CHAPTER 20

Fresh air

Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, and turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion.

—RICHARD LOUV,
Last Child in the Woods

Instead of doing something, something is done to us.… We stumble across a roaring, resplendent waterfall in the middle of a quiet forest, and we become profoundly entranced.

—THOMAS MOORE,
The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life

On an early summer day in 2013—on the first day of National Pollinator Week—more than twenty-five thousand bumblebees fell dead on a Target parking lot in Wilsonsville, Oregon. Landscapers had erroneously sprayed the lot’s sixty-five European linden trees with the potent insecticide Safari, marketed by Valent U.S.A as “a super-systemic insecticide with quick uptake and knockdown.” (Ironically, Valent is a cosponsor of National Pollinator Week, which celebrates the value of bees.) ¹ This unfortunate event, happening in similar ways all over the country, is a metaphor for our distracted culture. Busy with our digital devices, inhabiting the great air-conditioned indoors, we are almost as clueless as the pesticide applicators who sprayed according to schedule rather than observing that the trees were in full bloom and buzzing with life.

In the last few decades, the aphorism “Stop and smell the roses” sank to a more cynical “Wake up and smell the coffee.” We didn’t have time for nature anymore. We learned to just ignore the damn roses and let the landscaper take care of them. This chapter challenges a widespread belief that if you make enough money, you don’t need to know anything about nature or have contact with it. Conversely, we suggest that the stronger our bonds with nature—both individually and collectively—the less money we’ll need, or want. If kicking affluenza is the overall goal, proven natural remedies may be the way to go.

FOR THE CHILDREN

Nature isn’t just something pretty to look at, not just a backdrop for our busy lives; it’s where we live and what we are. It’s what flows in our arteries and endocrine systems, and it’s the whole-grain cereal that gives us energy to start the day. But the more sidetracked we get chasing possessions and the money to buy them, the more distant nature becomes from our everyday lives. And the distance between nature and popular culture has become a canyon: for example, recent data suggests children are tethered to electronic media (computers, phones, television, games) more than fifty hours a week, while spending less than forty minutes outside.² This disconnect between children and their Mother Earth—like the gradual loss of one’s hearing or sight—is poignant but stupidly careless at the same time. Certainly, it’s a poorly conceived strategy for human growth and development.

After a seventeen-year absence from the classroom, the biology teacher Fred First saw a lot of changes in student behavior: “Out of 120 on field trips near campus along Virginia’s New River that semester, only one student could call one of some 50 observed living things by name: poison ivy. Everything else—birds and bushes, wildflowers and vines, insects and fungi—were anonymous strangers.”³

On a similar natural exploration, the naturalist Annette Hurdle heard a frightened child call out, “A plant touched me! What should I do?” Another child poked a stick at a dead beetle, commenting to her friend that the insect’s batteries must have run out. Is nature becoming just so much nostalgia in our virtualized world? Richard Louv, author of the pivotal book Last Child in the Woods and cofounder of the Children & Nature Network, recalls that when he started interviewing children and their families in the 1980s, “They’d watch reruns of Lassie on TV, and see Jeff and Porky build a tree house in the woods, get lost, and have adventures. One boy said that, to him, that kind of life seemed like living on Mars. The disconnection has accelerated over the past three decades.” But is it children’s fault that the woods is now Fox Run Development, that some school playgrounds have signs that say, No Running, or that homeowners’ associations often forbid residents to have basketball hoops and trampolines? Don’t we need to change our priorities and design our cities and towns for natural diversity and resilience? William McDonough designs buildings brimming with biologic. On a recent visit to the architect’s office, Richard Louv saw plans for a hospital building in Spain that will heal more than sick humans:

The Original Stimulus Plan

The bottom floor of the hospital will be all glassed in and anybody who walks into that hospital may have a butterfly—the butterfly that is threatened with extinction in that region—alight on them. The hospital’s bottom floor will become a “butterfly factory.”

The butterflies emerge from their chrysalises in a synchronized fashion. Their emergence will become a community ritual. When they emerge, the hospital will open the doors and let them loose into the surrounding community. And the idea doesn’t stop there. The hospital staff will reach out to every school, place of worship, business, and home and say, “You can do this, too. We can bring this butterfly back.”⁴

Louv somehow remains optimistic that we can reconnect humans with nature. We can beat “nature-deficit syndrome,” he believes, “if we begin to spend less time in front of screens and more time in front of streams.”

NATURAL REMEDIES, SMALL AND LARGE

For individuals and families:

• Protect “nearby nature,” such as a creek behind your house or a little woods at the end of your cul-de-sac. Maintain a birdbath. Replace part of your lawn with native plants. Build a bat house. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn.

