THERE’S A CLASSIC speech that park rangers deliver whenever they catch a child trying to make off with a ‘natural’ souvenir. “You are supposed to calmly kneel down and say, ‘I saw you picking the flower. That is so pretty! Now think about what would happen if every child picked a flower,’” explains Matthew Browning, a former park ranger at North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell State Park. “And then they are supposed to have this moment of guilt.” One day in 2009 Browning saw a fellow ranger give the speech to a boy, about eight years old, in the park’s restaurant. Instead of picking flowers, the boy had picked up a small handful of ‘rocks.’ In fact, it was gravel that the rangers had bought at the local supply store to spread over the road. Browning had an epiphany. “It made me sick. The boy was crestfallen. He was so excited about coming to the park that he wanted to take a little memento back with him. More than feeling empowered or excited to protect the natural world, now he is going to associate going to state parks with getting into trouble.”1
But it’s not just picking flowers and rocks that get you into trouble. Mount Mitchell—and most parks, for that matter—prohibit all sorts of things: going off the official footpath, climbing trees, shouting, playing with sticks, digging holes . . . you name it. Disillusioned, Browning left the park and enrolled in graduate school to study the recreational use of natural areas. Hearing about so-called nature play areas in Europe where children are allowed to play with abandon, he set off to Sweden to observe some firsthand. He ended up finding one near just about every primary school he visited (Sweden has a lot of forests). “They all had plenty of forest and plenty of kids playing in the woods.” Browning didn’t interact much with the children, preferring to observe rather than interrupt. But one day he met a twelve-year-old boy. “He was talking about how he would break branches and build forts and throw rocks,” Browning said. “He had a knife with him. He said: ‘I carve sticks into spears and stuff like that.’” So Browning asked him whether he would ever stick the knife into a tree. The boy was shocked: “‘No! It would hurt the tree; it would hurt the tree just like it would hurt me.’”
This twelve-year-old’s instinct highlights the human instinct of wanting to connect with nature. In 1984 the world’s leading evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson introduced the biophilia hypothesis: the human “urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”2 He uses it to explain the fact that for much of human history, we’ve surrounded ourselves with plants and animals, either domesticated in our homes, gardens and communities, or close by in adjacent parks. You even see it in zoos, where animals exhibit unnatural behavior when their pens don’t mimic the natural environments from which they come.3 It’s an inborn desire we all share.
Indeed, study after study has substantiated the important beneficial effects of nature on human health and well-being. Views of nature and natural settings reduce stress and improve attention—walking in it even more so.4 Though running reduces anxiety and depression wherever it is done, Swedish researchers have found the effects are amplified when it is done in nature.5 In a Pennsylvania hospital patients with a view of trees had shorter stays, by almost a day on average, and required fewer pain medications than those in rooms facing a brick wall.6
UNNATURAL BEHAVIOR
Despite nature’s great importance to us, for most of our history we’ve gone out of our way to conquer the natural world. We’ve tilled the land, hunted and then domesticated animals, cut down forests, dammed rivers, mined mountains, built cities. Now we’re manipulating genetics with biotechnology and even toying with the idea of engineering the climate—to fix the damage we ourselves have inflicted. We have tried to bend nature to human will. We have tried to make nature . . . more human.
