Discuss: A Walk in the Woods

I think “rooted deeper in earth” means that science is good, but in the end it’s just intellectualization, which is something that doesn’t fully satisfy the human person. We need something that fulfills us at heart as well.

Maybe this is why all the environmental classes in the world won’t give real results if kids don’t have access to nature, which is the case in most cities, where most people live. Here in Detroit, you have to drive a long way to get somewhere “wild.” The idea can be there, but if the actual experience isn’t, the idea is useless. 

And while it’s true that nature is everywhere, it’s hard to stay focused when all you have is a lawn and some shade trees, for miles all around; especially with all the other distractions in modern life competing for the child’s attention.

I don’t mean to dismiss environmental and ecology classes, but they’re not enough alone. A couple weekend trips a year to the woods isn’t enough. As Jef said, immersion is the key; there has to be a relationship to nature, a regular visiting. Otherwise it won’t come to have meaning in one’s life.

I think Louv makes a very good point and I like that he mentions that nature can be a preventative medicine. I wonder how many children would not have to take medications if their parents took them hiking or camping instead of the doctor’s office.
Sure they have P.E. and sports in school, but not many really experience or connect to nature on a meaningful level.

As much as I enjoyed the article and the eloquence of the child I often have the feeling that people are living in a perceptual “bubble” about our society, our people, and our government that is not based on our actual behavior. The author speaks of being “stewards” of the land. Lovely thought but you are speaking to a people who are the lineal descendants of genocidal pastoralist killer nomads going back 3500 years to Central Asia – and we have the operating values to match. We are not stewards. We are conquerors and colonists. We are the Locust tribe. We descend and we feed. We are the melanin deficient Aryans: Brahmin; Persian; Greek; Latin (Rome to Portugal -> W. Hemisphere); & Celt (Ural Mts. to Emerald Isles -> W. Hemisphere) and the last four have written the history of the Global North in each other’s blood. The kiddie raping slave holding richfilth patrician animals who founded this country didn’t want a king, they wanted the Roman Slave Republic before Pompey Magnus and Gaius Julius Son of Venus – a Roman Slave Republic ruled by feral Patrician Gens, just like them.

When we came here a squirrel could climb a tree on the Atlantic coast of the US and moving tree to tree, never touch the ground until it reached the Mississippi river. We fixed that in a hurry. Be very clear about this. I completely agree with the author’s premise, humans require a physical connection to their world in order to be “sane”. We don’t and we aren’t and we haven’t been since long before Robert Moses and that’s why we are killing the biosphere and each other in wholesale lots and it always comes back to the values and beliefs that are the core drivers of a society. Forget WORDS. We are sociopath with WORDS. Look   at what   we do. That tells you who we are and what our real values are all about. Like Authority figures in secondary education tacitly approving “pack behaviors” among their charges. Packs always “search out and destroy” potential victims. These are practice behaviors for their later adult lives. Such feral children are often sired by a matched pair of feral adults who think that stuff is just fine. Small prediction: They are going to mangle “our little poet” in the plain print dress. They’ve already hung a jacket around her neck, making her a target. Her only likely chance of survival is to change schools and learn from her mistakes. Staying in the school of the story will be very ugly. What does that tell you about the kind of society that approves such behavior?

This is a society based on Exclusion. Male supremacy; Gender slavery; Human slavery; Constant war and conquest as the force that gives our lives meaning; and a feral Oligarchy. These are the Five Fingers of the fist of genocide. We have them all and we’ve done it here in this land. That’s why our housing tracts are built on mass graves and our freeways are paved with the bones of our victims from here and around the globe. You can’t drink warm AB negative from a human skull and then go sing Kumbaya in the choir. Not going to happen. Although it doesn’t prevent them from trying – while as the diva Joni Mitchell sang so many years ago, “…they paved paradise, put a parking lot.” We noticed the dichotomy long before the little girl was born. We grieve for her, for what will be done to her in the restoration of full blown gender slavery in this country as it reverts to its degraded norm, and for the degraded biosphere that will be the only world she ever knows. If she took her own life in her mid-20’s I would place no blame on her. On my generation? Yes. Oh yes. We sealed doom of this place every time we reaffirmed the decision our parents made forty years ago. But then, people have no history – peasants live only in the perpetual “now”. Short version: White America elected RMN 40 years ago, “…to put those filthy niggers, those fucking cunts, and those filthy fucking god dammed commie fucking anti-war protesters in their place.” (that’s a quote. I was there. From NY to Lost Angels. 49 states elected the animal Nixon). America had enough already. The prior 10 years had been a frontal assault on melanin deficient America’s core values, the Five Fingers. Nixon took the purple. Hoover took the call. America cheered. Ritual defamation; False imprisonment; Extra Judicial Execution. COINTELPRO. No more leaders and no more mass movements for economic and social justice. And now we are all here and our world is burning down around our ears.

Because we are insane, and because we murdered, imprisoned, or silenced all those who could have brought forward viable solutions, this country will die. All the “solutions” that any of Master’s Overseers will propose will result in regular folks being fucked to death by Master’s corporations. Sorry. For insane Oligarchies (produced by insane people), Nature is Enemy #1 and working people are Enemy #2. Roman Slave Republic ruled by feral Patrician Gens. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.

