Nature-Deficit Disorder

Salon interviews journalist Richard Louv about his new book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”. The book claims that our culture’s disconnect from nature has had harmful effects on younger generations, and that a real reinvestment in having kids experience nature could have widespread positive results.

” Louv spent 10 years traveling around the country reporting and speaking to parents and children, in both rural and urban areas, about their experiences in nature. In “Last Child in the Woods,” he pairs their anecdotes with a growing body of scientific research that suggests children who are given early and ongoing positive exposure to nature thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their “shut-in” peers do not.”

At one point in the interview Salon asks if this is merely a urban problem and that perhaps rural kids were better off, Louv says it just isn’t so.

“For my research, I tried to cross every barrier I could think of — for instance, I did interviews in more rural areas and suburban areas, like the one I grew up in outside Kansas City, which still has a lot of nature. I went in there thinking, Well, certainly if you have woods next to you, kids will be out in them. But that simply wasn’t true. The parents and the kids there were saying the same things as kids in more urban areas. In fact, the amount of nature you have in New York City is actually better than some of the newer suburbs; imagine, today, a city building a Central Park. A major study came out a few months ago that said that the rate of obesity in children is growing faster in rural areas than it is in cities and suburbs. Again, it seems counterintuitive. But it’s not so counterintuitive when you think about the fact that the family farm is fairly nonexistent now. Kids in rural areas are playing the same video games, watching the same television, and they’re on longer car rides.”

In the end, Louv hints at something many modern Pagans have suspected for some time.

“But there’s something going on here that’s more mysterious, and frankly the lack of study on it means any answer to your question will be incomplete. There is the “biophilia” hypothesis, which in some quarters is controversial, but that suggests we are still hunters and gatherers and biologically we have not changed. That hypothesis says there is something in us that needs natural forms, that needs association with nature in ways that we don’t fully understand. I think we instinctively understand that there is something about being in nature that you cannot get on a soccer field.“

An interesting look on where the priorities of our current society may be leading us. What I think is interesting is that Louv isn’t a luddite, he isn’t railing against our modern world he is simply suggesting that we could all do with some more time in the woods.

Tags: Neopaganism