For generations this relationship worked because the scale and power of nature so exceeded that of human civilization. Our efforts to surmount nature enabled our survival and progress as a species without, it seemed, doing nature much harm. But that has changed as we have become more mechanized and industrialized. As humanity began to outpace its natural context, the costs of our way of doing things became apparent. We saw pollution, spoilt landscapes, and filthy cities. In 1952 London was hit by the Great Smog, a combination of cold weather and windless conditions that trapped air pollution, mostly from burning coal, for four days in and around the city, creating smog so thick that it is estimated to have prematurely killed at least four thousand people.7 A similar event killed nineteen people in Donora, a small mill town in southwestern Pennsylvania, just four years before that. There, weather conditions led to toxic smoke from the town’s steel and zinc mills blanketing the town for five days in a row.8 The nation’s consciousness was perhaps seared most after widespread media coverage in 1969 of the Santa Barbara oil spill and later that year of the Cuyahoga, a river that runs through Cleveland, literally on fire, fueled by the copious oil and debris it contained.9
We reacted, the pendulum swung a bit toward conservation, and we cleaned things up. A bit. Earlier progressives like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt had championed the cause of nature, greatly expanding its protection through the National Park system.10 But the inexorable march of industry went on throughout the twentieth century. A decade that saw a high-water mark of environmental awareness and activism in the 1960s and 1970s—Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and, of course, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—then receded into an era of cheap plastics, mass manufacturing, and ever-growing urban sprawl and fossil-fuel consumption. As quickly as we learned our lessons, it seems, we swiftly forgot them. So today we live with a tomorrow that has never been more at risk.
Humanity’s hubris—our hubris—was thinking that we could endlessly extract from nature with little or no adverse consequences. Our fundamental mistake, according to the influential twentieth-century economist E. F. Schumacher, was to treat nature like an infinite bank account from which we could forever make withdrawals. But such an adversarial relationship is a fallacy: if man won his battle with nature, “he would find himself on the losing side.”11 Despite our best efforts, there’s just no way to bend all of nature’s vast, incomprehensible complexity to our human rules and institutions. We have to realize that nature isn’t just humanity’s support structure; humanity is a part of nature. Our careless manipulation of it is not only unnatural; it is irrevocably harmful both to nature and, ultimately, to ourselves.
We’ve now destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainforest—more than three times the land area of the entire UK.12 We lose over 20 million acres of tropical forest per year.13 There is now estimated to be at least 268,940 tons of plastic floating in our oceans.14 Rather than biodegrade—the way organic material would—plastic just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, devastating the wildlife that ingests it. Coral reefs occupy less than a quarter of 1 percent of the marine environment but house a quarter of known fish species. In the 1970s live coral covered half of the Caribbean’s reefs; today it covers 8 percent of them.15 According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s latest Red List of Threatened Species, 41 percent of amphibians and 26 percent of mammals are currently under threat of extinction. Precision is difficult, as many species are still undiscovered, but estimates suggest we are losing between five hundred and thirty-six thousand species each year.16
One of the most impactful meetings I ever had was when Rohan took me to meet E. O. Wilson at Harvard University. He is one of the first theorists to discuss and advocate for ‘biodiversity’—that is, variation among genes within species, species within ecosystems, and ecosystems among each other. As he puts it, we risk losing “‘genetic encyclopedias’ millions of years in the making,”17 embodying countless medical, biotechnical, and agricultural opportunities (e.g., 49 percent of cancer-fighting drugs are derived from nature).18 According to Wilson, we stand to reduce at least half of the earth’s remaining plant and animal species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century. Such cataclysms—of which the earth has had five so far, the last one having brought an end to the dinosaurs—take 5 to 10 million years to repair. “We are, in short, flying blind into the environmental future,” Wilson says.19
To forestall the sixth mass-extinction event of which he speaks, we have to get more serious about conservation. According to a December 2014 assessment by the science journal Nature, a loss of 690 species per week, the upper end of estimates, would bring such an event about by the year 2200.20 Wilson’s bold vision—what he calculates is necessary to avoid ruinous biodiversity loss21—is to set aside half of the earth for conservation or restoration (“Half Earth”). Crucially it’s not just making sure that land already out of civilization’s way remains protected (though this is important); it’s making sure that all of the world’s ecosystems have at least some protected areas where nature can ‘do its thing.’ In some cases this will require restoration; in others it might mean paying landowners to ensure parts of their land remain undeveloped, but still accessible for light use. It also means threading these protected areas together so that as habitats shift with a changing climate, wildlife is able to migrate—perhaps hundreds or even thousands of miles through accessible ‘corridors,’ like the White Hawk Project adjoining the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica.22 In order to preserve the park’s incredible biodiversity—some 2.5 percent of the world’s total—the White Hawk Project purchases and maintains land abutting the park in order to create wildlife corridors using conservation easements, which restrict development and land use for ecological benefit.
