Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

[Kudu 186]

 

packsaddle writes:

 

"100 years ago, the majority of the population was rural, today the vast majority is urban, mostly in coastal areas. There have been vast changes in most aspects of society: communications, transportation, commerce, just for instance. The kinds of opportunities that come with those changes were, I think, unforeseen 100 years ago...at least the technologies certainly were. And not all of those new things are bad. In fact, because we've embraced them so strongly as a society, it could be considered evidence for the degree to which we value them. At the same time, with the move to urban life comes less access to the outdoors and the wild. Let's face it, wild places have been greatly diminished."

 

CalicoPenn expressed similar ideas in the "Press and Discriminatory Story Writing" thread about a week ago. If I understand the idea correctly, the unspoken premise here is that Scouting was invented to teach practical skills that were important to a rural population 100 years ago, but now we need to move on and focus on the technological skills needed by an increasingly urban population.

 

However, Scouting was designed to address the shortcomings of an urban population which had already undergone 100 years of industrialization!

 

Ian Hislop addresses this subject neatly in the BBC's recent program, "Ian Hislops Scouting For Boys." Hislop details how Scouting came about as a result Baden-Powell's rise to national hero status in the Boer War. The war had left the nation badly shaken, "One of the reasons that the British army had performed so badly was that compared to the Boers -- the healthy outdoor farmers turned soldiers -- the British Troops had been weak and sickly... The Edwardian establishment was terrified that after a century of rapid industrialization, Western society might be, in their words, degenerating."

 

Baden-Powell's solution was to make useful citizens of the children of this industrial society by using nature to mold character and improve physical fitness. To this end he employed the structure of the camping and reconnaissance skills featured in his military book, Aids to Scouting, which had become a best seller during the Siege of Mafeking.

 

Before B-P invented Scouting, similar nature-based organizations had already been established in the United States including Dan Beard's "Boy Pioneers" and Ernest Seton's "Woodcraft League of America." Of the three, Seton was the most detailed about the human need for city-dwellers to occasionally immerse themselves in nature by systematically learning the woodcraft skills necessary for intensive recreation. A century later, Richard Louv would echo this idea of a biological need when he discussed the human "inborn need for contact with nature:" the nervious system's need to be "reset" in the environment in which the human senses evolved.

 

However, as Seton notes in his "Nine Important Principles of Woodcraft," to do so you need a structure:

 

Not long ago a benevolent rich man, impressed with this idea, chartered a steamer and took some hundreds of slum boys up to the Catskills for a day in the woods. They were duly landed and told to "go in now and have a glorious time." It was like gathering up a net full of catfish and throwing them into the woods, saying, "Go and have a glorious time."

 

The boys sulked around and sullenly disappeared. An hour later, on being looked up, they were found in groups under the bushes, smoking cigarettes, shooting "craps," and playing cards -- the only things they knew.

 

Thus the well-meaning rich man learned that it is not enough to take men out of doors. We must also teach them to enjoy it.

 

The purpose of this book is to show how Outdoor Life may be followed to advantage.

 

See:

 

http://inquiry.net/traditional/seton/woodcraft/9_principles.htm

 

packsaddle continues:

 

"The ability to pursue the BP ideal in the way he originally thought has changed. But the ideal remains the same. So I was wondering if that ideal couldn't be met through those other kinds of opportunities? For me the problem is how do we do it? And does it really meet the ideal?"

 

There is in Scouting a deep longing for the popularity that it once enjoyed, and most talk about "the ideal" seems to boil down to using some popular pastime to achieve the so-called "Aims of Scouting," the BSA's use of Soccer in the Latin community, for instance. However as Beard, Seton, Baden-Powell, and Louv point out, organized sports do not provide the recreational encounter with nature that Louv presents as an actual biological need.

 

As the BSA moves on to other things, we now need some organization to step up and offer the Scoutcraft structure specified in the BSA's real "mission statement," their Congressional Charter.

 

Richard Louv presents an interesting account of this dilemma in Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Here is a excerpt offered without comment for now:

 

At Scout headquarters at San Diego's Camp Balboa, an urban campground created in 1916, Narayan and Karyl T. O'Brien, associate executive director of the regional Girl Scouts Council, spread out a stack of literature to describe the rich programs they provide to more than thirty thousand girls. Impressive, but over the past three years, membership in the region has remained flat, even as the population has grown precipitously. This region's council markets itself aggressively. It offers such programs as an overnighter with the city's natural history museum, a daylong junior naturalist program, and popular summer-camp experiences. But the overwhelming majority of Girl Scout programs are unconcerned with nature. Included (along with selling cookies) are such offerings as Teaching Tolerance, Tobacco Prevention, Golf Clinic, Self-Improvement, Science Festival, EZ Defense, and Financial Literacy. Soon, Camp CEO will bring businesswomen to a natural setting to mentor girls in job interviewing, product development, and marketing.

