-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you even imagine your parents swinging from tree to tree, building a house out of logs or mud, living in a forest or desert, and instead of their morning coffee they drank from a brook? Can you imagine them living without cell phones, computers, television, or a job? I don’t know any who can. Even if our parents don’t live like a modern day Tarzan they still affect the way we, the children, react with nature. While reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Richard Louv’s The Last Child in the Woods, coupled with my own experiences, I have discovered three major nature-child relationships formed due to the influence of parents and adults. The first being that some parents have influenced their kids to hate the outdoors because it’s potentially dangerous and holds no “future.” Second being that some children use nature as an escape from their parents or the “adult” world, and the third is that some children have grown to love nature as a way of connecting with their family.
Remember the days when the kids who spent all day inside were considered the weird ones? Nowadays it’s quite the opposite. Whether or not it is the intention of the parents a large percentage of kids aren’t spending time outside. It could be to keep their children away from nature out of fear; they don’t want their kids to get hurt, lost, or in trouble. Kids could get hurt if their fort collapses on them, they could fall into a river and drown, or they could get lost or kidnapped. “Nature can frighten a child”(Louv 7). Even if a child were to risk injury in the pursuit of outdoor play he or she could face misdemeanor charges for “the illegal use of open space”(Louv 27). You can look at the tree, but you can’t climb it. A forth-grader in San Diego was quoted saying, “I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Richard Louv offers the explanation that parents think nature is an unorganized waste of their child’s time, a view which is reflected in the child’s view of nature. “One boy said computers are more important than nature, because computers are where the jobs are”(Louv 13). You can’t get a job with only tree climbing on your resume.
This is enough to stress out a child; he or she may try to escape his or her parents and this restriction on playing. John Burroughs once said, “I go into nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune.” I think this perfectly describes Chris McCandless. McCandless risked misdemeanors in the Detrital Wash, and was even given a ticket for hitchhiking. He played in places he “shouldn’t have.” His cross country teammate said “He would lead us on long, killer runs through places like farmers’s fields and construction sites, places we weren’t supposed to be”(Krakauer 112). Another example of how some kids (the other runners) are too afraid of rules or getting in trouble to enjoy the outdoors. Chris McCandless hated his parents; he was disgusted by their wealth and his father’s bigamy. They made his “entire childhood seem like a fiction”(Krakauer 123). Even his sister hated their parents and “also like Chris, she clashed fiercely with Walt and Billie as an adolescent”(Krakauer 129). Louv says that “in nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace”(Louv 7). Chris felt healed in the wilderness, he wrote to Ron saying, “the very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure”(Krakauer 59).
On Chris’ journey to Alaska he was “at long last… unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence”(Krakauer 22). This was his escape; he was free from his parents and the adult world. He wanted so much to be separated from his parents that he even changed his name! Like Adam naming the animals, he felt the name his parents had given him gave them power over him; he had to get rid of it; the name Alexander Supertramp gave him that freedom.
I was named after my grandmother on my father’s side who died shortly after I was born. Anna was an adventurous, strong woman. I sometimes wonder if my dad spent so much time with me because he missed his mom. He’d take me fishing and when I wasn’t catching anything he’d let me reel in one he’d already set the hook on. He’d never claim it was his fish either. When we came home I had always caught the bigger fish. My dad doesn’t put up with that sort of thing now of course. We’d take our dog on long walks through the parks by our home and we had the most beautiful garden with blue ribbon winning dahlias, vegetables, and lilies, my favorite. That’s where I learned to love the wilderness. It reminded me of spending time with my dad, time I don’t get much of anymore. Louv heard a fifth-grader say, “When I’m in the woods… I feel like I’m in my mother’s shoes”(Louv 13). Some kids use nature to escape their parents, others to remind them of their parents.
The nature deficiency of today’s children is a result of parenting. Parents shouldn't expect their kids to naturally want to be healthy, or to play outside, they have to be taught and allowed to love the outdoors. Some lucky kids find it on their own; other’s aren’t so lucky. It is up to the adults of this world to show children the joy that comes from being outside and existing with the earth rather than ignoring it. One cannot love something they don’t know about. If we want to save the earth, future generations must love it.
