INTRODUCTION One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid? I asked what he meant. Well, youre always talking about your woods and tree houses, and how you used to ride that horse down near the swamp. At first, I thought he was irritated with me. I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something Id be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days. Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood and, I fear, too readily discount my childrens experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important. He was right. Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact. Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. Thats exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child. As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered those woods even in my dreams. A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forestbut not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move. This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy childand adultdevelopment. While I pay particular attention to children, my focus is also on those Americans born during the past two to three decades. The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature. Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions. As likely as not today, summer camp is a weight-loss camp, or a computer camp. For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear to ignore. A recent television ad depicts a four-wheel-drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly beautiful mountain streamwhile in the backseat two children watch a Excerpted from Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
