Wild Child: Guiding theYoung Back to Nature
Authors: Tim Lougheed
Journal: Environmental Health Perspectives (2008)

Having already tested his parents’ indulgence by adopting snakes as companions, young Ed Wilson pressed his luck even further by raising black widow spiders, which he hand-fed with live insects. By the time he took up farming ants, it must have come as something of a relief for the household.

Ed, of course, went on to become E.O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist whose passion for creepy crawlers spawned a lifelong commitment to understanding the intricate connections between all life on Earth. Now approaching 80, he remains a leading figure in the field of systems biology, which studies the complex networks formed by the interaction of biological systems. Wilson’s childhood experience provides the archetypal account of raising a field biologist—one with hands perpetually dirty from poking into wild nooks and crannies, seeking to know what lives there. And the scientific community owes much to his early and enthusiastic attention to that world, a colorful example of the spirit embodied by so many scientists whose childhood pastimes developed into careers spent advancing our understanding of the natural world.

North America has a long tradition of nurturing this spirit, as expressed in the writings of individuals from John James Audubon to Rachel Carson. Yet the past three decades have witnessed major societal and technological changes that have transformed the way in which many young North Americans encounter nature. Where Wilson’s 1930s home might have held nothing more electronic than a crystal radio to lure him indoors, the twenty-first century equivalent can offer hundreds of television channels, increasingly vibrant computer games, kaleidoscopic Internet access, and endless social interaction to be found on glowing monitors.

Personal travel has evolved just as dramatically, so that many children spend much of their time enclosed in vehicles, often being shuttled from one indoor activity to another, perhaps without even glancing up from a handheld game or cell phone. They may well have toured airports and shopping malls on both sides of the country by the time they are teenagers, without ever having wandered among the trees left in an undeveloped lot down the street—if their neighborhood even has such property. Nor would they be encouraged to wander in such a fashion, warned of the threat posed by hostile strangers or the even more hostile legal liabilities associated with any injury. The result of this confluence of factors can be what author Richard Louv called “nature-deficit disorder” in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, a term that refers to the psychological and physical toll exacted as we become alienated from the natural environment.

These profound lifestyle and societal changes are prompting questions from researchers about what could be an equally profound change in how many North American children perceive the natural world. Of course not all children spend all their time indoors, nor is technology inherently bad; nevertheless, some observers are voicing distinctly practical concerns. If a substantial proportion of the population has little or no direct interaction with pristine natural environments as children, how will that affect their lifelong attitude toward such places? How will they come to regard the value of environmental science or policy? Above all, what kind of environmental scientists and policy managers will they become, if such careers even occur to them?