• Make your yard a National Wildlife Federation Certified Wildlife Habitat.

• Encourage your kids to go camping in the backyard. Buy them a tent or help them make a canvas tepee, and leave it up all summer.

• Play “find ten critters”—mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.

• Become a more effective recycler to conserve natural resources; consider green alternatives to standard products like cleaners, personal care products, clothes, and building materials.

• Become a habitual walker who observes the cycles of nature at the park or in neighbors’ yards.

• Let your thumb turn green, maybe starting with a single plant, such as your favorite variety of tomato.

• Shop for products that have green labels such as USDA Organic (food), Energy Star (appliances), the recycle logo (products, packaging), Fair Trade (coffee, chocolate), LEED (buildings), Forest Stewardship Council (lumber), Friend of the Sea (seafood), and Marine Stewardship Council (seafood). These designations help ensure practices that are nature friendly.

For educators:

• Move nature conceptually from the “recreation column” to the “health” column.

• Teach children about nature interactively; for example, teach about birds by letting them craft wings out of cardboard boxes and build nests out of plant leaves and sticks.

• Let them love the earth before being asked to save it.

For governments:

• Launch programs that support reconnection with nature, such the “No Child Left Inside” programs adopted by Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin.

For medical personnel:

• Conduct research on the benefits of exposing children to nature instead of pharmaceuticals; incorporate the health benefits of nature into medical and nursing school curricula; encourage pediatricians to prescribe nature time for stress reduction and as an antidote to child obesity.⁵

IF IT AIN’T FIXABLE, DON’T BREAK IT

In our current way of thinking, nature is at worst an evil enemy we’ve been battling for eons, and at best a warehouse of resources we can convert to cash. “Pay no attention to the pests, toxic chemicals, weeds, slash piles, and tailings ponds that are side effects of industry,” we coach each other, “because that’s the shape of money.” But the truth is, nature is far from being a problem; rather, it’s a living tapestry of tried and true solutions. Why should we care if this might be the last century for biological celebrations such as abundant schools of wild seafood; silent, old-growth forest; determined songbird migrations; and the annual spring “turnover” of pristine mountain lakes? Well, no need to care about such things—unless we have a fondness for life as we know it. Unless we have some use for clean air and water, healthy food, flood control, soil fertility, waste recycling, pest control, pollination, raw materials for goods, climate control, seed dispersal, erosion control, recreation, and medicine. A survey of the top 150 prescription drugs used in the United States found that 118 are based on natural sources: plants (74 percent), fungi, bacteria, and snakes.⁶

In research studies, when people view slides of nature, their blood pressure falls; and when those with ADHD spend time in nature, the results are often as effective as if they’d taken the widely used drug Ritalin. Nature is where we feel most comfortable. A classic ten-year study reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine documented that hospital patients with a view of trees went home much sooner than those who viewed a brick wall. In a similar study, Michigan prisoners whose cells overlooked a prison courtyard had 25 percent more visits to health care facilities than those whose cells looked into farmland.⁷

A CIVILIZATION ON LIFE SUPPORT?

One after another, services that used to be provided free by nature have been packaged and put on the market. Take bottled water, home-delivered in five-gallon bottles, or tanning salons, where creatures of the great indoors bask in simulated sunlight. Why build with durable stone and brick when petrobricks and faux rocks are cheaper? Many educators and thinkers refer to an “extinction of experience” that accompanies our pullback from nature. Like a washed-out sprig of parsley on a dinner plate, the community park is often biologically bland—and sometimes not secure from crime. The only way some know nature is by mentally crunching images of it on TV, like popcorn.

But television can’t communicate a multidimensional, sensuous, interactive reality. It shows only the visual realm—and that through the tunnel of a lens. We’re not actually there to smell nature, and touch it, and feel the breeze. Besides, televised nature is often scripted nature—as fake as a paper ficus. Spliced together from hundreds of nonsequential hours of tape, a typical nature program filmed in Africa zooms in on a majestic lion, relentlessly on the prowl for wildebeests, jackals, and gazelles. The reality is, lions are as lazy as your housecat, sometimes sleeping twenty hours a day. Even so, footage of two lions mating is predictably followed by “cubs, tumbling out after a two- or three-minute gestation, full of play. The timeless predatory cycle repeats.… ”

In The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben compares and contrasts the information contained in a daylong hike in upstate New York with the information content of a hundred cable TV stations, on the same day. Writes McKibben, “We believe that we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been an information ‘revolution.’ … Yet vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach.” In one hundred hours of programming, he found very little to enrich his life.

