Feature Story

Richard Louv may not look or sound like a mountain man, but he is a Pied Piper to the outdoors, trying to lead a movement back to nature. The former San Diego Union-Tribune columnist has written a book warning that this generation of American children may be the first in which a connection to nature is the exception, rather than the norm. As family life ramps up, as technology creates less time, and as parents fear what lurks beyond the front door, the walk in the park has the outdated impact of a “Lassie” film. It seems as corny as a Davy Crockett hat. What that means to the millions of American families that prefer to stay inside and go bonkers on the computer is being explored by educational studies, one after another, that tie cognitive advances to a life filled with nature. Without it, the author argues in his book, “Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive.”


“It is an exultation,” says Lisa Alvarez, mother of her young explorer, 5-year-old Louis. “Nature is something that lifts the spirit in a way that can’t be reproduced by a video game or, even I dare say, a book.” The longtime OC Family Magazine contributor and her husband, Andrew Tonkovich, chose the rural Modjeska Canyon, near Irvine, in which to raise their son.

It is a setting that would warm Louv’s heart. He believes the effect on the shiftless child is all bad. When no one is there to see and hear the leaves fall, he argues, nature becomes an afterthought.

“If kids are not going out and bonding with nature, who in the world is going to care about the spotted owl in 10 or 15 years?” Louv asked recently before a talk at Chapman University. His point: The further we are from nature, the less we understand and the narrower all life becomes. The meter reading on what should be explored, as well as protected, vibrates downward.

Nature-Deficit Disorder
Louv’s year-old book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006), may be the best alarm clock espousing the need for free-form nature experiences, from imaginative play in parks, to strolls through the woods, to climbing trees and building tree houses.

Certainly, that is easier written than done. Alvarez and her husband, Tonkovich, are both college professors, and each day they see the result of families that have stressed education over all else.

They’ve resisted hard-wiring their child. “I think we’re under enormous pressure to make our children achieve earlier and earlier than ever before,” Alvarez says. “That pressure is more easily measured in these scheduled activities, which do play an important role, but they aren’t everything.

“Nature is as good a teacher as a piano teacher or a soccer coach, but we don’t necessarily recognize that. We don’t get awards from nature, or something to put on our child’s resumé, and it’s not a competition.”

Observes Bill Habermehl, superintendent of schools for the Orange County Department of Education: “Our children today are locked up in areas that are often restricted, where they can play, how much they can play. Electronics and computers and TVs have taken them out of nature and into the indoor environment. I think it’s having a devastating effect on them.”

Mother Nature is still beckoning
This isn’t the end of nature as we know it – protected parkland, permanent open space, rural and suburban trails, lakes, rivers, streams and national parks still exist, and in some places, in abundance.

But to Louv, everything is at risk if a generation is, as well. “People will carry nature in their briefcases, not in their hearts,” he warns, if use of, and protection of, natural resources becomes more of an intellectual pursuit than a realized one.

While Louv hesitates to write a prescription for how often and to what degree children need to reach out and touch nature, he does believe there has to be an “immersion” into it. That doesn’t minimize the hours-long, free-form, imaginative play in the back yard that too few parents endorse these days. However, it probably does require some time deep in a forest, on a boat in a river, or on a hike in Yosemite.

Like the young auto mechanic who learns the details of an engine, or the future veterinarian who understands the needs of a dog, direct experience is a necessity to learning from nature. And, as Louv writes, nature’s contact is a necessary part of developing the whole child.

“It’s about 2 things – the health of the earth, and the health of the kids,” Louv says.

Who is going to care about nature in the future?

Louv worries about the decline in attendance at national parks and adds: “Where will the political constituency come from in the future if we’re not raising little Teddy Roosevelts?”

Roosevelt brought reform to an increasingly business-led economy in the early 1900s and also saw through the smokestacks to the need to preserve natural land. As president, he set aside some 148 million acres of forestland.

