People in Nature

Exploring the natural world's psychological effects on human beings.

Richard Louv is the author of seven books, most recently Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. He is also chairman of the Children & Nature Network. See full bio

March 9, 2009, Parenting

The Right to a Walk in the Woods?

A right to a walk in the woods?

From a new article in Orion magazine, "A Walk in the Woods: Right or Privilege?"

A FEW YEARS AGO, I visited Southwood Elementary, the grade school I attended when I was a boy growing up in Raytown, Missouri. I asked a classroom of children about their relationship with nature. Many of them offered the now-typical response: they preferred playing video games; they favored indoor activities-and when they were outside, they played soccer or some other adult-organized sport. But one fifth-grader, described by her teacher as "our little poet," wearing a plain print dress and an intensely serious expression, said, "When I'm in the woods, I feel like I'm in my mother's shoes." To her, nature represented beauty, refuge, and something else.

"It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad-and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why." She paused. "I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lay down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back in there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day." The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened. "And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me."

I was struck by her last comment: "It was like they cut down part of me." If E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis is right-that human beings are hard-wired to get their hands wet and their feet muddy in the natural world-then the little poet's heartfelt statement was more than metaphor. When she referred to her woods as "part of me," she was describing something impossible to quantify: her primal biology, her sense of wonder, an essential part of her self.

Recently I began asking friends this question: Does a child have a right to a walk in the woods? Does an adult? To my surprise, several people responded with puzzled ambivalence....

To read the rest of this article, please visit: "A Walk in the Woods: Right or Privilege?" in Orion.

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Richard Louv is the author of "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" and chairman of the Children and Nature Network.