Nicholas Kristof, an American journalist, New York Times op-ed columnist, and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, is best known for bringing to light human rights abuses in Asia and Africa. Having traveled to 140 countries, he has an exceptionally diverse perspective on the world. But earlier this summer, he turned his attention to a much different subject when he wrote a piece called “How to Lick a Slug,” a personal story of a backpacking journey up Mount Hood with his 11-year-old daughter.
My daughter and I were recuperating in a (banana slug-infested) wilderness from a surfeit of civilization. On our second day on the Pacific Crest Trail, we were exhausted after nearly 20 miles of hiking, our feet ached, and ravenous mosquitoes were persecuting us. Dusk was falling, but no formal campsite was within miles.
So we set out a groundsheet and our sleeping bags on the soft grass of a ridge, so that the winds would blow the mosquitoes away. Our dog looked aghast (“Ugh, where’s my bed?!”), but sulkily curled up beside us. As far as we could tell, there was no other hiker within a half-day’s journey in any direction.
Kristof’s journey into nature was his way of taking “time to hit the ‘reset’ switch and escape deadlines and BlackBerrys… The experiences offer us lessons on inner peace and life’s meaning—cheap and effective therapy, without the couch.”
Our society seems to have misplaced that reset button. We are slowly becoming an indoors nation separated from the necessary physical and mental restoration that immersion in nature provides. The problem is especially acute among young people, who are retreating to the sofa in a huge and historic cultural migration.
One recent study found that 37% of kids aged 10-12 spent just a half hour or less outside each day. Few were outdoors for two hours or more. Children who bucked these trends were those whose parents let them roam the neighborhood. But, as Kristof notes, research on 9-year-olds finds that that the distance from home in which they are allowed to wander fell almost 90% from 1970 to 1990.
At the same time, obesity has doubled over the last 30 years among preschoolers and adolescents and tripled for kids in between. In 1985, only 1-2% of with children diabetes had the adult onset form of the disease. By 1995, that number had risen to 17%.
These are just some of the symptoms of what author Richard Louv calls“nature deficit disorder.” But the even greater tragedy is what the loss of this relationship is doing to our souls.
As we forsake nature and become creatures of solely artificial environments, tethering our days to information feeds and video streams, and dialing in not to the divine but to over-accelerated thrills and other manufactured diversions, an essential ancient part of ourselves is slipping away. We losing our reset button, and with it the sense wonder that make us human.
As I discovered this summer on my own solo journey into the mountains of Colorado, a trip in which I was completely alone and surrounded by nothing but that which has existed since time out of memory, only nature can give us that. Only nature can slow us all the way down to our aboriginal speed, empty our minds completely, and in the perfect silence that follows teach us those things for which words do not exist. In the absence of these lessons and the larger, deeper understanding they bring, we become harder, colder, and something much less than I think we’d like to be.
Some of the more terrifying results of that transformation can be seen in today’s many environmental crises, which are ultimately symptoms of a single spiritual crisis born of our current nature deficit disorder epidemic. As regular contact with the natural world becomes a rarely practiced anachronism, we are forgetting what nature gives us and why we should protect these irreplaceable gifts at any and all costs. In the absence of the awe that the nature world inspires, we no longer care enough to care for it, and all that it contains becomes as disposable as everything else in our increasingly synthetic worlds
But this need not be our fate. There is a better ending to our story. All we have to do is get outside and go find it.
By Jeffrey Hollender
Chief Inspired Protagonist
Seventh Generation, Inc.