When World War I broke out, most American boys enlisted off farms. When World War II ended, millions of rural servicemen chose city living. More recently, Louv’s extensive study of our habits in a natural habitat shows an America simply turning away. “For all of human history and pre-history, human beings went outside, and most of the developing hours, days, years were spent either playing or working in nature. And within a matter of 3 decades, we’re seeing the potential disappearance of that.”

Our future frontier
He writes in his book about 4 frontiers, beginning with Lewis & Clark and ending with (his hope) a rebirth of nature-loving: Of the third frontier, which is today’s children, he notes: “The Baby Boomers…may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.”

Louv would check all of the following as reasons why we’ve rushed indoors and slammed the door:
>> Increasing technology
>> Loss of open land
>> Lack of parental interest
>> A family’s building blocks that downplay nature for more “educational” pursuits.

“Obviously, technology is part of this and video games are seductive, as is television,” Louv says. “So it’s not just the presence of new technology; it’s something else in addition to that.”

His theory? “The underbelly issue is fear, as parents are scared to death of stranger-danger.”

One way to overcome this is to involve the parent in the outing, the park day, the trail walk. Yet it is as hard to get the parent outside as it is the child. “The radius that kids can go (alone) from their house has shrunk to a few hundred feet from about 6 miles, from when I was a kid,” Louv says. So, often, families don’t go anywhere.

However, as parents grasp the real meaning of the whole child – and understand the healthy attributes of nature – a rebirth may occur. Louv points out that while in nature, all the senses are in play, as is the wonder you won’t find on a city street or in a computer game.

“Biologically, we are all still hunters and gatherers…when we deny that, we deny our humanity. We need that; our physical, psychological and spiritual organism needs nature.”

Here’s how to touch nature…locally

The Orange County Department of Education administers the self-funding “Inside the Outdoors” program, which serves more than 125,000 students annually through 1-day field trips, multiple-day outdoor science school experiences, and in other ways. The department’s Habermehl understands that this program offers a nature experience for the first, and sometimes only, time for scores of children.

“They get an appreciation for water, where it comes from,” he says. “For keeping the environment clean. They get to understand fires, the devastating impact. It’s the first time they actually see stars and constellations…They talk about nocturnal animals, survival and nature. When you are actually there, and pick up pine cones, and see that the seed has blown somewhere, and that forest spreads, that has an impact on kids; there is no other way to replicate that.

“It is life-changing, and it is lifelong.”

Today’s busy scheduling
Louv listens to the hyper-schedule of many a child: 3 sports, piano lessons, 2 private coaches, tutoring to nail down math, and in high school, there is the international baccalaureate program to prepare for a Top 15 university. Who has time to play outdoors? Replies the author: “As long as nature is seen as a frivolous activity, as an extracurricular nice-to-do, we won’t see much change.”

He doesn’t agree that today’s parents should know better. “The cultural message is that nature doesn’t count and that it’s in the past.”

Nature, then, is being treated like an old Western.

“We study all kinds of things that affect child development…but nature largely has not been studied as having any impact on child development.” His book is part of that mind change.

He says that often when parents take their children on a nature trip, it’s based largely on “instinct and nostalgia, not on any hard knowledge. But the evidence now exists, and the evidence is very persuasive. I’m thinking about writing a column someday about, ‘If you want to get your kid into Harvard, get them outside.’”

Want those test scores to go up? Louv talks about, and writes about, the connection between immersion in nature and higher grades. So there is clear educational rationale for children to take the time to grab the day pack, strap on the hiking boots, unplug the iPod and store away the cleats. However, they just may need their parents by their sides to pull this off, an active participant that because of today’s society is being pulled in all directions. Observes Alvarez, mother of 5-year-old Louis: “As parents, we’re as vulnerable to peer pressure as our children.”

“There is a paradox that runs through the book,” Louv says. “In order to give kids some semblance of unorganized activity in nature, we’re probably going to have to organize a lot of it.”


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Craig Reem is executive editor of Inland Empire Family Magazine, and he loves to hike with his 3 sons.


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OC resources to get your kids outdoors