Interview: Journalist and Author Richard Louv

by David Roberts

RICHARD LOUV IS an anecdote machine. As we milled about awaiting lunch-hour seating, he kept up a constant stream of witty, telling stories — about “no running” signs on playgrounds, clueless environmental leaders, suffering outdoor-gear execs. It’s no wonder Louv’s got a trove of such chestnuts: As a longtime journalist (he’s written for just about every leading U.S. newspaper and magazine, and now has a regular column in the San Diego Union-Tribune) and the author of seven books about family, community, and nature, he’s been talking to kids and parents about the maladies and inanities of modern life for years.

His latest book bears the self-explanatory title Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. After tens of thousands of years of children playing and working primarily outdoors, the last few generations have seen such interaction with nature vanish almost entirely. The implications—for children’s physical and mental health, and for the future of environmentalism—are immense, Louv argues.

But he stresses that there is hope—indeed, that response to the book has him more hopeful than he was when he began writing it. After all, in a world of intractable problems and social malaise, his encouragement to parents is simple and easily achieved: Take your kids outside.

David Roberts: What led you to this particular subject?

Richard Louv: This is my seventh book, and the second was called Childhood’s Future. I went across the country to interview 3,000 parents and kids about the landscape of family life, which was radically changing. One theme that surprised me was this sense that something profound was changing in the relationship between children and nature.

One little boy said the reason he preferred playing indoors was that’s where all the electrical outlets are. I heard that kind of thing over and over. And the parents were saying, “I don’t understand — how come the kids won’t go outside?” The chapter I wrote about it got picked up by Sierra Magazine and Utne Reader.

Over the years I did some other books, but I kept watching the research on this. The empirical evidence for the split between children and nature is thin because longitudinal studies don’t exist for the most part. Nobody thought to ask the question. We always assumed this relationship [between kids and nature] would be ongoing. Some of the researchers were referring to my chapter as anecdotal evidence, and I thought, if I’m an expert on this we’re really in trouble.

What we do have is circumstantial and anecdotal evidence. We know what kids do: 44 hours a week plugged into electronic media, more time in the car, organized sports, all of that. We know what our own eyes and experience tell us.

David Roberts: What forces have conspired to keep kids inside?

Richard Louv: Obviously electronics are part of it. Video games and television are fun, and very distracting, and very convenient for parents. I’m not a Luddite. I love my Macintosh — probably too much, as my wife will tell you. I don’t think that video games are the spawn of the devil. I do think it’s a little tough to have a sense of wonder while you’re playing Grand Theft Auto (which, by the way, I played with my sons — they’ve never let me forget that I tried to run over everything in sight).

When I first started interviewing parents, I thought access to nature would be the most important reason kids aren’t going outside. The woods I played in as a kid, in the suburbs on the edge of Kansas City, have been bulldozed. But if you go to the new edge of Kansas City, it looks just like where I grew up. Kids can walk out their back door into the woods if they want. Parents there say the same thing: kids aren’t going outside. So access is important, but it’s not at the top of the list.

The No. 1 reason parents give is: they’re scared. Of “stranger danger.” Child abductions. That fear is changing our lives. The irony is, when you look at the statistics on abductions, almost all are by family members, and the number of abductions has been going down for about a decade. There’s a Duke University study that says kids are safer outside the home than at any time since the 1970s.

If those numbers are going down, what’s going up? I’m afraid it’s people in our profession. I like to think it’s those TV guys, but it’s also print media. You watch CNN or Fox or MSNBC and they take a handful of really terrible crimes against children and repeat them over and over and over again. When they get done telling us about the crime, they tell us about the trial over and over and over again. It’s no accident people think there’s a bogeyman on every corner. We’re literally being conditioned to live in a state of fear, and this predates 9/11.

David Roberts: So parental anxiety is really No. 1 on the list?

Richard Louv: It would be unfair to make a siYep. One of the things that’s pleased me is, right after the book came out I started getting emails from parents who have been getting their kids outdoors. One woman wrote and said they’d made a deliberate decision as to where they lived; their kids were spending every weekend in tents out in the woods behind their house, running in to get food and running back out. She wrote, “Now I know why I’m doing what I’m doing and why it’s right.”

A lot of parents have been getting their kids outdoors based on nostalgia or instinct, but didn’t have that body of evidence. We’re an evidence-based society. So that evidence is really affirming to parents who are getting social pressure. What do you mean Johnny isn’t enrolled in Suzuki violin lessons? What do you mean you let your kids build a tree house? Don’t you know they could fall out?

This gets into the issue of comparative risk. Pediatricians will tell you they’re not treating very many broken bones in kids anymore. What they are seeing now are repetitive-stress injuries in children, which generally last a lot longer, sometimes permanently, compared to most broken bones.