The Natural Patriot

[The solstice has turned and we are once again, as the poet would say, moving toward the light. A new year and a new decade, with all the hope and apprehension — the yin and the yang — inherent therein. For thousands of years people have seen the year come and go, the light dwindle and return, and faced the new year with the same mixture of hope and apprehension that we do. So this first morning of 2010 it seems fitting to turn to the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, in the 39th chapter of Stephen Mitchell’s masterful (if somewhat free-form) translation.]

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly repeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

The master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn’t glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as a stone.

[For good measure, here is another, perhaps more literal, translation of the same chapter by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English:]

These things from ancient times arise from one:
The sky is whole and clear.
The earth is whole and firm.
The spirit is whole and strong.
The valley is whole and full.
The ten thousand things are whole and alive.
Kings and lords are whole and the country is upright.
All these are in virtue of wholeness.

The clarity of the sky prevents it falling.
The firmness of the earth prevents it splitting.
The strength of the spirit prevents it being used up.
The fullness of the valley prevents it running dry.
The growth of the ten thousand things prevents them dying out.
The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall
of the country.

Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.
The low is the foundation of the high.
Princes and lords consider themselves
“orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.”
Do they not depend on being humble?

Too much success is not an advantage.
Do not tinkle like jade
Or clatter like stone chimes.

Isn’t traveling great? I love the . . . no, not the luxurious accommodations on today’s state-of-the-art aircraft, nor the mouth-watering bag of desiccated pretzels (all three of them), nor the physical intimacy with complete strangers with which one is sharing a 12-hour flight across the Pacific, nor even the vague guilt at the colossal carbon footprint one is generating while flying.  No, one of the few remaining charms of long flights is the rare chance to read, something that seems to happen vanishingly infrequently for me in regular life anymore. Hours on end with no interruptions (except perhaps the intermittent pleas to play the electronic version of battleship with one’s child), nowhere else one could be going.

So, on our (no longer very) recent trip to the Antipodes I was able to read two books, seemingly worlds apart but actually with a curious connection between them. Rather against my will, I seem more and more often these days to find myself drifting into ruminations about the end of the world as we know it.  It’s hard to avoid such dystopian daydreams what with accelerating global warming, the sixth wave of extinction underway, the reigning environmental Ponzi scheme known colloquially as “the global economy”, and various other wonders of modern civilization celebrated by our friends at the Cato Institute and such places.

But, to quote Monty Python, “This is supposed to be a happy occasion!  Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who . . .”

Let’s do the bad news first.  After passing by it in the airport bookstores several times in recent months, even picking it up and leafing through a few pages, I finally succumbed to the macabre fascination and bought a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. What really hooked me in the end was that the story is about a man and his young son traveling through the wasteland together and that hit a nerve.

My impressions: The book is both horrific and irresistible. The End Of The World with no silver lining, no blinking, and no punches pulled. I don’t know how to describe its — it is the bleakest, most disturbing narrative perhaps ever written, the more so because of the growing sense that it could in fact happen. But this also, in some perverse sense, makes it hopeful for me. I can’t believe, or it’s hard for me to believe, that the world could truly be completely destroyed with only humans remaining. Life is simply too strong and tenacious. Though it is possible that we’re dumb enough.

It seems much more probable that we would end up with The World Without Us (which I haven’t read). Perhaps it’s only a question of time scales. Ultimately, at some point, humans will disappear as all species do. The question is whether we will go out with a whimper, such that The World Without Us is left, or with a bang, as in The Road. Even in the latter case, life will return and a new age will begin. But it may well be centuries. Even millennia. Depending on how badly we stumble . . .

But that is hardly a topic for polite dinner conversation. Perhaps it’s best to just move on.  The world is in trouble. It is what it is, as the current cliche goes.  So what are we going to do about it?

That, for the most part, is the subject of the Bill McKibben’s excellent recent book Deep Economy. So let us turn to what might reasonably be called the good news. If you’re tired of reading and hearing about impending disaster (perhaps especially because it’s likely to be true), if you’re suffering paralysis about what you can do constructively to help turn the world from its current alarming path, this book is a real shot in the arm, as would be expected from this true hero of American environmental letters.

Basically, McKibben’s thesis is that the solution to the multifaceted complex of threats facing modern civilization is a return to humanity, meaning the humane life of small, more self-sufficient communities — anti-globalization, if you will (one reviewer of the book described him as the “anti-Thomas Friedman”).  And (horrors!) anti-growth.  Meaning that the dogma of economic growth, which is more fundamentalist than any religious belief worldwide, comes under some harsh scrutiny. Its time to live within our means, not just because it is necessary to prevent the collapse of global civilization (in case that is not sufficient justification) but because it will make us happier. Does economic growth make you happy?  It does if you’re starving.  But most Americans aren’t. We long ago reached the point of diminishing returns on the relationships between consumption and happiness. How much happier has the opening of the new Wal-Mart outside of town made you (even ignoring the several stores that closed in the aftermath)?

