In one of the eight essays that make up The Geography
of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, Gary Paul Nabhan
relates an amusing but poignant scene he witnessed about 10 years
ago when he was asked to arrange a meeting between a noted Native
American educator in Arizona and a Phoenix television news team.
The educator, a Tohono O’odham woman in her 80s,
graciously accommodated herself to the television cliché of
walking slowly around her garden, arm in arm with a bouncy news
celebrity. The interviewer then asked the wrong – or precisely
right – question: “Well, Laura, you and the other elders out here
on the reservation have made your living from the desert for a long
time … Why do you think the younger generation is not keeping up
these traditions?”
The elderly woman pointed at
the camera and said, “It’s that TV! They’re all watching that TV!
They just sit around in front of it; they hardly go outside
anymore, so how can they plow or plant or gather the fruit? That’s
the problem right there!’
Nabhan and co-author
Stephen Trimble are foremost spokesmen for the landscapes and
indigenous peoples of the West, and although their Western
perspective shows in many of these essays, their message has no
regional boundaries.
Children everywhere, they
show, have diminishing contact with natural environments, even as
some of them have been provided with increased opportunities for
“environmental education” in classrooms or through mass media.
As Nabhan explains, education tends to treat
nature as a distant abstraction, and biology has become “one of
many exercises in logos, reasoning, but has very little to do with
bios, life.”
The authors’ barbs at the education
establishment notwithstanding, the heart of their book is in
describing how children relate to natural environments, how we, as
adults, tend to lose our affinity for nature, and how parents can
preserve and encourage their children’s affiliation with creatures
and habitats which lie outside the dominion of urban, industrial
culture.
The Geography of Childhood: Why Children
Need Wild Places by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994. $22,
hardcover.
* Clyde
McConnell
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Children need the wild.
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