Stomping in the Grass

We were talking about Richard Louv's book Last Child In the Woods, in which he states that children need to develop an attachment to the land. They need unstructured play in the outdoors in order to develop that attachment.

Quality grass stomping time

And yet, it seems that culturally we discourage children from really exploring nature. There's the obvious concern of how dirty they get, but it seems to me that people are regarded as being completely separate from nature, even among environmentalists. Nature is regarded as something that needs to be fenced off and protected from us. But who will want to protect something with which they do not have a deep relationship?

One of the key phrases of the Wilderness Act describes wilderness as a place "where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." The first time I read that phrase was painful, and it aches still. We are excluded as beings of the wilderness, a place in which we evolved.

I understand that the majority of humans have moved beyond living within the natural world to a point where we completely sculpt it to match our desires, and I'm all for preventing hordes of people from stomping across fragile alpine tundra, but that particular quote makes me feel as though we are being told that we are aliens who are visiting a world in which we do not belong.

A part of me, too, cringes when I see a natural space trampled, even though I understand the importance behind children exploring and manipulating the natural world. It is something I yearned for as a child.

We are fortunate to live near a natural area with a creek and trails where visitors can spy many stick structures, some astoundingly large, built by children. At times I feel a big hesistant to let my own daughter participate in something similar because of the scorn it brings from others who visit the park. One particular incident that comes to mind is when she and I watched another boy, about 7, build a "stick bridge." He was laying piles of sticks across a tiny creek, and my daughter "helped" by insisting that I drag more over.

A woman walking by stopped to ask what we were doing, clearly upset at the proceedings. She then began to lecture me on making sure the stick bridge was entirely destroyed, because it would dam up the creek and cause the trail and bridge to flood over. She clearly had more faith than I did in a seven year old's ability to dam up a creek with sticks. Even if it had been successful, the creek would have flowed around the sticks long before it would have flooded the trail.

But we need those spaces for free play. There needs to be spaces and wilderness corridors where wildlife are not threatened by human activity, but children (and adults, too) also need spaces for exploration and play that are more than an inert structure of metal and plastic surrounded by a well manicured plot of grass.