Yet his real-world experiences made him feel actively, rather than passively, alive. In the closing sentences of The Age of Missing Information, McKibben reminds us of the virtual canyon we’ve put between ourselves and the natural world:

On Now You’re Cooking, a lady is making pigs-in-a-blanket with a Super Snacker. “We have a pact in our house—the first one up plugs in the Super Snacker.”

And on the pond, the duck is just swimming back and forth, his chest pushing out a wedge of ripples that catch the early rays of the sun.⁸

KICKING ECOPHOBIA

The educator David Sobel terms our separation from nature “ecophobia”—a symptom characterized by an inability to smell, plant, or even acknowledge the roses. “Ecophobia is a fear of oil spills, rain forest destruction, whale hunting, and Lyme disease. In fact it’s a fear of just being outside,” Sobel explains. A fear of microbes, lightning, spiders, and dirt. Sobel’s first aid for ecophobia emphasizes hands-on contact with nature. “Wet sneakers and muddy clothes are prerequisites for understanding the water cycle,” he says. In the book Beyond Ecophobia, he describes the magic of overcoming “timesickness” and regaining a more natural pace:

I went canoeing with my six-year-old son Eli and his friend Julian. The plan was to canoe a two-mile stretch of the Ashuelot River, an hour’s paddle in adult time. Instead, we dawdled along for four or five hours. We netted golf balls off the bottom of the river from the upstream golf course. We watched fish and bugs in both the shallows and depths of the river. We stopped at the mouth of a tributary stream for a picnic and went for a long adventure through a maze of marshy streams. Following beaver trails led to balance-walking on fallen trees to get across marshy spots without getting our feet wet. We looked at spring flowers, tried to catch a snake, got lost and found. How fine it was to move at a meandery, child’s pace!⁹

NATURE’S MADNESS

The wilderness leader and ecopsychologist Robert Greenway has spent many years on the trail and has allowed the child in himself to remain active. He tries to bring out that trait in others, too, with tangible results. Comments from more than a thousand wilderness-trip participants (both adult and child) indicate that nature is indeed working its magic:

• 90 percent described an increased sense of aliveness, well-being, and energy

• 77 percent described a major life change upon return (in personal relationships, employment, housing, or lifestyle)

• 60 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women stated that a major goal of the trip was to conquer fear, challenge themselves, and expand limits

• 90 percent broke an addiction such as nicotine, chocolate, and soda pop

• 57 percent of the women and 27 percent of the men stated that a major goal of the trip was to “come home” to nature

• 76 percent of all respondents reported dramatic changes in quantity, vividness, and context of dreams after seventy-two hours in the wilderness¹⁰

coming back to our senses

A few years ago, Lana Porter began to come to her senses. The garden she cultivates in Golden, Colorado, is far more than a lush, reclaimed vacant lot—it’s a biological extension of herself and a way of life. “I eat very well out of this garden, just about all year round,” she says, “and the organic produce gives me energy to grow more produce and get more energy. It’s a cycle of health that has cut my expenses in half. My grocery bills are lower, my health bills are lower, I don’t need to pay for exercise, and my transportation costs are lower because I don’t have to travel so much to amuse myself.”

Asked what she likes best about her personal Garden of Eden, Porter replies, “I like what it does for my head. Sometimes, when I’m watering a healthy crop, or planting seeds, or cultivating between rows, I’m not thinking anything at all—a radical switch from my previous life as an overworked computer programmer. People tell me I should take care of my crops more efficiently—with irrigation systems on timers, designer fertilizers, and pesticides—so I could spend less time out here. But that way of growing disconnects the grower from the garden. The whole point is to spend more time with the plants, taking care of things, and less time trying to reshape myself to fit the changing whims of the world.”¹¹

When we experience nature with our own noses, skin, lungs, and reptilian brains, we feel silly about the stress of obsessive projects and timelines. Self-importance begins to dissolve into something larger. We see that we’re integral members of a club called Life on Earth, and it feels great! Rather than perceiving ourselves as simply human-paycheck-house-car, we finally understand who and where we are. We see that in reality, we’re human-soil-grains-fruits-microbes-trees-oxygen-herbivores-fish-salt marshes, and on and on and on! We begin to question the logic and the ethic of parting nature out like a used-up car. Then, if we have the guts, we begin to speak out about protecting nature and supporting policies and even companies that help it regenerate. We begin to see nature as a sacred garden that can’t tolerate any more abuse and as a haven that can restore our psyche and our health.