Nature-Deficit Disorder?

Richard Louv Asks Whether We’re Raising Our Children Under House Arrest

In the days before sprawling residential subdivisions, children at play could often be seen traipsing through meadows or climbing trees. Now it’s more common to find boys and girls being shuttled from school to computer to soccer practice as part of a fast-paced schedule that leaves little time for daydreaming or exploring nature. The result, says journalist Richard Louv, is “nature-deficit disorder.” Louv coined this term, which is not a medical diagnosis, to call attention to the absence of nature in children’s lives. In his newest book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books), he ties the lack of time spent in nature to everything from childhood obesity to psychological disorders. Suburban sprawl and busy schedules are just two factors keeping children out of nature, Louv says. Others include the strict focus on academics, what he calls the “criminalization of play,” media-fueled fear of child abductions, and overzealous environmental campaigns. Still, Louv is optimistic and believes that people with different political and cultural concerns can find common ground around this issue. Most people above a certain age, he says, remember having a place in nature that was special to them when they were a child.

For Louv, that place was the woods beyond his childhood home in Raytown, Missouri. Born in 1949, Louv was raised by an artist mother and a chemical-engineer father, both of whom encouraged his engagement with the natural world. But nature for the Louvs didn’t mean just looking at wildflowers. Every spring, his family would get in the car on a mission to save the box turtles — who were making their annual migration — from the ravages of automobiles.

Louv began writing at a young age, and by twelve he was getting published in his school and community newspapers. He went on to receive a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas in 1971. It was the Vietnam era, and he successfully applied for conscientious-objector status. For his alternative service, Louv got a position at Project Concern, a charity in San Diego. He spent five years there before returning to journalism and later became a contributing editor to Human Behavior and San Diego magazine, and then a columnist for twenty-three years at the San Diego Union-Tribune. Louv has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. He helped found Connect for Kids, the largest child-advocacy site on the Web, and was an advisor to the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World awards program. In 2005 he cofounded the Children and Nature Network (www.cnaturenet.org). His other books include The Web of Life: Weaving the Values That Sustain Us (Conari Press) and Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An Angler’s Journey across America (Simon & Schuster).

We spoke in the sunroom of Louv’s San Diego home, on an uncharacteristically rainy August day. A shadow box of multicolored fishing lures hung on the wall, and titles like The Art of Fly Tying and Trout Magic lined the shelf. (He prefers fishing to writing, he says.) Louv has two sons — Jason, twenty-five, and Matthew, nineteen — and is as comfortable quoting facts and figures as he is talking about the delights of a childhood immersed in nature.

Cooper: What was your relationship with nature as a child?

Louv: When I was a kid in the 1950s, I had a strong sense that nature was saving me in some fundamental way, though I couldn’t have articulated it then. I found a meaning in the outdoors that I didn’t find anywhere else. Not that my life outside nature was without meaning; it’s just there was a certain intensity in nature. I’d go as far as to call it a “spiritual” intensity, though the word spiritual makes some people — including me — uncomfortable.

I was lucky to have parents who introduced me to nature. Being outdoors gave me a sense of balance and a little bit of escape from family problems.

Cooper: How has childhood changed since you were growing up?

Louv: Children’s activities seem more restricted now. My son Matthew once asked me, “How come it was more fun when you were a kid?”

Matthew’s now nineteen, and he and I recently traveled to Kansas and Missouri. I took him to some of the places where I’d spent time in nature as a child. We went to the Lake of the Ozarks, where I’d gone fishing. Back then there were only rustic cabins and wooden boats hauled up on the mud beach. Now it’s cheek-by-jowl California-style McMansions and Miami-style condos along the shore, and if you went out on a bass boat in the middle of the day, you’d be in danger of being capsized by the speedboats’ wakes. [Laughter.] There are parts of the lake that are blocked off and protected, but overall there has been a huge change.

Next we drove up to Kansas City, where I grew up. Along the way we must’ve seen thirty dead armadillos on the road. I had never seen even one as a child. It turns out the armadillos’ range has expanded out of Texas and up to central Missouri. There’s some suspicion that this might be caused by global warming, but that also may not be the case. In fact, armadillos have been heading north ever since they crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1850. We have to consider a much longer clock when we talk about the environment and remember that major environmental changes have always occurred.

Growing up in the Midwest, I learned that nature is often dangerous. In 1957 I watched as a huge tornado passed behind our house and killed nearly fifty people. Kids today, because they don’t have a lot of direct contact with nature, have this odd belief that nature should be safe and dependable. So when some major natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, happens, they take it as evidence of the end of the world.

I think the long-term effect of Katrina will rank with that of the 9/11 attacks. It taught young people that nature can be dangerous. Many kids my son’s age think of nature as a slogan on a T-shirt, a consumer item that doesn’t have much power. When disaster strikes, nature goes from being something they wear to being something they fear, from clothing to catastrophe. The joy that can be found in the middle, somewhere between consumerism and natural disaster, gets lost when a generation has so little direct engagement with nature.

When I showed Matthew the places where I’d lived, we took a walk through what was left of the woods behind one house. What for me had been a source of endless wonder was now a sad remnant of its former self. When I was a boy, that house, though part of a ticky-tacky, Levittown-like neighborhood, was on the very edge of Kansas City. I could walk through the yard, past a hedge, and into a cornfield, where I built my underground fort. Beyond that were deep woods and rolling hills and farms that seemed to go on forever. I spent many of my waking hours hiking those woods and fields with my dog, a collie named Banner. It was a real fifties boyhood.

But my knowledge and awareness of nature stopped with those woods. I could not have told you anything about the Amazon rain forest. I had no clue that my woods were connected ecologically to any other woods. For kids today, it’s the reverse: they can tell you plenty about the Amazon, but they cannot tell you the last time they went outside just to watch leaves blowing in the breeze. It’s good that children know more about ecology, but an intellectualized experience of nature simply isn’t enough. We need both.

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