 

The divide between past and future is seen best at the Girl Scout camps in mountains east of the city: one is billed as traditional, with open-air cabins and tents hidden in the trees; the newer camp looks like a little suburbia with street lights. "I flipped when I learned that girls weren't allowed to climb trees at our camps," says O'Brien. Liability is an increasing concern. "When I was a kid, you fell down, you got up, so what; you learned to deal with consequences. I broke this arm twice," says Narayan. "Today, if a parent sends a kid to you without a scratch, they better come back that way. That's the expectation. And as someone responsible for people, I have to respect that."

 

Scouting organizations must also respect, or endure, outrageous increases in the cost of liability insurance. This is not only an American phenomenon; in 2002, Australia's Scouting organizations Girl Guides and Scouts Australia reported increases of as much as 500 percent in a single year, leading the executive director of Scouts Australia to warn that Scouting could be "unviable" if insurance premiums continued to rise.

 

Considering the mounting social and legal pressures, Scouting organizations deserve praise for maintaining any link to nature. Narayan pointed out that most of the two thousand girls who attend summer camps are touched by nature, even if indirectly. "But we now feel compelled to put tech labs in camps or computers in a nature center, because that's what people are used to," says O'Brien. Scouting is responding to the same pressures experienced by public schools: as family time and free time have diminished, Americans expect these institutions to do more of society's heavy lifting--more of its social, moral, and political juggling. Ask any Boy Scout how difficult that act can be.

 

Justly or not, the public image of the Boy Scouts of America has shifted from that of clean-cut boys tying knots and pitching tents to one of adult leaders who ban gays and expel atheists. Like the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts struggle to be up-to-date -- and marketable. At the new National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas, displays use virtual-reality technology to allow visitors to climb a mountain, kayak down a river, and conduct simulated rescues on mountain bikes. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) activists launched a campaign to convince the Boy Scouts to drop their fishing merit badge. In 2001, the Dallas Morning News reported that some Boy Scout councils across the country were selling off wilderness camps to pay their bills.

 

For the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, it's not easy being green.

 

Today's parents push such organizations toward even safer, more technological activities. Scouting struggles to remain relevant, to be a one-stop shop, to offer something for just about everyone. That may be a good marketing policy. Or not. (An astute book editor once told me: "A book written for everyone is a book for no one.") As the scope of Scouting has widened, the focus on nature has narrowed. But a slim minority of parents and Scout leaders is beginning to argue for a back-to-nature movement. "They're usually the older adults," says O'Brien, "The ones who can remember a different time." Could this set of adults offer a targeted marketing opportunity to future capital campaigns? Rather than accept nature's slide, or suggest that non-nature programs be dropped to make way for the outdoors, why not ask these adults to build a whole new nature wing to Scouting? Interesting possibility, said O'Brien. In fact, it makes sense not only as a marketing tool--define your niche and claim it--but also as a mission.

 

Scout leaders emphasize that Scouting is an educational program that teaches young people about building character, faith traditions, mentoring, serving others, healthy living, and lifelong learning. Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell surely sensed that exposure to nature nurtures children's character and health. The best way to advance those educational goals (and, in a marketing sense, revive Scouting) as a return to the core orientation to nature -- an approach that many parents and Scout leaders support [Last Child in the Woods, pages 152-154].

 

See:

 

http://tinyurl.com/yr3qol

 

Kudu

 

 

[John-in-KC 311]

Kudu,

 

As I noted in my response to Eamonn, the volunteers of Scouting need to get together and decide what they want a young man to look like:

 

At age 9

 

At 11

 

At 14

 

At 17

 

Then, they need to reverse engineer the program so the elements:

 

1) Crosswalk

2) Meet the vision

3) Show BSA as the premier stewards of the land

 

Just one example: Is our camp cookery designed for the Covered Wagon (Dutch ovens and cast griddles), or for High Adventure (backpack stoves).

 

Yes, I know I insist Cooking should go back on the Eagle List. That doesn't mean we cannot take a critical look at the task analysis of the MB.

 

We don't need Morse Code by flags, or semaphore signalling. We do need survival mirrors.

