Nature calls, but our kids don't listen

July 14, 2007

As kids, we had a dozen destinations within two miles of home, places we'd visit regularly, like the river, the sand pit, Mankins' Grove, the Fox Hole, the jungle, the fort, the trees.

As I get older and faces and events fade, I'm surprised to find that what grows more vivid in my memory are these outdoor places.

Maybe it's because for 35 years, I've spent 48 of every 52 weeks behind a desk, and my inner park ranger is rebelling. Maybe it's because it's July, when I become hopelessly romantic about my childhood summers on a Nebraska farm. Or maybe it's just because Colorado air has been so glorious it makes you glad just to be alive.

For whatever reason, weekends find me outdoors for no gainful purpose. I survey my vast tomato holdings about 15 times a day, overwatering my six plants, pulling weeds, walking the dog at all hours, cruising the neighborhood on my bike.

I crave the outdoors because I bonded with nature as a child.

Or that would be Richard Louv's theory, I suspect. Two years ago, he wrote Last Child in the Woods: Saving Your Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, in which he argues children today are deprived of the outdoors to their great physical, mental and spiritual detriment. Kids today can tell you all about the Amazon rain forest, Louv says, but don't have a clue what's behind their backyard fence.

He cites a couple of interesting studies: One showed that by 1990, the radius around the home where American children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to one-ninth of what it was in 1970.

Another, in 2005, showed American children spend an average of 60 hours weekly in front of TV or computer screens, and that 68 percent of kids have TVs in their bedrooms.

Louv believes this nature deficit contributes to several modern childhood maladies, including obesity, anxiety and depression.

As a society, we're still fixated on "stranger danger," he writes. Since 1975, violent crimes against children have decreased 38 percent. What's increased, on the other hand, is 24-hour news coverage of a few tragedies.

"Society is sending an unintended message to children - nature is past, electronics are the future and the boogeyman lives in the woods," Louv wrote in a 2005 article in The Oregonian. "The script is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. This message is effectively banning much of the kind of play we enjoyed as children."

Outdoor classrooms have proved to curb attention deficit disorder, and they also boost test scores, grade-point averages and problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, Louv writes.

Organized outdoor instruction is expensive, I suppose, and "nature" near urban areas is increasingly lost to development.

But there's a lot of truth in Louv's theory - that we impoverish our kids' lives when we lock them indoors. Great religions and thinkers have always stressed the value of solitude and introspection, and that path for many is through wide- open spaces.

My grandmother saw to it that I attended Bible camp at St. Paul's Lutheran Church for at least two summers in my youth, but the places that fed my spirit, in fact, were the pastures and fields and wild places.

The Platte River may have been my favorite.

I'd pedal to it two miles south of the farm, over gravel roads and the Interstate 80 overpass, through a small pasture and a wooden gate.

A wall of giant cottonwoods lined the banks. Beyond it flowed the wide, warm, lazy Platte. Sometimes the water was ankle deep, so you could walk from sandbar to sandbar, digging your toes in the sand, inspecting minnow pools, dragging a stick in the sand just to see the imprint. Other times it was deep enough for a canoe adventure. The Platte was our seashore, endlessly entertaining.

Generally, there wasn't another soul in sight. Just the clatter of cottonwood leaves filling the giant sanctuary, where meadowlarks and mourning doves and an occasional scared deer helped me see how benevolent the world could be.

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