When our family, along with Rohan and his wife, Kate, vacationed near the park in April 2015, we learned about the White Hawk Project firsthand from Lana Wedmore, our ecolodge’s owner and the project’s founder. What is so amazing—but equally frustrating—about Lana’s work is that compared to the massive sums spent by government (often ineffectively) fighting climate change, she’s asking for a pittance. And yet here is a solution that not only contributes to global climate efforts but also conserves land forever and tangibly saves species from extinction—today. Even more tangibly, visiting the Corcovado National Park exposed all of us to the rainforest and showed us firsthand the true value of nature and its protection. This kind of direct exposure to nature has got to be the best way to instill in everyone—especially children—a conservation ethos that lasts a lifetime.
It seems hardly necessary by now to justify why this would be worthwhile. The unknown human value that will one day derive from the biodiversity preserved—and stimulated—by a globally connected wilderness alone makes ambitions like Half Earth and projects like White Hawk easy to justify. But it’s also the benefit of having truly natural nature (such a phrase would seem ridiculous if it weren’t necessary) local to everyone. We would be infusing our modern, sophisticated landscape with pristine nature, side by side, everywhere.
Throughout this book I’ve discussed how we need to make our world more human. But when it comes to nature, we’ve already made the world too human. We’ve distorted our idea of what nature is and should be because we’ve misunderstood our part in it. So now we need to fundamentally rethink humanity’s relationship with the natural world and move the pendulum back toward the system of our ancestors, in which we benefit from nature while simultaneously giving back to and coexisting with it.
NATURAL CAPITAL
Nature isn’t just beautiful; it’s practical. Nature can help us prevent floods, dampen tidal waves, filter water, and clean the air. Engineers—not just environmentalists—are increasingly recognizing nature as a way to provide essential services we otherwise would trust to machines and concrete and steel. It actually has a term devoted to it: green infrastructure. Nature provides many ‘services’ to us when left in its natural state. For example, it saves our lives and communities in times of natural disaster. Flooding and storm surges can be softened, if not stopped, by wetlands and marshes that absorb the brunt of the impact. When British authorities built seawalls to protect against annual floods in the Humber Estuary in Yorkshire and in Lincolnshire, they inadvertently killed off the wetlands that had formed natural barriers. So when flood waters hit, the walls held back some water but, without the wetlands to block the storm surge, flooding was actually worse. To solve the problem, seawalls have now been deliberately breached so that the wetlands can return to their natural state, a move that will create around $18 million of net benefit over the next fifty years in terms of saved farmland and property compared to the damage the standing sea wall would have led to.23 In Boston the Army Corps of Engineers found that annual flooding of the Charles River would cost $17 million a year if not for wetlands protecting the city.24 Wetlands can be particularly crucial during extreme events: a long-standing rule of thumb holds that for every 2.7 miles of wetlands, a hurricane storm surge can be reduced by as much as a foot.25 When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it found a city built out too far to the ocean’s edge, with nineteen hundred square miles of natural wetlands having been destroyed and developed between true land and the Gulf of Mexico.26 Without these natural shock absorbers, the flooding wasn’t just destructive; it was devastating. Thankfully some wetlands were still intact; scientists estimate that if there had been none left, the flood waters would have been three to six feet higher.27
Although some environmentalists might scoff at putting a price on nature, not to do so is to completely devalue it and let others take advantage—and destroy—its enormous wealth. Depleting natural resources might not cost money, but it isn’t ‘free.’ Take, for example, the conversion of mangrove swamps in southern Thailand into shrimp farms. One report found that such conversions yield around $1,220 a hectare. But these profits fail to consider the costs of losing the mangroves. After five years the farm is depleted, requiring intensive and expensive rehabilitation. And while they are being used as shrimp farms, the mangrove swamps fail to provide wood for local communities, nurseries for local fish farming, and a barrier against storms. In total, one study found the implicit costs equal $12,392 a hectare, over ten times more than the profits reaped from shrimp farming.28 Yet because the costs are borne by the ‘public’ while the profits are earned privately, the decision was a foregone conclusion: profits were made, natural capital was lost, the community suffered. The argument—and a compelling plan—for rigorously accounting for nature is brilliantly set out in Natural Capital, the latest book published by economist Dieter Helm (my tutor at Oxford). Simply implementing his approach would make more practical difference than any number of international environmental conferences.
