Nature Deficit Disorder

As I sit here trying to type some words that make sense, I look out my window and notice that the trees are swaying softly in the wind. It is a wind that seems to come from nowhere.  I can almost smell it. I can almost hear the rustling of the leaves, the not-quite-inaudible rush of branches moving against one another in their repetitive, swaying dance.  If I try, I can feel the warm wind touching my skin, moving my hair, and I can almost taste the lazy sweetness in the air.  Why am I still sitting inside?  

In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv coined the term “Nature Deficit Disorder”.  He is concerned that today’s children are spending less time in nature than generations of the past, and asks us to examine the cost of this absence.  Most people above a certain age, he says, remember having a place in nature that was special to them as a child.  I wonder about this seeming generational change. I remember several places in nature that were special to me as a young girl, but alas, being a Gen-X’er,  I must remind myself that I am no longer of the current generation. Am I, at the age of 31, on the cusp of this trend?

When I was a child, there was a small creek, usually dry, that ran through our ten acres of grass pasture and opened up into a giant wooded swamp full of interesting cypress knees.  Sometimes the creek would flood, and then the swamp would be filled for several months. My brother and I would spend hours with a canoe and a wooden pole, pushing our way through the wet labyrinth. Sometimes we saw water moccasins.  To the north there were woods…I didn’t know whose they were, but treated them like they were my own and went hiking through them regularly. When I was ten I found metal spikes going all the way up a tall pine tree –a hunter’s stand—and I climbed it, all the way to the top.  

We built our very own log cabin at the edge of the swamp by dragging and stacking dead logs together. We spent hours there. Sometimes we would startle bands of wild turkeys. I remember small things, like the yellow (poisonous!) jessamine that fell all over the needled carpet of the woods during the same few weeks every summer.  In March, the startling sight of the delicate rain lilies seemed to have erupted in the soft earth of the creek banks overnight. I remember the way I could peel the skin off of a certain swamp reed to reveal a soft, spongy marshmallow-like substance; or the distinct smell of a dog-fennel weed, which possessed the perfect flexibility for stripping down to make arrows or bending to make bows.

I ask you—what is gained from spending time in nature? What is lost when we don’t spend sufficient time in the wild? There is something powerful in nature that we, as humans, need to have contact with.  For me, this power reveals itself in the natural order of things that is so clearly communicated to me when I am alone in a quiet place of wilderness. The way that everything there rushes to be alive and yearns for growth with a desperate desire to live awakens a similar feeling in my own soul.  Spending time in the wild reminds me of my own fragility; that I am small and delicate, yet I also play an important and critical part in the whole. The magnificence of such life teeming around me confirms that my own life is precious, even if at times it feels like a hopeless struggle. If this isn’t restorative, then what is?

In nature, everything is in its proper place, or at least seems to be.  We are able to see the big picture, the beauty of it, in spite of all the little parts.  I believe this is called perspective, and it is something that I often lose when I have been too far away from the woods or an open field.  

There is something vital in nature, something raw, something wild, something important. In this day and age where everything seems to be so cultivated, let’s not lose that. And let’s not let our kids lose that either.