Local food, local power generation, local community, yes even neighborliness. These are McKibben’s answers. There have of course been many critics of globalization, and in the hands of a lesser writer, this thesis might sound smarmy and naive. But McKibben’s argument is characteristically informed, measured, balanced, and strongly supported with examples from the real world. Very compelling. And let’s face it — it becomes clearer every day that what the world needs is a fundamental rethinking of the way we do things and think about things. This book makes me think that there may yet be a silver lining.

Recently I got an uncharacteristic surge of organizational momentum, girded my loins, donned my battle gear,  and dove into the swamp of my home office filing system.  Many of you will appreciate from your own experience what a daunting task this can be.  I was aided by inspiration of the book Getting Things Done, which appears typical of those somewhat smarmy looking self-help books that are piled all over the tables of airport bookstores against which you bang your carry-on as you negotiate the laughably narrow aisles.  But, because it had been recommended by a friend of mine, I happened to buy a copy on the way home from Christmas travel a month or so ago.

It turned out to be, well, a life-changing experience would be too strong a way to put it.  But let’s just say that the demands of everyday life, and particularly the sense of control over information flow, had been spinning ever more dizzily out of control over the last few weeks months years, and I was, shall we say, receptive to finding some way out.  I must confess that, despite the appallingly geekish subject matter, I couldn’t put the thing down.  This was the real McCoy.  Yes!  I can do this!  Concrete suggestions!  So I read the book and — this is the important part — actually made a conscious decision to start putting some of its recommendations into practice.  Long story short: it works for me.

Anyway, I did not intend this to become a book review, though I do highly recommend it (Warning: the book and its author David Allen have grown into something approaching a cult — see here for an entree into this world).  Really this is all backdrop for a rumination that emerged as I was happily going through my office, printing out neat little labels for my neat little manila file folders, absent-mindedly humming advertising jingles as I arranged them in alphabetical order, merrily consigning decades-old bank statements to the pile destined for the shredder in a surprisingly liberating catharsis, etc.

Yes, the shredder: I never thought of myself as the kind of guy who would own a shredder.  Isn’t that the sort of thing that CIA operatives and high-level corporate mucky-mucks have, not real people like me?  Well my very responsible spouse convinced me that grown-ups need such things to prevent identity theft, etc, etc. I did not press the point on my mind at the time, which was what motivation someone might have for stealing my identity. So we got one.  And there is indeed something pleasing about shredding those old records and being done with them once and for all.

Or not.  And that, dear friends, brings me to the real subject of today’s shaggy dog story.  In embarking on my semi-decadal office reorganization, it quickly became evident that there was a lot of crap here.  And because shredded office paper is largely air (seems like it would make great insulation, though I suppose there would be a fire hazard), it takes up a lot of space. What to do with the stuff?  It’s unwieldy and takes flight at the slightest breath of breeze.  Not good for dumping into the recycling bin.

Naturally, I wondered whether it is compostable.  So I tried an experiment. I figured let’s just try one bagful and see what happens.  So I dumped it into the compost bin and brushed off my hands. To my surprise, it was basically completely gone in two weeks.  Mind you, this is January and the creek has been frozen over probably more days than not during that time. The microbes are a bit more sluggish this time of year than in the summer.  Yet, when I pitchforked the stuff up and turned it over, there was almost no sign of little bleach-white shreds of paper.  Only that pleasing, earthy amalgam of rotting leaves, almost recognizable former vegetable bits, pupae of some sort of large fly, and the odd remarkably intact apple.

So the moral of the story is that there is life after death and taxes.  My ancient yellowing tax worksheets and records of dentist bills and pay stubs have returned, literally, to the ecosystem that, via some convoluted path, spawned them.  In a few months’ time, when I get back to Phase II of the biodiversity restoration project, they will be nourishing the little root-hairs of native plants, and from there on to caterpillars, birds, and what not. It’s comforting in some way to believe that the information superhighway leads to a dirt road, and thence into an old field full of untidy life.

[Editor’s note: A millennium before Charles Frazier, before Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, there was the original “Cold Mountain”, a modest group of poems thought to have been authored by the mysterious hermit Han-shan, who scribbled them on rocks and trees around his humble abode and left them. The story goes that they were collected by an official who wished to be enlightened. And that, fittingly, is how the most influential Zen poetry in history has come down to us. Or at least, that’s how the story goes. The poems cover a lot of ground, but the following one hits home at the moment (although I would switch groundhogs for mountain monkeys). This poem, seventh in a series, is from Burton Watson’s translation.]

