SUMMER’S END

Some friends have joined us here at the cottage, employees of the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, and I read their copy of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a recent book by Richard Louv, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune. A fascinating issue, particularly relevant to me here in this close-to-nature setting, surrounded by small kids, my brain still steeped in the art and life of Richard Wagner–an artist whose art and life are so closely bound in with his experience of nature. Wagner was the kind of Romantic who saw, ahead of time, where the Industrial revolution would lead; he yearned for primeval German forests, twice cast the ‘Wild Child’ in leading roles in his operas (Siegfried and Parsifal), promoted goofily inaccurate, romanticized pictures of pagan and medieval European society, and spent most of his creative life as far from urban centers as possible because he understood that when man isolates himself from the natural world, horror ensues. To me, Loge is Wagner’s most potent image of the modern age, our post-enlightenment world of science, technology, industry, profit, and insatiable dissatisfaction. And it is Loge who wipes out the human world, at the end of Gotterdammerung. So far as anyone can tell, he’s about to wipe out ours.

Louv’s point is that kids’ experience with nature—whether that be going with parents on trips to national parks or building a tree house in the backyard—has an inverse relationship with such common and terrible modern childhood issues as obesity and ADHD; ie statistically speaking, kids who have more contact with nature are healthier, happier, better students, and less obnoxious than those who spend their entire existences glued to a computer or video-game screen, trapped in the back seat of a car, or (the new fad) both at once. It’s man vs. machine, it’s The Matrix, Terminator, and the future of the human race is at stake. Louv, with his journalist’s background, is perhaps more of a cheerleader than I might be, writing on such a dire issue; his concluding chapters are an explosion of different things different people have been trying or suggesting to help the situation, without (I feel) anything definitive—perhaps because he avoids down-‘n’-dirty grappling with the roots of the problem.

With my own brain shaped by Wagner, I’d probably prefer an ambivalent conclusion. All of Wagner’s conclusions, at the end of all his operas, are ambivalent. Gotterdammerung is both dusk and dawn. (Go through all the others yourself and find other examples!) The issue, as clearly as I’ve found it stated, boils down to this (Louv quoting Seth Norman, a writer on fly-fishing):

"Grasping the Grand Scheme is demanding for adults; for kids raised on Disney, it’s simply shocking to discover that it takes a bunch of Bambis to feed a Lion King, and that Mowgli’s wolves would eat Thumper and all his sibs. Eventually, most of us figure out that it’s people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics—and even the idea that nature itself is something worth preserving. We choose to be shepherds and stewards or we don’t. We will live wisely—preserving water and air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we’re only beginning to understand, or we won’t, in which case Nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite, and utterly indifferent."

I believe it’s easier for one person to make a good decision than for a large group of people to make a good decision; that most of us, decision by decision, do whatever is easiest or requires the least amount of effort; that the great explorers—those who push back the boundaries, those who spend a lifetime in nature, far from their homeland or their native culture—are invariably pushed on by some powerful inner dissatisfaction, something that makes a comfortable life in a little hobbit hole out of the question for them; that the reason the Loge-
computer/video screen is more engaging than the great outdoors is, the computer doesn’t seem to share that complete indifference of Erda-nature but keeps reacting to each of our actions, thereby affirming our existence (ie when you go and hunt and kill an animal, or tear down a forest to build a shopping mall, you can proudly look at it and say: "Look what I did!", whereas the low-impact hiker who merely jots down the numbers of finches he saw in a journal may end up needing some more dramatic way of proving to himself that he was really there). All of which leads me to think Norman’s second version of events is the likely future, that we will destroy ourselves in short order, many beautiful things will be no more, and the Rhine will once again cover it all, roll back, and all will be as if nothing had been.

And yet I know Louv is right, and that there is always still hope. My own spirituality, if I can talk or write about something so intangible, is entirely bound up with childhood experiences of nature and music. I’m still doing it, decades later, with these last two months spent running around listening to operas and then hanging out in the wilderness. Comparing notes with my environmental sector friends, I’m pleased and terrified to see that the same issues are at play in their industry as in ours. It’s well-known that natural sciences education and arts education make kids smarter, healthier, and happier; but these subjects are hard to test, in any quantitative, standardized form, our current obsession, and because there’s no profit to be made in either industry, we always seem to be fighting a losing battle. Yet we know that kids are wide open to both subjects. This last week here has confirmed what our experience of Theft of the Gold suggested, that kids adore Wagner’s musical stories about the wild forces of nature. My 7 year-old nephew has spent the last week studying the libretto to Siegfried; his favorite scene is of course the sword-fight with the dragon. But it does require a little one-on-one contact, a kid modeling an adult who honestly cares about art, or nature, to pry the kid away from the ubiquitous glowing screen. If WE decide that we care—if WE turn off our screens, and work at building great connections with our world (better forms of transportation, better ways of connecting to our food, better ways of enjoying our surroundings and each other, better art, better ways of communicating) then THEY will learn from us that that’s what human beings do.