The chestnut trees are fruiting, and it seems devilishly early for this sort of thing. It'll just be another three weeks or so before the squirrels'll go manic and conkers'll and shells will be everywhere, littering the pavement and crushed between the sewer grates.
Two weeks ago it was the mulberries staining the sidewalks and making the pigeons and starlings fight beak-on-beak for the juicy things, sending shiny green leaves and feathers into the subway as harried commuters avoided the dropping fruit.
As I write this, a squirrel convention is bickering over Bush's supreme court nomination, overpowering the sound of a Bloor Street morning less than 100 yards away.
What, does a resolute city-dweller waxing about nature surprise you? Shouldn't I be off littering or polluting something?
In their usual hysteria privileging the ubermensch "Nature" by denigrating us urban folk, people always seem to forget that the organic elements in our concrete jungles are made more visible in their sharp relief from the greyish norm. It's just too easy to knock us city-dwellers who enjoy our patios and subways and 24-hour drugstores instead of grasslands and hiking trails, who breathe smog and carbon monoxide instead of dew and campfire smoke, and who listen to the cacophony of sirens and other people moving day in and day out instead of frog mating and birdsong.
If you keep your ear to the asphalt, we're the big baddies, us urban folk. It's us who are responsible for the fourth-grader who says "I like to play inside because that's where the electrical outlets are," us who are responsible for children's Nature Deficit Disorder, us responsible for letting people just plug in and tune out. We're the ones removed from nature, separated like Mephistopheles from God, and we're not supposed to care about green things unless they're organic and served on china with a light vinaigrette.
Of course, it's not an overt condemnation - it never really is. We need our cities, and even the staunchest environmentalist will admit that it makes much more sense for humans to live at high densities than spread out over the countrysides, suckling at the breadbasket's teat. We can't all be hunters and gatherers - just the wealthier ones with that kind of leisure time or the disposable income to have somebody else bring in the wild blueberries they buy at Whole Foods. The rest of us just have to make do.
No, what we get instead is a tacit assumption that kids who grow up in cities are necessarily deficient in something crucial, something involving going to school on a proper school bus and being able to have bullies rub your face in mud instead of the gutter. The general idea is that you're not really playing outside unless you're doing something involving a field guide, turning over rocks and splashing through ponds in an obviously adult-approved acceptable manner of exploration. You need a magnifying glass for this, of course, and periodically you need to burst through a screen door clutching an insect that you've never seen before, just so you can validate your parents' need to condescend to you. THAT, my friends, is the way kids are supposed to play outside.
Especially according to Richard Louv, coiner of the inane, damaging and thoroughly untested term "Nature Deficit Disorder." According to Louv, children's high levels of stress, obesity and depression can be directly linked to the amount of time they spend outdoors, and kids suffering from ADD would just calm right down if they'd only take up baseball or something. Of course, he has no hard evidence for any of this - just the odd anecdote, such as his favourite by the fourth-grader who likes electronics that he seems to trot out in every interview. (Oh the horror!)
Louv's book Last Child in the Woods has created quite a buzz for itself in its capitalization on parental guilt, suggesting yet another reason for parents to feel ashamed about their parenting choices involving Playstations and books on the rain forest. Clearly, what they're doing is interfering with their child's sense of wonder. The bastards.
Implicit in all these discussions is the classic post-lapsarian whine of the middle-aged, yowling about how "kids today" are somehow more inferior or more helpless than ever before, as if this latest generation of children are the last in a long line of parental disappointments because they can't identify Solidago virgaurea from Solidago rigida.
Leslie R. Walker, a pediatrician who runs an adolescent clinic at Georgetown University, said she rarely sees patients who have unstructured outside playtime.
"A lot of kids are living their lives on the Internet. I think the isolation that comes with sitting at a computer can hurt social skills, and if somebody's at risk for depression, that isolation can't be helpful," she says.
Requisite false dichotomy between nature and electricity/computers? Check.
Here's another, from Canadian Living:
"Your child's grandfather might have overturned rocks looking for grass snakes and built secret forts out of tree branches, but its not so common for today's children to be on intimate terms with nature. In fact, these days kids may have an easier time defending a fort in a video game than building one in real life."
Yes, just in case you'd forgot, computers are EVIL and responsible for all BADNESS in children. They follow kids around and make them stop piling the couch cushions into a fort under the dining room table, and lash their hands to the keyboard with little electronic pulses lest they slip away for the moment for some unstructured play.
Thank goodness Louv's got a better solution, one that's not complicated by a property complex utterly at odds with the idea of sublimity or a false sense of control, no sir:
Growing up was different for Mr. Louv, who was raised near Kansas City,
Mo. His home backed up to fields and woods. "I spent lots of hours with
my collie in those woods. I had a sense of ownership over them," he
recalls.
But he knew nothing about the Amazon rain forest. Today, he says,
children know all about the rain forests but little or nothing about
the ecosystem outside their door.
"Their relationship with nature is scholastic. Mine was in my heart."
Hmph. Well, I guess I can't compete with that. I'm just too keyed up with my intimate knowledge of the two-toed sloth's defecation habits to pay attention to the trees.
Guess they're not worth looking at unless they're part of a forest anyway.
*title quotation by Jack Handy
You've hit upon the one thing I get truly worked up about. We'll have this out sometime.
In the meantime, I'm with Thoreau:
"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness. ... I wish to make an extreme statement, if I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that."
Posted by: Josh | July 22, 2005 at 13:37