environment” (or the Creation if you prefer that terminology) is not an abstract issue, it has real consequences for their lives.  And second, the rapidly changing world we are living in is filled with new opportunities and they will be the ones that reap them.  We need to build a new civilization, with new kinds of agriculture, new kinds of business, new careers that don’t even have names yet.  These things are already happening and the kids of today will be the leaders of this new civilization.

Finally, this is not just about kids.  If children don’t appreciate nature, where will the next generation of environmental stewards come from?  Who will care enough to take responsibility for a healthy natural envirnment?  Here are some resources for making sure that no child is left indoors: 

The Children and Nature Network.  Lots of news, commentary, and useful, inspiring information showing that “No Child Left Indoors” has grown into a bona fide movement that is making real progress — with governors, mayors, and other policy makers getting on board. Join the network here.

The Powerful Link Between Conserving Land and Preserving Health. “Evidence suggests that children and adults benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy.”

A synopsis of scientific research documenting the benefits from connecting children and nature. Volume 1 and Volume 2.

And so, hats off to Richard Louv, a true Natural Patriot and a hero for our time. 

At least it feels like I’ve had a baby (I can sense any mothers reading this rolling their eyes at the cluelessness of this analogy). Only the gestation time for this little bundle has been more than four years.  What a relief to be finished with the labor . . .

It’s a bouncing newborn book, now available from Oxford University Press.  Read the rest of this entry »