I’ve been reading a lot lately about “nature-deficit disorder.” I guess this is a result of Richard Louv’s recent book Last Child in the Woods, where he coined this term to describe the human costs of alienation from nature. According to Louv, the proliferation of structured activities (homework and sports), fear of “stranger danger,” and video games keep children from playing outside in nature. Lots of these same young people can tell you all about the destruction of the Amazon rainforests and which species are endangered, but they don’t know much of anything about the bugs and birds in their own backyard.

I agree with Louv when he says that children need time to bond with nature on their own terms, time to play without any necessary goal beyond following their curiosity. But I would go even further and say that all of us — adults as well as kids — need time in wild settings, time to rejuvenate, time to experience amazement and discovery. We all need unstructured time to unwind, to play, to find calm in our frantic world. And nature may be the best place for these activities.

There seem to be two sides to the nature-deficit coin. One side is the amazement of discovering what nature affords us. When my sister Amy and I talked recently (see Sister Talk if you want to know more about her), I started out our discussion of “nature-deficit disorder” by telling a story about Line, the Danish exchange daughter who lived with us for a semester about ten years ago. (You can hear this story and the next, plus Amy’s responses on YouTube and here).

Line hadn’t been in our home very long when she came running to me and excitedly told about a bird she’d just seen. In fact, she wasn’t if it was a bird, because it didn’t fly like any she’d ever seen; it hovered at our back window, drinking red-colored sugar water from our feeder. She continued to describe it by telling me about its irridescent green feathers and its wings, which looked blurry, because they moved so quickly. I’m sure you know by now — as I did — that she was describing her first hummingbird sighting. She was thrilled to see this bird, especially since hummingbirds don’t make their homes in Europe. They’re a New World bird. But Line had spent lots of time in nature while in Scandinavia, so this new bird delighted her.

The other side of the “nature-deficit” coin is what we lose when nature becomes foreign to us. I illustrated this with another story, about a neighborhood friend of my daughter Linnea’s, a kid I’ll call Kate. Among Linnea’s friends, Kate was probably the one who spent the most time outdoors. She played soccer, ice hockey, and other sports, as well as hiking, biking, and camping out in Wisconsin and even on the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. She was what we used to call a “Tomboy.” While Kate and Linnea were growing up, we lived in a neighborhood bordered by an undeveloped area in Madison, albeit one only accessible by climbing over a (mostly unused) railroad track. As a result, we saw lots of birds and animals, more than you would usually find in an urban or suburban locale. Our entire family loved spotting birds and animals (if you’ve read my other posts, you know this is still true for me).

One day Kate came to visit and we sat talking at our kitchen table. Knowing that I loved birds, she asked me what was hopping around on the back lawn. Glancing out our back window, I thought she must be joking, but she continued to ask until I finally told her it was a robin! Imagine my surprise when she said, “Hmmm, so that’s what a robin looks like.”

Even kids like Kate — who don’t fall into the sedentary lifestyle of many youth today — lose a lot by not connecting with nature. When I asked Amy about this, she agreed. Non-structured play in nature opens up our imaginations, she asserted. We realize that nature is not under our control, that it’s unpredictable, free. Why else would we call it wild?! And discovering that wild-ness is good for our spirits. It connects us with our own wildness, with our instincts and our creativity.

Amy added that her interest in wildlife really expanded when she finally owned a good pair of binoculars. This gave her a new window on the world, through which she could finally see birds (and other animals) in great detail. With her new eyes, she recognized the beauty of all birds. It was no longer just the brightly-colored varieties that she noticed, but even the small, brown species with their tiny feathers arrayed in speckles and stripes. Maybe all Kate needed as a kid was a close-up view of that robin, something she finally got from my back window.