 

How badly do we need pioneering skills, or how badly do we need to inculcate the LNT ethic starting at Tiger Cubs?

 

Among the volunteers within 50 miles of my front door are an educational psychologist, many docs, some really expert hunters/fishers/outdoorspeople, a BSA Ranger, and on, and on, and on. We need to leverage the power of the volunteer and rationalize the whole program, top to bottom.

 

Of course, I'm prejuidiced, I think the 1965 edition of the Handbook is a great starting point for the 14 year old. I think we need to add more hikes at 2C and more camping/cooking at 1C. At the same time, adding the visit with an area citizen at 2C and "share scouting with a friend" at 1C are helpful as well.

[Its Me 10]

 

Kudu, I like what you have written.

 

A couple of thoughts. We have a Scout Master that thinks camping in public RV campground is The Great Outdoors. One month we camped right next to RVs running their generators with satellite TV dishes set up in clearings. Coax-cables ran across roads and through campsites. I can only imagine that one of these nature lovers mumbled blasted forest is ruining my reception. Another month we camped in a public group site adjacent to a group of hard drinking, country folks. They were loud, their music was louder but on the positive side, when a fight broke out it was broken up quickly. Four of our last five campouts have been in these types of parks. The fifth was on a military base.

 

I am pushing to camp away from these distractions. I argue that these places are not instilling the type of qualities that we want in our youths. The Scout Master argues that they tried the hiking thing once and he met with flack.

 

That is why I like your analogy of the rich man dropping the urban kids off in the great outdoors and then observing that they just didnt know what to do. Lets look at another parable; baseball is a fun and relatively easy game to understand. Take 18 boys one ball some gloves and bats and let them loose on a ball diamond. If they have never been taught how to play baseball they wont know what to do. They would use the bat and gloves wrong and likely use them for games they already know. It would be boring. In general the more baseball skills they have the more they enjoy the game.

 

Further more, I have an old 1949 Boy Scout handbook. It reads much differently then the current books. It reads more like an adventure book. Something more like the book, My Side of the Mountain. Its one part instructional and one part adventure story. Although there are instructions on how to track a Moose. It seems to me that the book was written for the boy to get as much, if not more pleasure in reading about moose tracking then actually doing it.

 

The current book is less about feeding a boys soul through literature than it is about being a text book. It has all the trappings of a text book, he reads a section then takes a test at the end of the section. No doubt it's a text book.

 

The adventure must be scouting, both in perception and in the actual. Build up the outdoors through stories and skill development. Let the boy for a month in advance imagine what it will be like on the trail. Then take up to the trail away from RVs and parking lots. Let him rely on his skills.

 

I cant imagine anything more wonderful.

 

 

 

 

[RangerT 10]

Kudu

I applaud your sentiment although many of todays teens may not agree. One of the last treks I took my crew on was to a beautiful wilderness area for a week, trees, a pristine lake loaded with fish, and a lot of wildlife. The one rule was no electronic devices allowed, even cell phones were only for emergencies and were kept locked up, this was to give them the feeling of being at one with nature with no technology. Well the first day and night were absolute misery most of the teens, a coed group, wanted to go home, many were afraid they would not survive. The next morning I taught them how to create a fishing pole and tackle from the objects around them, some cooked biscuits, etc on an open fire. Sitting together that first breakfast some of them talked about how much fun catching the fish was,one kid only had a ball of string, a safety pin and some beef jerky, he caught four fish. By the third day not one of my venturers asked about their cell phone and had immersed themselves totally in the experience. By the end of the week, NOT ONE of them wanted to go home, even after taking a cold shower with lake water. They still talk about that trip almost a year later. Since then I have relinquished my postion as advisor, and am now the CC and COR, but the teens still want me to lead another trip, and so do the the advisors of the crew, go figure.

 

As a park ranger for the last 22 years I know the beauty,joys, and dangers of the outdoors, however motivating teens and some adults to see those same joys is a daunting task to say the least. As I stated in another thread that I see scouting evolving to a program where the outdoors will be de-emphasized or secondary because of the over protectiveness of well meaning parents on their children and the technocentric nature of our society. Kids today are growing up with fears that are unfounded as well as a complete lack of adventure about the world around them, and that in my opinion is tragic. Wilderness areas are being swallowed up for development at an alarming rate, pretty soon we will run out of these special places to take our youth and then what will happen to scouting? I hope I never see that day during my lifetime. We owe the youth so much more.