The problem is that creating nature rich cities is getting more difficult by the day.
Lets start with land management. Boston is a great example of a city that has spent millions over 3 decades to fix up the green spaces in the city. After much success, last year they got a major hit on the effort that is causing many to rethink what they have done.
Bringing back greenways to the city meant restoring natural shorelines to waterways, pulling streams out of culverts and returning them to the surface, restoring wetlands along rivers and dredging out backfilled ponds in some parks.
Just when they were celebrating their long term success, long absent diseases like West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis returned to the city in mosquitoes that are breeding in the restored streams and wetlands.
Another problem is simple yet complex. Trees.
Because of urban concerns over everything from dangerous acorns and pine cones to noxious tree sap (straight from the minutes of a local public hearing) the variety of trees that can be planted in an urban area is growing more limited by the day.
Gone are the towering pine trees of my youth. Their sheer size now puts fear into the hearts of many that they will fall and kill someone. Even if planted in the middle of a large park. And let us not forget the dangerous weapons they drop every year. Children will be killed because of the pine cones. Of course you cannot ignore the tree sap that can ruin a car finish in seconds. Who cares if the parents have to drive their car 100 feet off the road to do it, tree sap on a car cannot happen.
Gone too are the majestic oaks and maples. The massive leaves are declared too messy to clean up every year and besides, they make roads too dangerous to drive on when wet. And those huge limbs are way too dangerous to have in a city. They will fall on someone or something and never, ever should children be allowed to climb on them.
Trees, even those planted in large parks, must be kept to a small size so as not to invite risk.
The trees must not be able to bear seeds or fruit of any kind. Fruit and nuts are way too dangerous for dozens of reasons.
If you think I am wrong, take a good look at your own home town. Watch what happens the next time a big old tree, like an oak, maple or pine, falls in a storm.
Do they replace it with a similar tree? Or a smaller, safer tree? Do they even replace the tree? You might be surprised.
I have a park in my home town that has over 40 fewer trees in it now than it had during my youth. City lawyers have been deemed it to dangerous to replant the trees as storms have claimed them. Not one person was hurt when they fell. No one vehicle damaged when they fell. But who cares? Large trees are a danger and must be eliminated.
The result of this fear is that the once lush 10 acre green space is slowly turning into an ever larger brown spot of burnt grass in the summer because so many shade trees are gone. The swing sets and other childrens play things were moved a few years ago to a shady side of the park because they got too hot in the open sun for kids to use.
Now scared parents want the trees near it taken down out of ignorant fear a limb will fall on a kid.
What they want instead of trees is best described as a circus tent.
In his most recent book, The Nature Principle, author Richard Louv posits that a healthy dose of Vitamin N — in which that N stands for Nature — can make us happier, smarter and more creative. So why aren’t we all out getting more of it? An Audubon Medal winner and founder of the Children & Nature Network, Louv talked to us about transforming cities into “incubators of biodiversity,” balancing post-apocalyptic visions with nature-rich ones, and addressing so-called Nature-Deficit Disorder.
You coined the term “Nature-Deficit Disorder” in your book Last Child in the Woods and continue to discuss it in The Nature Principle. What is NDD, and how do I know if I have it?
I think it of it as more of a condition of society rather than any one person. I use it to describe the barriers that are put up between all of us and the natural world and the price we pay for alienation from nature — our physical health, our psychological health, our spiritual health.
So it’s something that affects all of us, to some degree?
I think it touches on most people. As of 2008, more people in the world live in cities than in the countryside, and that’s a huge moment in human history that goes largely unremarked upon. There are two directions it can go from here: Either our disengagement from nature will quicken because we’re going to have more and more urbanization or we’ll start seeing new kinds of cities — ones that are nature-rich — along with new kinds of neighborhoods, new kinds of homes, new kinds of schools, new kinds of workplaces.
How can we create these nature-rich cities?
By ‘creating nature,’ I mean new landscapes in cities that are naturalized, whether they’re on school grounds or our backyards. I think one of our goals should be to transform cities into incubators of biodiversity. Neighborhoods — even dense urban neighborhoods — can be infused with nature. If you look at some of the eco-villages that have emerged in Western Europe, there are quite dense neighborhoods that are rich in green roofs, which are planted in a way that actually creates a natural habitat for birds and butterflies and focuses on native plants. There are streams made out of recycled rain water that go through these eco-villages.
What if we began to think about the redevelopment of inner-city neighborhoods and truly greening them? I think we would begin to see a different kind of life.
What do you think needs to occur in order for that to happen?
We need conservationists sitting down with residential developers, imagining a different future. We also need to challenge our perception of the way we talk to ourselves and our kids about the future. When most people are asked to conjure up visions of the far future, the images that most readily surface look a lot like the movie Blade Runner — the post-apocalyptic existence in which nature has been stripped or so unalterably changed it’s unrecognizable. If that’s the dominant image of the future that people carry around with them without a balancing image of a nature-rich society, then we’re in trouble. We’ve got to start painting that picture of a nature-rich world, a nature-rich civilization.
In The Nature Principle, you write that time spent in nature can boost both mental acuity and creativity. How?
The science on this is fairly new. It’s embarrassingly new. Science should have been looking at this long ago. Even though there are a lot of studies that have emerged, most are correlative, not causal. That’s because nobody thought to ask questions 30 years ago, when they should have started 30-year longitudinal studies.
But quite a bit of correlative evidence is coming forth and it all seems to point in the same direction. That’s pretty rare. There was a recent study on young adults who were taken backpacking. They factored out the effect of exercise on mental acuity and focused on the impact of the natural world itself. They found that after three days — and it seemed to peak at three days — cognitive skills went up significantly and creativity increased by 50 percent. That’s just three days backpacking. So there’s evidence that not only can we become healthier and happier, we can become smarter when we connect more with nature.
Do you have any theories of why?
Other than a New York subway, when else do we use all of our senses at the same time as we do in the natural world? That, to me, would seem to qualify as the ultimate state of learning in which you’re using all your senses at the same time, taking in a lot of information, integrating it, and connecting the dots. Scientists no longer talk about five senses. They talk conservatively about 10 senses, sometimes as many as 30. We spend a lot of our days expending a lot of energy to block out many of those senses because we need to focus on the computer screen, on video games.
There’s another question here: the question of feeling fully alive. That’s one of the most important things about connecting with the rest of nature: It helps all of us feel more alive. I think that’s the most important thing, and it ignites a sense of wonder, particularly in kids.
When you say ‘nature,’ does that just mean going outside wherever you are, or is there a specific natural setting we should be seeking out?
Science has a hard time defining nature. There are at least 30 definitions in science of what constitutes life. It’s understandable that nature would be difficult to define. My personal definition is anywhere I’m in a meaningful relationship with species other than my own. That can be a backyard, that can be the trees at the end of a cul-de-sac, that can be a city park, that can be wilderness, that can be a greenhouse. It can take many forms.
Is there a certain amount of nature-time we should aim for daily to best reap these benefits?
There’s one study that came up with five minutes. They didn’t say that’s the minimum daily requirement of what I call Vitamin N. They did say that people show psychological improvement just after five minutes in a natural setting. But we really don’t know the answer. The best answer I can give at this point is that some is better than none and more is better than some.
Photo by Robert Burroughs