It’s been said that we are biologically connected to each other, chemically connected to the earth, atomically connected to the universe.  I like that.  Brothers to each other, cousins of the planets, children of the stars, we have a right to be here.  And with that right comes the responsibility to care for the worlds around us.

Like most other learning that human children acquire, the example set by the role models in their lives will make the most difference. People don’t miss what they’ve never known, and the majority of kids are being raised by people who are distracted by everyday socirty or are ignorant themselves of nature.Also, a lot of people growing up today don’t know how to “play outdoors” unless in an adult-organized team game, etc, as one of the commenters said. Our lives no longer involve “outdoors” except on a superficial or recreational level. We no longer have to go out and feed and care for the animals and land and growing plants that provide us our sustenence, so we no longer know intimately what goes on out there. What we need is everything: ecology classes, environmental-education trips and projects, vacations outdoors, daily walks through the nearest green space, and chores taking care of other species and our own, growing some or all of our own food, seeing first hand the consequences of our decisions and the results of our endeavors, and noticing all the other lives that are dependent upon the exact same Earth, the same space, the same land, the same forests, air, and water as we are. Likely to happen? I don’t know. I’m doing what I can, because I need to be out in the woods and “natural” spaces regularly in order to function, and I’ve seen reports of studies that theorize about or prove the efficacy of time outside in nature on the well-being of people, including learning, healing, and improvement in autistic children’s behavior and undertanding and interacting when time outdoors in green spaces in included in their day. If we conducted a significant portion of our school science classes outdoors with kids doing hands-on projects with the earthly processes, we could make great leaps in the right direction, and I’m sure there are other ways to include the natural, “real” world in contemporary daily life. Community gardens and park lands serve as the backyard of urban dwellers, and intelligent city planning could put work and commercial locations within walking distance of residences. Our working day could be restructured, and we could all adjust to make a way to connect with “outdoors” while still pursuing our 21st century lives. It’s a major adjustment to our mindset, and the replacement of “nature as adversary” with “nature as part of self, self as part of nature, all part of The All” which is an inderstanding that would cause us to change and save us and our world.

I’m heartened to see the movement push the question of morality and ethics. I loved “Last Child…” and have followed the discussion since, but can’t help but feel like all the organizing, policy making, studies and awareness day claiming is missing something more organic and fundamental that is key in changing our culture. Just this past weekend at our local ski area I witnessed a couple locking horns with their preschooler who wanted to walk through a mud puddle (with full ski regalia on). They meant well. Probably thought they were doing the right “parental” thing, but come on; they were spring skiing in the NE, not headed to church. Real sea change will come the day it is considered just as politically incorrect to forbid a child from experiencing the squish of mud beneath his ski boot as it is to insist he maintain a stiff upper lip when he skins his knee or to punish him for accidentally spilling milk. Just as a child should have the right to cry when he’s hurt, he should have the right to satisfy his curiosity about the natural world with his senses, not just read about it for the test. The curiosity, creativity and insight is inherent in them when they’re young—until we “educate” and “correct” them out of it. It most definitely is a moral issue.

This week my grandson is visiting. He lives in the city, I live surrounded by a state forest.  Our pleasures are simple.  The first day we waded out in the ice waters that fill the prairie and pasture in front of the home.  I bought rubber boots, he immediately got them full of water and eventually got wet to the neck.  It was 70 air temp, the water was ice water.  He did not care.  He played, he broke the ice, he laughed for over an hour and he did not get hypothermia, a cold, the flu or anything else that everyone worries about when children play.  What he did get was an ability to experiment, to test and to be happy.

The same thing was true as we went for geocaches in the forest, fed the horses in the pasture, hiked down the forest roads.

It is simple.  He gets up and says - can we go outside grandpa?

We sit on the porch and talk and play.  We absorb the sun, we look at the birds at the feeders, the squirrels sneaking around and make friends with the world.

When a writer notes that people got upset when the child got their skis in water it reminded me of one thing that everyone needs to be aware of, when we do things with kids, we need to do them for the children too. 

Make your expectations match theirs, not the other way around.

My wife and I have been writing a series of books for grandparents on places to go and wisdom to share.

One of the main lessons is that you make the experience satisfy the child and you go back for the extra exhibit, the experiences that you, as an adult desire.

Mud, water, sand, snow and ice are just mediums for creativity in the mind of a child who has been given the freedom of expression.

As long as we wait for the THEY who are in power positions to implement what we believe we need to become part of nature again, it won’t happen. THEY are always blamed.  We have to realize that WE are THEY.  When every individual/family decides to go back to nature to renew health, then things will be moving in the right direction.  Those of us already in the know have to lead by example, and tell the others, especially the children, the truth.

My community is boasting that they are going green, yet the code enforcers have harassed me because I “have too many plants in my yard”.They said I need to have spaces between my plants, and they can’t be above 7 feet.
Good luck world.