Nature doesn’t only mitigate the impacts of future disasters; it also provides us with essential services every day, often cheaper and more reliably than man-made infrastructure can. In Maine about 15 percent of the population, mostly in the greater Portland area, gets its water from Sebago Lake. The lake covers thirty thousand acres, and the area that supplies it is more than fifty miles long.29 Because of the area’s pristine condition, the Portland Water District has long operated under a federal waiver allowing it to draw its water without many of the typical filtration requirements that are otherwise necessary in other geographies. Recently, though, the lake’s water quality has deteriorated, as runoff from upstream land development and population growth has increased. The typical approach would be to invest in ‘gray’ infrastructure, so-called because of the color of the excessive cement usually involved—in this case, ‘membrane filtration’ technology. An analysis by the World Resources Institute found that this would cost between $102 million and $146 million. Investing instead in conservation and restoration of the surrounding forest ecosystem—green infrastructure—at a cost of between $34 million and $74 million would deliver $70 million in savings.30 It turns out that natural forest land is just more efficient at keeping our water clean (one study estimates that for every 10 percent increase in forest cover in a source area, there is a corresponding decrease of about 20 percent in water treatment costs31). And yet our human habits, Australian ecological economist Robert Costanza estimates, destroy $23 trillion each year of the $142.7 trillion in these ‘services’ our natural ecosystems provide us—not just clean air and water and storm protection but also waste decomposition, crop pollination, renewable energy sources, and raw materials, to name a few.32
DESPITE THESE POWERFUL arguments, the environmental movement is losing. People understand what they can see, hear, touch, and smell. At that level I think most people really do care about the environment, even if they hate green politics and can’t stand talk of climate change. I’ve yet to meet someone who is in favor of dirty air and water, dead forests, or poisoned landscapes. Or someone who doesn’t enjoy, if they get the chance, spending time in the mountains, at a lake, or at the beach. Behavior that could be described as ‘environmentalist’ is really just showing our love of nature. Pretty much everyone is in favor of that. But by branding and politicizing environmentalism, we’ve made good stewardship a question of saving the entire planet: an unrelatable idea.
So although our local actions do indeed have global impacts, these impacts have to be talked about at the human scale, otherwise their real meaning becomes obscure. Climate change doesn’t mean ‘global sea-level rise’ (though this may happen); it means that farmers lose their crops and livelihoods, entire species of animals and plants are lost forever, and the sea will wipe out centuries-old villages.
The other problem with the big global-environmental argument is that it diffuses responsibility. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for demonstrating the tragedy of the commons, in which behavior that benefits the individual at the group’s expense leads to everyone doing it until the whole group is out of luck. This phenomenon is exacerbated when problems are made to seem big; the individual actions we take to both create and to solve the problems have the illusion of insignificance. Noble as fighting for ‘parts per million’ is, it just doesn’t mean anything if you’re not a scientist. We have to make sure nature is accessible to everyone so everyone can have their own experiences, their own memories to draw from, their own reason to care that we don’t destroy it all.
As much as the communications revolution—not to mention high-definition television—has enabled us to more vividly experience exotic ecosystems and animals across the world, there is no substitute for the real thing. The key to making us environmentalists, conservationists, good stewards—or, really, just conscientious human beings—is exposure to what we otherwise wouldn’t care about. So the answer to the threat to nature is not a new law, a new government program, an ad campaign, or any of the other traditional levers of bureaucratic action; it’s something more human than all of that. It’s the simple act of being in nature, walking in nature, playing in nature, getting out into nature, seeing the world’s wonder. When you begin to comprehend your place on the planet in the midst of everyone and everything else, it all suddenly comes into perspective. But of course, this theme has been true throughout the book: empathy through human connection and experience.
