Play.Outside

...Last Child in the Woods reminds us of one probable element in that equation, but falls far short of resolving the problem...

...The resulting attachment seems genuine in some cases and the children certainly no worse than those 19th-century hunters who shot everything in sight...

...But the book's lack of edge, combined with its fuzzy affirmative case, robs us of any clear view of these forces and, therefore, of any realistic plan for overcoming them...

...Next, if our contact with reality is indeed fraying, is more contact with nature the only cure...

...But Last Child does not address such complex and debatable possibilities...

...Adrift in sensations, he had trouble pursuing his medical studies until, three weeks later to his partial regret, his new perceptions faded...

...Last Child has no discernible ideological agenda beyond these points...

...a world overwhelming in immediacy, in immediate significance...

...Beyond a few perfunctory references to Wordsworth, Thoreau, and other canonical authors, no arguments based on history, literature, philosophy, or personal experience balance these analytic defects...

...But many country people, now and in the past, have loved their own landscape and had little interest in "preservationist" changes, however justified, that might impair their use of it...

...This will be so for some...

...Even a proposal for mandatory geographic redistribution of the population in proportion to the government-determined "ecological carrying capacity" of different landscapes provokes only equivocal dissent...

...Ironically, Richard Louv contends, our increased exposure to abstract publicity about the environment reinforces our alienation from nature here and now...

...He envisions local action that takes a small-town America that certainly never quite existed as the pattern for child- and nature-centered ecotopias...

...Louv argues that "destructive" activities like building a treehouse should therefore be allowed, as should hunting and fishing, even at some necessary risk of injury...

...Last Child's broad-brush approach also robs us—more fundamentally— of any sophisticated probing of Louv's basic thesis itself...

...Indeed, it has nothing critical to say about anyone—from conservative Christians to truly radical environmentalists—who might support its broad agenda...

...There are many reasons for lost contact with nature...

...They include too much time spent passively absorbing television, computer games, the Internet, and recorded music...

...and the banning or restriction of risky or environmentally destructive outdoor play (like treehouse-building) by local governments, particularly in "membership" communities...

...Yet that thesis invites examination from at least three angles...

...Dickens's kaleidoscopic descriptions of London's streets and people are far more tightly observed than his rather conventional evocations of country life...

...Such anecdotal descriptions prove little without a careful survey of opposing facts and arguments...

...He encountered "a world overwhelmingly concrete, of particulars...

...But, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks told of a young medical student who, after drug abuse, woke up able to smell as well as a dog...

...He contends that children develop best through absorption on their own terms in a world that is distinctly "other," with as few boundaries as possible...

...Many readers will find the prospect of a more sensually immediate grasp of the natural world as attractive as I do...

...This world has many realities and many paths to them...

...One might speculate that a combination of technical progress and use restrictions could make this practice more benign while preserving the natural experience, just as animals are no longer hunted to extinction in America...

...First, is deprivation of nature the basic cause of any current slippage away from reality...

...Much of the book consists of interviews either with proponents of his cause, who describe their successes in establishing nature-based communities or education programs, or with the authors of equally nature-oriented professional studies in fields like child development...

...It barely mentions the federal government...

...more time spent driving from one place to another...

...Louv describes, with some horror, children in Northern California who appreciate nature by riding through it on all-terrain vehicles...

...Louv lives in San Diego, one of the 25 most biologically diverse areas of the world, according to the United Nations...

...greater and more frequent immersion in the non-human world as its cure...

...But Louv does not come close to demonstrating its benefits...

...Once again, the approach is anecdotal: To show that communities in general are restricting outdoor play, the book describes a handful of communities that have done this...

...A more detailed description of these efforts would have had interest in itself, and would have required a focused discussion of such opposing forces...

...Finally, Louv regularly assumes that immersing children even in some small slice of nature would make them advocates for environmental protection in all its forms...

...too much organized sports...

...He refers briefly to relatively unsuccessful efforts to get San Diego schools to focus their nature education on these treasures in their backyard, and to his apparently more successful efforts to get the city to set aside as an urban park the interlocked canyons that lace its territory...

...Cautionary statements that the research described is "controversial," or "not strictly scientific," or "in its infancy and easily challenged" punctuate Louv's discussion...

...It argues that we, and our children in particular, have increasingly lost contact both with nature and with reality itself—its slowly unfolding qualities of inexhaustible difference and surprise, its resistance to our efforts, its immense objectivity and its occasional danger...

...Louv calls this alienation "nature deficit disorder" and sees William F. Pedersen practices law in Washington, D.C...

...This story tells us that even deciding what constitutes education into humanity—much less achieving it— is a complex and multifaceted task...

...Universal friends of the outdoors from Thoreau to Annie Dillard did some of their best work in the presence of railroad tracks or barbed wire...

...Absorption in sports, or military service, or growing up in a close family, a complex ethnic or regional culture, or a traditional religion—or even a big city—could quite plausibly give as strong a sense of the real world as growing up immersed in nature...

...Instead, he stresses meadow edge or tide pool-level experience...

...Many of the trends that Last Child deplores, like more time spent driving or watching video screens, or more fear of lawsuits, rise out of fundamental technical and social changes...

...He does not mean immersion in pristine wilderness, believing (correctly, in my parental experience) that children do not respond much to epic landscapes...

...school pressures...

...Most readers will be sympathetic to Louv's vision...

...Complaints about artificial education began long before the industrial age, and television might exercise its own reality-depriving influence quite apart from the time it takes from nature...