In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.
The fundamental premise of the book is that there is a connection between the uptick in medical and psychological treatment for various emotional, mental and learning disorders in children today and the downturn in active, tangible connection with nature. Put more simply: kids are more likely to sit inside their house playing a video game about climbing a tree today than to actually go out and climb a tree. The collapse in outdoor “play” for children is attributed to a variety of societal changes, but all contribute to the same consequence, which is a generational shift resulting in an almost epochal change in the way children engage with the natural world existing outside man-made structures.
Go digital. Try wildlife photography—appropriate for small children, teenagers, and adults.
The end of the book offers a “Field Guide” to the text which includes extensive recommendations for how parents can facilitate the process of getting their children “back to nature.” Suggested ideas range from the most occasionally impractical like building an igloo to the most obviously like vacationing at a National Park. The processes vary wildly with the author recognizing and confronting the immediate difficulty of getting kids who’ve never known a world without the internet to accept a wholesale ideological change in lifestyle. Such as stimulating a new passion by exploiting a current passion.
“Game Boy and Sega became their imagination. Parents became alarmed. Their kids were getting fat. Something had to be done.”
John Rick is a math teacher who moved his family to a spot in San Diego precisely because its “planners fought to have vast amounts of open space for kids to play in and parks for every neighborhood.” It only took a few short years for the Scripps Ranch Community Association to successfully push through new ordinances which essentially outlawed kids from enjoying this access to the natural world outside where they built forts, fished in ponds, constructed bike ramps and created statutory regulations against all other manner of childhood pursuits. The quote above reveal the consequence of these decisions, but as of publication nothing substantial had yet been done to reverse the trend.
Economist Thorstein Veblen once offered an alternative way to define serious research. Its outcome, he said, “can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before.”
Veblen remains America’s most prescient economic mind, the man who foresaw the impact of the leisure economy decades before most people even had leisure time. He possessed a formidable mind envied by most of his peers, many of whom responded with uninformed dismissal of his theories, almost all of which have since proven true. Veblen was also a ferocious analyst who looked at problems not as a hypothesis one determines to prove true, but as equation to be solved regardless of the difficulties such a solution might present. Throughout the narrative, the author reveals he intent to take Veblen seriously: there are almost two-fifty question marks in the book as opposed to just over thirty exclamation marks.