This is what politicians and conservationists have got wrong. Although often well meaning, their efforts have morphed the environmental movement into Big Green, the bureaucracy and politics of which have needlessly made the environment a contested and partisan issue. The environment should not be a battlefield of Democrats versus Republicans; it’s actually about loving the world we live in, our home. People—all people—want blue skies and clean air and safe water, but you’ll never convince people to be greener if you make it all about carbon dioxide or a couple of degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. We have to highlight how nature can actually, tangibly help us in our own daily lives. ‘Green’ means animals, parks, the countryside. It’s about where people want to go on vacation or spend free time with their families. It’s about the joy of fresh air and beautiful scenery.
“SHOPPING IS NOT A HOBBY”
Connecting people with nature will become ever more urgent as humanity continues to urbanize. Since 1950 the urban population has increased from 30 percent of the global population to 54 percent today, and it is expected to reach 66 percent by 2050.33 Cities represent a prosperous and, in some respects, more sustainable future. But for all its modern, hipster vibe, urbanization comes with a significant drawback: the more we live in cities, the further we are from nature and the closer we get to forgetting its importance altogether. We risk what some are calling “nature deficit disorder.”34
But how do you persuade people to change? At the moment we fail miserably at distilling nature into human terms, resulting in dangerous abstraction. We need to bring people’s interaction with nature back to a human, visceral level. Nature must be experienced by the human touch.
But getting people into nature is a big hurdle. I’ve seen it firsthand. When I grew up, spending time in nature was not the social norm. Now, here in Northern California, where it is very much part of the culture, I’ve chosen, for the first time in my life, to do strange things for a confirmed urbanite—like go camping. Camping! How horrific. Actually not. It is no exaggeration to say that our children and their friends are never happier than when they are out in the woods or wherever we go in nature. It is cheaper—and better—than any number of toys or trips to theme parks or visitor attractions.
That’s why we should start with children. It’s not just about a respect for and understanding of the natural world, its importance to us, and the necessity of sustainability and conservation. It also helps child development. Children need to engage in the world if they are to be properly educated. As we saw in Chapter 10, a significant part of their development comes from exploration and adventure, and there is no better place to do that than out in nature.
Many parents understand this but don’t know how to go about it. There are too many barriers to getting their children into nature, many of which are simply inherent in our inhuman world today: families live too far away from natural spaces, parents have unrealistic fears of the outdoors, teachers lack enthusiasm for leaving the classroom, technology too easily entertains and distracts.35 The key is to start the process early, with a proper communication of the interconnection between nature and society. Jason and Scott fondly remember their grandparents sending them the magazines Your Big Backyard and Ranger Rick, published by the National Wildlife Federation, which, by helping them understand the importance of nature as children, made them lifelong environmentalists. Those magazines worked because they explained nature in children’s terms.
The same principle guides author Christiane Dorion, who has developed a creative way to communicate complex environmental and scientific concepts through her pop-up children’s books. “Children are naturally interested in the natural world,” she explains, so she tries to identify “the questions they are interested in learning about.” And it turns out that children are indeed fascinated by the water cycle and weather patterns—just not when described in those words. Instead, Dorion poses questions that children have actually asked her: Where does rain come from? What’s inside the earth? How do plants live? She then answers them in surprisingly rich detail while keeping it all age accessible. They might not understand biodiversity loss or climate change, but they come to intuit how small things in their lives connect directly to a wider world.36
If applied correctly, technology, like Dorion’s books, can play a helpful role too. Researchers at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard are working on various projects to create virtual-reality simulators that put users directly into otherwise inaccessible natural circumstances. One simulation created at Stanford transforms users into a pink coral so they can see what happens to reefs over time. During the simulation sea urchins, sea snails, and fish interact around ‘you.’ Over the course of thirteen minutes the simulation progresses through a century, and the environment changes around the reef as it is degraded by acidification, an urgent problem currently facing all the world’s oceans.37 Species present at the start disappear, and even the pink coral skeleton that the users embody disintegrates. Early studies suggest that conveying the gravity of human effects on the environment in such a personal way has a significant impact on attitudes, which the researchers confirmed in follow-ups with participants afterward.38 “One can viscerally experience disparate futures and get firsthand experience about the consequences of human behavior,” says Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which ran the simulation.39 And with the advent of virtual-reality headsets like Oculus VR, zoos, parks, and schools can increasingly use these technologies to complement their real-world programs.
