Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
Authors: Richard Louv
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might otherwise take them out of the city. But the new technology accelerates the phenomenon. “What I see in America today is an almost religious zeal for the technological approach to every facet of life,” says Daniel Yankelovich, the veteran public opinion analyst. This faith, he says, transcends mere love for new machines. “It’s a value system, a way of thinking, and it can become delusional.”
The late Edward Reed, an associate professor of psychology at Franklin and Marshall College, was one of the most articulate critics of the myth of the information age. In
The Necessity of Experience
he wrote, “There is something wrong with a society that spends so much money, as well as countless hours of human effort—to make the least dregs of processed information available to everyone everywhere and yet does little or nothing to help us explore the world for ourselves.” None of our major institutions or our popular culture pay much notice to what Reed called “primary experience”—that which we can see, feel, taste, hear, or smell for ourselves. According to Reed, we are beginning “to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well.” René Descartes argued that physical reality is so ephemeral that humans can only experience their personal, internal interpretation of sensory input. Descartes’ view “has become a major cultural force in our world,” wrote Reed, one of a number of psychologists and philosophers who pointed to the postmodern acceleration of indirect experience. They proposed an alternative view—ecological psychology (or ecopsychology)—steeped in the ideas of John Dewey, America’s most influential educator. Deweywarned a century ago that worship of secondary experience in childhood came with the risk of depersonalizing human life.
North Carolina State University professor Robin Moore directs a research and design program that promotes the natural environment in the daily lives of children. He takes Reed and Dewey to heart in his contemporary examination of postmodern childhood play. Primary experience of nature is being replaced, he writes, “by the secondary, vicarious, often distorted, dual sensory (vision and sound only), one-way experience of television and other electronic media.” According to Moore:
Children live through their senses. Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world. Since the natural environment is the principal source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life. . . . This type of self-activated, autonomous interaction is what we call free play. Individual children test themselves by interacting with their environment, activating their potential and reconstructing human culture. The content of the environment is a critical factor in this process. A rich, open environment will continuously present alternative choices for creative engagement. A rigid, bland environment will limit healthy growth and development of the individual or the group.
Little is known about the impact of new technologies on children’s emotional health, but we do know something about the implications for adults. In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently. Enterprising psychologists and psychiatrists now treat Internet Addiction, or IA as they call it.
As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically. The effects are more than skin deep, says NancyDess, senior scientist with the American Psychological Association. “None of the new communication
The late Edward Reed, an associate professor of psychology at Franklin and Marshall College, was one of the most articulate critics of the myth of the information age. In
The Necessity of Experience
he wrote, “There is something wrong with a society that spends so much money, as well as countless hours of human effort—to make the least dregs of processed information available to everyone everywhere and yet does little or nothing to help us explore the world for ourselves.” None of our major institutions or our popular culture pay much notice to what Reed called “primary experience”—that which we can see, feel, taste, hear, or smell for ourselves. According to Reed, we are beginning “to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well.” René Descartes argued that physical reality is so ephemeral that humans can only experience their personal, internal interpretation of sensory input. Descartes’ view “has become a major cultural force in our world,” wrote Reed, one of a number of psychologists and philosophers who pointed to the postmodern acceleration of indirect experience. They proposed an alternative view—ecological psychology (or ecopsychology)—steeped in the ideas of John Dewey, America’s most influential educator. Deweywarned a century ago that worship of secondary experience in childhood came with the risk of depersonalizing human life.
North Carolina State University professor Robin Moore directs a research and design program that promotes the natural environment in the daily lives of children. He takes Reed and Dewey to heart in his contemporary examination of postmodern childhood play. Primary experience of nature is being replaced, he writes, “by the secondary, vicarious, often distorted, dual sensory (vision and sound only), one-way experience of television and other electronic media.” According to Moore:
Children live through their senses. Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world. Since the natural environment is the principal source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life. . . . This type of self-activated, autonomous interaction is what we call free play. Individual children test themselves by interacting with their environment, activating their potential and reconstructing human culture. The content of the environment is a critical factor in this process. A rich, open environment will continuously present alternative choices for creative engagement. A rigid, bland environment will limit healthy growth and development of the individual or the group.
Little is known about the impact of new technologies on children’s emotional health, but we do know something about the implications for adults. In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently. Enterprising psychologists and psychiatrists now treat Internet Addiction, or IA as they call it.
As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically. The effects are more than skin deep, says NancyDess, senior scientist with the American Psychological Association. “None of the new communication
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