The Wilderness Blog

Whither the Wild Child?

By Hillary Rosner, 6-03-05

Thanks so much to everyone who posted responses to the first installment. You raised some fascinating points, and I'll be addressing them as the weeks go on, starting now.

A 14-year-old reader asked a critical question: how do you get kids—and teenagers in particular—to care about nature? It seems simple enough, right? Take them out to witness it. But can wilderness compete with PlayStations? With Abercrombie & Fitch? With instant messaging?

I asked a former student of mine, who just finished her sophomore year at Bowdoin College in Maine, to reflect on her own experiences outdoors, and how they contributed to her environmental beliefs. She's both a lover of wilderness and exceptionally well read on matters of nature. Tasha's father worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club, so every family vacation involved some combination of hiking, camping, and canoeing.

Tasha told me she grew "bored" of hiking in junior high because her friends weren't into it. It's easy to understand. You want to do what your friends are doing. Even in New Hampshire, it's hard to imagine junior high school kids thinking hiking is cool.

But it was too late for Tasha—she'd already fallen hard for nature. "Luckily I snapped out of it," she said of her brief anti-hiking stint, "and in ninth grade, I took it up again, only to get injured on my favorite mountain. That's when I started reading Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey and Thoreau and co. and I realized my love for nature and the wild."

She also offered this: "I would say it takes a little coercion on the part of parents as children turn to teenagers, but once you're hooked, you're hooked, even if you don't realize it for a few years."

She's right, of course. Ask any wilderness advocate where it all began for them, and they'll almost certainly recount a childhood memory. There's even scientific evidence for this. Studies in the fields of environmental education, developmental psychology, and sociology have all shown correlations between people's childhood experiences and their level of concern for the environment as adults. In one U.K. study of people in conservation-related fields, 97% of those surveyed said their outdoor experiences as children were the most important factor in shaping their environmental views.

I've had several chance encounters with this idea over the last week. I was interviewing a guy whose job involves annual six-month stays in Antarctica, and he turned dreamy-eyed while telling me of his long traverses across the ice and snow to remote field camps. So I asked if he'd always been drawn to wild, unfrequented places and he said he'd grown up hiking and fishing the Rockies with his father, and that the experiences had stuck.

And in Chip Brown's terrific book about naturalist and mountaineer Guy Waterman, Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild--which I've been reading the last few days--he describes Waterman's early years on his family's rambling 10-acre wooded compound in Connecticut. Waterman's father, a skilled outdoorsman, took his sons on camping and canoe trips and held weekly Sunday picnics in the woods; as a boy Waterman "loved to wander the banks of the brook, navigating toppled tree trunks and tangled roots." Waterman went on to work on Capitol Hill and on the corporate fast-track, but was compelled to return to nature in his early 30s, took up rock climbing, and never stopped heading for the hills. "Everything followed from that moment," Brown writes of Waterman's re-acquaintance with the outdoors.

But the problem, it seems, is that the old fuddy-duddy lament may have something to it: these darn kids today are spending less and less time in nature and more time in front of Grand Theft Auto. (I'll have to ask Steven Johnson--whose new book Everything Bad Is Good for You, is about how today's pop culture, including video games and reality TV, is making us smarter—what he thinks about this. I'll get back to you.) The New York Times House & Home section ran a great piece at the end of April about a recent book by Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. One of the most disturbing--and surprising--points about the disconnect between kids and nature was the idea that the culture of fear is partly responsible for keeping kids indoors: Fear of abduction, fear of lawsuits, fear of loitering.

Add that to the disappearance of wild places close to home. The ever-increasing development of formerly rural areas--like those rapidly multiplying and totally depressing subdivisions springing up from the prairie out by Denver International Airport—is quickly eating away at the spaces where kids can play. Every time we go to Albuquerque, my boyfriend, who grew up there, drives in disbelief past the sprawling, sparkling strip malls that now sit in place of the gaping fields where he used to play.

Still, you don't have to grow up in a tent in the forest to learn to love trees. I grew up in New York City, where the outdoors meant Central Park and "wilderness" might refer to anything beyond Manhattan. (As a friend from the City wrote me: "What 'wilderness'? Are you talking about north of 96th Street? Queens? Staten Island?") But my parents refused to let the city represent my entire geographical frame of reference. I spent summers in the Adirondacks. We took weekend trips to nature preserves, heading up to the Berkshires for an autumn weekend, hiking at Bash Bish Falls or Bartholomew's Cobble. In the city, we spent many afternoons at the Natural History Museum. There was no backpacking, to be sure—but there were enough glimpses of nature to plant the bug.

I, too, grew too cool for nature—I skipped it, for the most part, during all of high school and much of college, and didn't revisit the peace of a walk in the woods until I was in my early 20s and got a dog. But I'd put money on the fact that those childhood excursions shaped my longing for wild places, and that without them I would certainly not be writing this.

Obviously, those excursions were luxuries. Which is why programs like the Fresh Air Fund and urban botanic and community gardens are so important—anything that puts kids in contact with enough wildness to trigger awe. Lack of exposure to nature, according to people who study this stuff, leads to "eco-phobia," which can prevent kids from caring about the natural world.

I'll leave you with this. In his excellent book Monkey Dancing, journalist (and fellow Boulder-ite) Daniel Glick chronicles a trip he took around the world with his 9-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son. In the aftermath of family upheaval and tragedy, Dan decided to take his kids to see places and creatures that might soon be lost—orangutans, Bengal tigers, the Great Barrier Reef. After a lifetime of traveling to wild places, Dan had, he wrote, "fallen in love with my planet."

It was time to share the love. "My kids, raised on flashes of music videos and DSL Internet downloads, had only the barest suburban inklings of the natural world that I clung to as my spiritual core. Perhaps I could help them make a deeper connection during this trip." Tune in next week to find out if it worked.

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