The studies done around virtual reality prove that we need to empathize with nature to care about it. But it’s also pretty ridiculous that we have to reduce nature to a virtual-reality headset. All the book learning in the world won’t change the simple fact that children need to touch nature for themselves. It must be palpable, emotional, and experienced firsthand. That’s why programs like Vida Verde are so crucial to this effort.
Vida Verde is an educational camp and organic farm in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains dedicated to getting children from all backgrounds into nature. “There are thousands of children who live thirty miles from the ocean, and they’ve never actually seen it,” explains Laura Sears, who founded the organization with her husband, Shawn, in 2001. “We’ve seen kids who come to Vida Verde who’ve never spent time walking on uneven surfaces.” Shawn and Laura bring groups of children from different inner-city schools in the San Francisco area for three days and two nights to their twenty-three-acre property. The children learn experientially, classifying plants and animals on walks, learning about mammals whilst milking the resident goats and learning about birds while collecting hens’ eggs, and understanding the sea while running barefoot in the sand (many for the first time in their lives) or exploring rock pools—all in the same lesson, of course. “It’s a beautiful thing to let these children start to discover and explore and let their guard down,” Laura says, “and just be in this gorgeous environment that they maybe never thought they’d ever get to be in.”
“Kids do really well being outside, using all their senses and bodies to learn, not just reading something or hearing it,” Shawn explains. Being there and doing it makes it real for them. For the first time they can really connect to the place where they live, and their teachers can use this in the classroom from there on to connect lessons to real life. Teachers report that children engage in their studies as they haven’t in the past. Perhaps more importantly than this, nature can be harnessed as a tool for teaching very human lessons about relationships, trying new things, determination, and working together. In one activity, the goat hike, small groups of students use teamwork to herd resident goats across a river, through the thistles, and up a mile-long hill on a steep, sometimes tricky path. “It’s a physical challenge. They simply have to work together to make it,” says Shawn. “You see students who don’t necessarily talk or hang out with each other otherwise doing it because it’s needed. People just breaking down and treating each other like human beings—and walking away from the experience with fresh eyes for those around them and new friends.”40 Such programs are so important. Jason and Scott—Northern Californians themselves—remember that when they were sixth graders (they’re twins), everyone in their grade went to a place like Vida Verde, where many of them camped for the first time. They spent a week hiking, exploring marshland, running basic experiments in the forest, not to mention growing emotionally by being away from their parents for the first time. Nearly every public school in the region participates in such programs, providing a valuable link to nature for countless schoolchildren.
You can predict the objections. “Well, that’s all very well if you live in Northern California in one of the richest and most naturally beautiful places on earth, but what about the real world where you don’t have incredible nature on your doorstep? Or incredible wealth to preserve it? Or incredibly rich families who can pay to send their kids to experience it?”
Well, here’s the thing: none of this is preordained or determined by geography, finances, or anything else. It’s about priorities.
