Richard Louv, _Last Child in the Woods_

Subtitle: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

Louv is a boomer.

Louv grew up in Kansas, but lived and raised his children in San Diego.

Louv would like to see the cities depopulate and return to spread out across the land (Usonian style?) in small, human scale villages in the prairie.

Louv wants a world in which children can build tree houses. His own experience is his prime referent for this: contractors who let him take 2 X 4s from building lots. And 4 x 8 sheets of plywood.

Louv thinks that arguments based on God's Creation will be more effective in convincing people to return to nature than utilitarian arguments.

What is that, five strikes? You might reasonably ask, why, dear, did you finish this book? Good question. I almost didn't. I bought it in June 2005, before the birth of my first child. I had grown up constantly being kicked out of the house to "play outside", but was extremely limited in where I could go outside, when, and what I could do. Needless to say, pretty dull. My two preferred out of the house activities were the playhouse (back inside) and the swingset (in retrospect, easy to argue that was stimming). We also rode our bikes, initially up and down the street (dead end), then in circles just outside our house and up and down the driveway, and then around the house. The increasing limitations (backwards, much?) was an artifact of restrictions in the wake of incidents (bullying at the end of the street, cars turning onto the street, us hitting those cars riding down the driveway). Dumb parenting, in other words. I remember going camping once with cousins, and riding down a river with rapids in an inflatable raft with my uncle. Fun! Altho, wow, he took some risks, almost as bad as the time another uncle took me out on the back of his motorcycle. My mother's brothers were nuts and I apparently had no fear. Again, Never Again after those incidents.

Despite all that, I (re)discovered hiking and camping and hanging out outdoors as an adult and didn't want my kid missing out on 20-30 years of Playtime Outside because I was screwing up as a witless parent.

Louv provides no assistance here. He thinks taking a cell phone someplace will help keep kids safe and that they should have one with them 24/7 (but that those GPS leashes are ridiculous). If you do get into trouble and rely on a cell phone (but don't have GPS, and in the days he was sending his kids out, they didn't), good freaking luck communicating to 911 service where you are. This particular strategy was roundly mocked in the 2 week WFR course I took -- based on how that turned out for people who got into trouble.

Louv's definition of nature is so slippery it makes Kuhn's use of the word paradigm in _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ look like something S.I. Hayakawa would look on with approval. It seems to include the following:

no adult supervision
not within adult-built structures
no structured games (like soccer -- I wonder if he knows about orienteering?)
hunting and fishing are definitely nature activities, altho he recognizes some issues there
cutting down trees is definitely a nature activity, somewhat ditto

He's really enamored of the idea of a frontier, and of going back to the land, and he seems to loathe cities and want to de-densify them (increase open space, whether parks, vacant lots, etc.), get animals back into them, make them look like open plains, get people out of them, etc. He's perfectly happy to use bankrupt studies from Brookings to try to convince the reader that metropolitan regions in the West are denser than Eastern metropolitan regions. Which, if you choose "region" correctly, may well be true, but isn't particularly useful.

This is a lot of negatives, so it isn't very surprising that he's having a hard time coming up with a specific, detailed and compelling program for Reconnecting Kids with Nature, altho he seems to think that scaring parents that their kids are ADD because of lack of connection to nature will somehow motivate their parents to become avid birders and that will somehow fix the problem. Interestingly, he is contemptuous of walking on trails and just looking at stuff.

Wow.

I should have liked this book. I liked the topic. He's spoken to some interesting people. If he'd paid more attention to his research, he might have come up with some stuff like this:

Kids can't drive, but they can walk or ride bikes or other non-powered vehicles like scooters, if there is a safe place for them to do so and destinations of interest to them. We should design our residential areas to support kids walking/riding to places that are interesting to them, including skateparks, appropriate trails for walking, appropriate trails for mountain biking, places to swim/wade/waterplay in the summer, skate or sled in the winter, etc. They should be shaded (if it is hot). They should be protected from wind if that is a problem. They should support spending many hours (picnic tables, food vendors, drinking fountains, public restrooms) within an easy walk of activity areas. Do that, and it won't be all about the ball field and the playset any more. If you go a bit further, and make sure there's ample native vegetation, there will even be little birds and animals scattered about. As for his comment about suburbia being impenetrable to nature, I'll just mention the robins that hatched out of the tree next to our front door (which we use), and the baby bunny I saw run into a bush on the side of Lothrop near where it intersects with Spencer. It's not just squirrels, chipmunks and crows around here.

