Nature, children, optimism, and Louv

In spite of the fact that I'm running on vapours at this point in the day, I managed to grab an hour after writing my way through about 100 hours of furlough to finish off the Louv book. It's a great message. Kids have fallen out of touch with nature. We're actually losing our knowledge of natural history entirely because it isn't taught anymore. Even in the academy, what passes for biology is discussion of molecules. Fascinating discussion, mind you, but nary a whole animal in sight. I remember sitting down once with the dean of science and the chair of biology at my university to talk about a joint future in animal research. The bio chair opined that whole animal biology was a thing of the past. I was told in no uncertain terms that unless I wanted to talk molecules, there was no common ground. Louv's argument also touched a memory for me of an informal study showing that most biology undergraduate students at the University of Toronto had never been on a camping trip. What they knew of nature they'd learned from books and computers.

Louv thinks all of this matters for all kinds of reasons (and I agree) but the main argument of the book is that kids need contact with nature to be healthy. I think he's right about that -- there's a load of data to back that claim. What I don't know is why that is. What is it that nature gives us? And then my cyberhead wonders (and here's where Louv cringes) whether there's any way to simulate it. I know. Seems like some kind of regressive step. Perhaps even blasphemy. But the thing of it is, I really don't see what Louv proposes ever actually taking place. He espouses some form of return to the old Garden City of Ebenezer Howard. It didn't work last time -- in fact it was one step on the road to Le Corbusier disasterland -- but Louv says that's because we didn't do it right -- we emphasized the wrong parts of the idea. We tried to do the Garden City without the Garden. Anyway, whether Howard was right or wrong (and coincidentally enough I'd just read Jane Jacobs doing a merry lambasting of Howard earlier today), I just don't see what he proposes, a return to village life in some kind of rural hinterland, replete with small agricultural collectives, alternative energy, etc. etc. ever coming to fruition. For one thing, I think that things are coming crashing down too hard and too fast. I think that long before Louv re-engineers North American culture, we've got this small problem of 7 or 8 billion people in the rest of the world, starving for resources, water, energy breathing down our necks. I don't see them putting up with such a bold experiment, at least while they have lots of guns to point at us. If there's any way out of the morass (and, as I've said recently, I'm not sure there should be or that I even want there to be) then I'd put my money on technological cures. We can't have back what we've blown. We've kicked ourselves out of the Garden of Eden. Oops. But if we can figure out how our love of nature works, why it matters, what it's for, and how to simulate it, we may be able to help ourselves a little.