L. David Mech "Dave"

Your Mother is calling

By Nancy jo Tubbs
Reprinted by permission of the Ely Timberjay
June 28, 2006

It’s true, we don’t inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children. However, the kids are likely indoors playing Ultimate Ninja on the Game Boy, under the impression that outdoors is what you drive through to get to the mall. More kids are watching Gilligan’s Island reruns than exploring their own real or imaginary islands.

Members of the Baby Boom Generation may have been the last to reluctantly straggle in from a day in the tree house, the neighborhood creek or the nearby patch of woods only when Mom yelled for the third time that the tuna casserole was ready.

Some folks our age are already chomping at the old-growth timber, happy to ignore the diminishing ozone layer and to promote drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. If our childhood experiences with Mother Nature left us only partially protective of the environment, what will happen when the Nintendo Generation is responsible for deciding whether old-growth timber is logged and polar bears follow melting icebergs into oblivion?

Here at the edge of the Boundary Waters, in small towns surrounded by woods and lakes, I suspect our young folks spend more time under the sun and moon than do many urban kids. The area is rich with camps, outfitters, wolf and bear experts and resorts that make it possible for even visiting children to catch a fish, learn to paddle or see a wolf. For this I am grateful.

Since I run a resort, I get to watch kids savoring summer the way I did as a kid. I climbed the big red pine on the point, straddled the branch and felt it sway in the wind. I caught lots of frogs, and to my embarrassment, took way too long to figure out that they would never make it long-term in a minnow bucket. Mosquitoes, nor leaches nor parents kept us ruffians from racing the paths and swimming until we were wrinkled and blue. We bobbed around in the lake on those windy days when the waves slap you silly. I once went wading on the beach as the ice went out in May. By the time we were ten, we knew where it was safe to dive and how to build a fort. We could bait a hook, hike to the bluff on our own and paddle a canoe across the lake. We were one with Mother Nature.

At the moment, instead of getting out on the water in the kayak, I’m sitting in front of the computer, which puts me in the company of too many other folks on this beautiful summer day. According to Richard Louv, that goes especially for the kids. Louv is the author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.

“A child today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move,” he said. A Kaiser Family Foundation study reported in 2005 that American kids spent an average of 45 hours a week engaged with some form of electronic gizmo. Half live in homes where the TV is on all the time and 68 percent of kids have TVs in their rooms.

Nature deficit disorder is Louv’s shorthand description of the cost to humans when we are alienated from nature. He suggests that higher rates of emotional and physical illness, difficulty paying attention and diminished use of the senses result when kids don’t have unstructured time to play and explore outdoors. Early signs of heart and circulation problems from sedentary lifestyles are beginning to show up in 40 percent of our kids.

On the other hand, a University of Illinois study showed that symptoms of attention-deficit disorder were significantly reduced in children age five and older when they spent time with Mother Nature. A California study found that when sixth-graders spent time in the back yard, the park, the fields and woods, their test scores in science and math jumped 27 percent.

All reasoning aside, doesn’t the rough and unpredictable earth call to us, especially on these summer days, to get out, to feel sand between our toes and the wind in our hair? And let’s take the kids along, or better yet send them outside to find their own real and imaginary islands. Isn’t it time, for the sake of both, to encourage a Mother and child reunion?