Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Rick Scibelli, Jr. for The New York TimesMount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains.
TUCSON — Your day breaks, your mind aches for something stimulating
to match the stirrings of the season. The gate at the urban edge is
open, here to the Santa Catalina Mountains, and yet you turn inward, to
pixels and particle-board vistas.
Something’s amiss. A third of all American adults — check, it just
went up to 35.7 percent — are obese. The French don’t even have a word
for fat, Paul Rudnick mused in a mock-Parisian tone in The New Yorker
last week. “If a woman is obese,” he wrote, “we simply call her
American.”
And, of course, our national branding comes with a host of deadly
side effects: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, certain kinds of
cancer. Medical costs associated with obesity and inactivity are nearly
$150 billion a year.
This grim toll is well known. Cripes: maybe surgery is the answer, or a
menu of energy drinks and vodka (the Ann Coulter diet?). Count the
calories. Lay off the muffins. Atkins one week, Slim-Fast the next. We
spend more than $50 billion on the diet-industrial complex and have
little to show for it (or too much).
But there is an obvious solution — just outside the window. For most
of human history, people chased things or were chased themselves. They
turned dirt over and planted seeds and saplings. They took in Vitamin D
from the sun, and learned to tell a crow from a raven (ravens are
larger; crows have a more nasal call; so say the birders). And then, in
less than a generation’s time, millions of people completely decoupled
themselves from nature.
There’s a term for the consequences of this divorce between human and
habitat — nature deficit disorder, coined by the writer Richard Louv in
a 2005 book,
“Last Child in the Woods.” It sounds trendy, a bit of sociological shorthand, but give the man and his point a listen.
Louv argued that certain behavioral problems could be caused by the
sharp decline in how little time children now spend outdoors, a trend
updated in the
latest Recreation Participation Report. The number of boys ages 6 to 12 who engage in some kind of outdoor activity, in particular, continues to slide.
Kids who do play outside are less likely to get sick, to be stressed
or become aggressive, and are more adaptable to life’s unpredictable
turns, Louv said. Since his book came out, things have gotten worse.
“The average young American now spends practically every minute —
except for the time in school – using a smartphone, computer, television
or electronic device,” my colleague Tamar Lewin
reported in 2010, from a Kaiser Family Foundation study.
You can blame technology, but behind every screen-dominant upbringing
is an overly cautious parent. Understandably, we want to protect our
kids from “out there” variables. But it’s better not just to play in
dirt, but to eat it.
Studies show exposure to the randomness of nature may actually boost the immune system.
Nature may eventually come to those who shun it, and not in a pretty
way. We stay indoors. We burn fossil fuels. The CO2 buildup adds to
global warming. Suburbs of Denver are aflame this week, and much of the
United States is getting ready for the tantrums of hurricane and
tornado season, boosted by atmospheric instability.
Last week, an Australian mountaineer named Lincoln Hall died at the
age of 56, and in the drama of that life cut short is a parable of
sorts. Hall is best known for surviving a night at more than 28,000 feet
on Mount Everest, in 2006. He’d become disoriented near the summit,
and couldn’t move — to the peril of his sherpas. They left him for dead.
And Hall’s death was announced to his family.
But the next day, a group of climbers found Hall sitting up, jacket
unzipped, mumbling, badly frostbitten — but alive. He later wrote a
book, “Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest.”
Still, having survived perhaps the most inhospitable, dangerous and life-killing perch on the planet,
Hall died in middle age of a human-caused malady from urban life — mesothelioma, attributed to childhood exposure to asbestos.
Various groups, from the outdoor co-op REI to the Trust for Public
Land, have have been working to ensure that kids have more contact with
the alpine world than one lined with asbestos. And they don’t even have
to haul children off to a distant mountain to get some benefit. An
urban park would do.
This week, Michelle Obama appeared in the glow of spring’s optimism
to kick off the fourth year of the White House Kitchen Garden, a
component of her campaign to curb childhood obesity. If she is
successful, it will be because people learned by their own initiative —
perhaps at her prompting. A worm at work can be a wonderful discovery
if you’ve never seen one outside of a flat-screen. But so are
endorphins, the narcotic byproduct of exercise.
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. The First
Lady supplied her own variation on the theme, with two powerful words
that can go a long way to battling nature deficit disorder: “Let’s
plant!”