At the moment, across the world, consumerism is the social norm and nature is not. We choose to build Westfield shopping centers. Why? Why do we need more of those? Why do we think it’s acceptable for children to spend a weekend afternoon going shopping? As my sister-in-law, Kate Whetstone, once pithily remarked, “Shopping is not a hobby.” But for many people in rich countries today, that’s exactly what it is. We can change that. The norm has certainly flipped before: when workers spent most of their time in the fields, bronzed by the sun, the elite stayed inside. But with the advent of the factory and then the office cubicle, that norm switched. Once workers’ skins grew pale under artificial lights, the rich jumped at any chance they could to develop a tan, setting themselves apart—the ‘leisure’ class. Now people with money buy homes in the country, houses by the beach, lodges in the mountains, villas on the lake. The rich have made nature fashionable, with eco-tourism and luxury brands and philanthropy. They wouldn’t think of keeping their kids inside all the time. But the outdoors shouldn’t be a function of fashion; it should be something everyone enjoys from the richest to poorest, that everyone rightly feels entitled to experience as a human, without stigma. We must choose to make this a priority; we must choose to collectively pay for it; we must choose to require it. Nature should be a fundamental part of our human experience. More than anything else, nature should unify us.
But right now it divides us. The second you suggest that everyone else should get better access to nature, it’s suddenly just that—a luxury, a waste of money that we can’t afford—because, gosh, what would happen to those SAT scores? Why? Why is nature a necessity for rich people but a luxury for poor people? Why is nature less important for students than math or art or history?
ONE OF THE many reasons I would love to be mayor of a city is to show what can happen when we take a radically different—a revolutionarily different—approach to land use. When it comes to the physical presence of nature in our lives, we could easily incorporate woodlands and wetlands and natural habitats right in the middle of our towns and cities. Not just parks, but real, wild nature. There are some great examples: in Los Angeles I visited the Ballona Wetlands near Playa del Rey. Here, where you’d least expect it—in bustling LA, surrounded by a highway to the east, private homes to the south, a strip mall to the north, and a tourist beach to the west—are six hundred acres of open space that state officials are trying to restore to their former glory. The wetlands here once stretched for miles in either direction up and down the coast but were carved out into developments around fifty years ago. Even in Ballona there is hardly any wetland left. For centuries Berliners have enjoyed the Grunewald forest, covering more than seven thousand acres in the western part of the German capital. In Knoxville, Tennessee, locals recently championed the preservation of one thousand acres of forest along the Tennessee River waterfront. Just three miles from downtown, residents and visitors there can use its more than forty miles of trails to walk, mountain bike, run, or just explore. In London, Hampstead Heath comprises 790 acres of rambling hills and woodland, dearly loved by dogs and visitors alike. And of course, there’s New York’s Central Park.
But these are exceptions. How about designing a world where they’re not?
If we do make space for nature in the midst of our modern world, how do we make sure children grow up in it, not through a once-a-year field trip, but all the time? Well, we know exactly how to do it—we just need to make the choice. There are countless national and local organizations, notably the Scouts, dedicated to giving children fun experiences in nature. We could easily make nature an expectation for every child, just as we expect them to learn math or, now, coding. It’s actually more important than either of those or any other academic subject because the kinds of experiences you gain when you spend time in nature, with others, help build your character in ways that are far more useful in the twenty-first century than anything academic.41 But instead we insist on locking children up in windowless, soulless boxes from eight in the morning for the rest of the day. Madness. But amidst the strange priorities that have infected today’s world, the argument I’m making—that we should expect all children to spend time in nature as a basic, substantial part of their education—is more likely to be seen as crazy.
Nature must be made more accessible in another way too. Remember North Carolina park ranger Matthew Browning and the twelve-year-old boy he saw being chastised for playing in nature? The way things stand now, nature is a museum, where we can look but not touch. How do we expect to get excited about nature if we can’t engage with it? The typical sheltered life of the twenty-first-century family might make us feel safer, but we are not better off as a result. We cannot survive without nature; we are inextricably linked. Nature is not harmless, but it is far from harmful. We must engage with it, understand it, and raise our children in it. And if we do, not only will we improve everyone’s happiness and well-being today, but we will also do something much more significant: we will bring up a generation of people who really understand and respect nature and humanity’s place within it.
Because when it comes to the natural world around us, it’s time we were a little bit . . . less human.