From: Cold Mountain
Han-shan
My house is at the foot of the green cliff,
My garden, a jumble of weeds I no longer bother to mow.
New vines dangle in twisted strands
Over old rocks rising steep and high.
Monkeys make off with mountain fruits,
The white heron crams his bill with fish from the pond,
While I, with a book or two of the immortals,
Read under the trees — mumble, mumble.

It’s familiar dilemma: after you’ve changed out your old incandescent light bulbs, got serious about recycling, started eating local farm produce, switched to reusable shopping bags, maybe even bought a Prius, one comes to the uncomfortable question: How are we going to make a real dent in the voracious global carbon appetite? How, in other words, can we make more than symbolic progress towards getting global climate change in check?

The question is urgent, possibly the most urgent of our time. And there are many parts to its answer, but they all inevitably boil down to decisive action at the highest levels of state, national, and international government. And as we look forward, in matter of a few hundred days, the long-overdue departure of the current administration in Washington may at last provide a chance for progress.

But how to proceed? What can an ordinary citizen do? If it all seems mind-numbingly wonkish and impossible to grasp (Cap and trade? carbon credits? What the . . ?), do not despair. There is hope. And it comes in the form of an extremely concise and clear little book called Climate Solutions, by Peter Barnes (Chelsea Green Publishing). This is undoubtedly the best summary I have seen of the complex, byzantine economic and geopolitical context of the problem of climate change and how we as citizens — as the stewards of our various governments — might approach it. I highly recommend the book.

Most proposed legislation to reduce global warming calls for a cap-and-trade system, in which a “cap” (limit) is set on the total amount of carbon that can be released to the atmosphere, the cap declines over time, and tradable permits for emitting this carbon are issued to allow the market to determine how the reductions take place. The crucial issues are how the permits are issued (whether simply given free to big utility companies, or auctioned off), who gets the money from sales of the permits (the government or the citizenry, as administered through a trust fund), and whether there is a “safety valve” that basically allows the whole thing to be jettisoned if it gets too inconvenient.

Barnes argues cogently for a “cap-and-dividend” system, in which permits are auctioned off, the proceeds go to a “sky trust” that pays dividends to citizens (rather than the government or utility company shareholders) and/or is used for projects that are clearly in the public interest, no carbon offsets are allowed to serve as fudge factors, and there are no safety valves.

In a strikingly unusual and altruistic move, the author and publisher claim that they are actually making a FREE PDF copy of the book available to maximize its practical impact. That is supposed to be at www.onthecommons.org. I couldn’t find the free PDF of the book there, but there is other interesting stuff which gets at the sam material, including free citizen’s guides to the “cap and dividend” model that Barnes advocates. If you can afford the modest price of this book, I encourage you to buy it, read it, loan it to as many friends as possible to support the effort that went into it, and then act on it by voting and organizing. If you can’t afford it, download the free stuff. We will all need to be on our toes about this as the issue actually comes to serious discussion — and a vote — in the fresh air of the next administration.

Some key quotes:

“When people don’t pay the full cost of what they’re doing, but instead transfer costs to others, economists call this a ‘market failure’. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, has said that climate change is ‘the biggest market failure the world has ever seen.’”

“The big question in climate policy is whether polluters should pay pollutees, or vice versa. If carbon permits are given free to historical polluters, energy prices will rise and we’ll all pay more to whoever gets the permits. That wealth transfer — which over time could exceed a trillion dollars — will flow straight from our pockets to the shareholders of private companies. It will be less visible than tax-funded transfers, but a huge shift of wealth nonetheless.”

“Fossil fuels are unique. There’s no other source of energy that’s as concentrated and convenient as fossil fuels. This means that we can’t simply replace fossil fuels with something else. We also have to use less energy, and use it smarter.”

“The big problem with a carbon tax is that it has to be very high to decrease pollution sufficiently. When people are addicted to a substance or a source of energy, they’re willing to pay a lot more before they stop using it . . . A carbon tax is an economist’s dream but a politician’s nightmare. The economist imagines that politicians will keep raising the tax until it reduces pollution sufficiently to solve the climate crisis. That assumes heroic behavior by a majority of Congress members for several decades, an assumption not grounded in reality.”

“In cap-and-dividend, permits are also sold, not given away free. However, the revenue doesn’t go to the government — it comes back in the form of equal dividends to all of us who pay it. This revenue recycling system is sometimes referred to as a sky trust.”

“Several bills pending in Congress address the market failure that causes climate change. However, most of them replicate errors of the European trading system: They give free permits to historic polluters, cap carbon downstream rather than as it enters the economy, allow offsets and safety valves, and offer little protection to consumers and businesses.”

And finally, in a nutshell:

“KEY LESSONS
* Auction, don’t give away, permits.
* Cap all carbon entering the economy.
* Protect consumers and manufacturers.
* Don’t count offsets against permits.”

The devil is in the details, of course, but a surprising depth of the details are in this little book and it is written for regular people, rather than hard-core policy wonks. Power to the people!

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 ”