Large parks with a lot of places for kids to hide are hugely dangerous. The first half of the book, where he talks to people about their memories of childhood, sounds horrifyingly risky. The second half of the book, where he talks about how he raised his kids, sounds bizarrely overprotective. It's not clear this guy grasps where danger is and how it can be managed. If he _did_ grasp where danger is, and how it can be managed, he would have suggested park monitors, so parents would not have to accompany their are-they-old-enough-yet kids to the park (which age seems to have crept up to, oh, gosh, they have a license, can't control them now, can I).

Finally, and I apologize for hammering on this, but I'm a dog with a bone on this. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE SIDEWALKS. Drive through a large, spread out subdivision in Anycity, USA. Sidewalks galore. That end at the end of the subdivision. They are suitable only for strollers and accompanied kids on ride on toys, trikes, etc. If you are close to places you want to go, sidewalks will follow. If you are not close to places you want to go, sidewalks will not help you get there. Period. End. See earlier posts about Dutch trip length.

Oh, and one more thing: public bicycles are an appealing idea, but fundamentally not a good one. It is incomprehensible to me that in a world where there are more cars than there are people who can legally drive (never mind safely), and where you can get a bike from WallyWorld online for under a hundred bucks, that people think bikes should be provided for free. Free bikes will not solve this, any more than sidewalks will. You have to live _close_ to what you are going to do.

And then we can lobby for separated lanes, because it'll be obvious to everyone that the multi-use thing (whether a multi-use trail, or a sidewalk and car lane both doing double or triple duty) is not working.

ETA: In any event, Louv is not relevant, given the increasing numbers of young'uns who, in response to Michael Pollan's books and others, are doing internships on small organic farms, either as a break, or as a way to contemplate starting their own. Louv's assertion of the end of contact with nature doesn't make a lot of sense in this world, and that is hardly surprising. Judging by the apparent content of America II and its timing, Louv is _really good_ at chiming in at the tail end of a trend, and extrapolating it exactly the wrong way into the future.

Community

A variety of activist types out there rail against people in their sealed up cars and how that damages community, and how sitting on the porch, walking, etc. is good for community because people interact. This is not wholly true, because there are people who drive slowly with their windows open and are willing to stop and idle to chat (and in the subdivision roads around here, that seems to happen a lot, altho that may be because of what T. and I are doing).

But it is mostly true.

However, there are other cyclists, who you would think would be like the walkers, gardeners, porch-sitters, etc. The kids on bikes are a little leery of talking to stranger adults, so I don't try -- I just wave and if they want to start a conversation, I'll respond, but I don't push it. The adults on bikes with kids (on a trail-a-bike, or accompanying a trike or whatever) are also fine -- if you pace them, you can chat as long as you want to. The adults on bikes in spandex, however, do not so much as respond to a hello and a wave clearly directed at them. They do slow down (because T. is not totally predictable, this is the correct thing to do), and I do thank them. They give me a blank or angry look and continue on. R. thinks this is just because on a bicycle, you can easily get into a identify threat deal with threat identify threat deal with threat etc. mode.

I would just like to note, however, that that's kinda bad from a community perspective. In fact, the only thing less bad about this than the people in the sealed up cars is that the cars weigh a lot more and can, basic physics, do more damage to us without taking damage in return (unfair hunting, in other words).

Bike Shop Websites

In Which I Complain About People Who Are Trying to Be Helpful

My regular readers know I have Issues. Lately, I've been talking about the ones involving bicycles, and cycling culture, particularly of the go-fast competitive crowd. Periodically, I think, hey, maybe I'm harshing it up on these guys a little too much. And for a while there, I was thinking I should give my LBS a chance to impress me. Googling Acton bike shop, turned up this place:

http://pedpow.com/

I'll just say upfront, I haven't been there. I didn't even call them on the phone. Part of that is because they have a very short list of lines they carry, and, to be honest, some of it is because of all the exclamation marks on their website. But I am Not That Petty. It took more than a few too many exclamation marks and not carrying any of the makers I'm interested in to stop me from calling them.

http://pedpow.com/page.cfm?pageID=61

The title of this gem is We Love Beginners! / Welcome to the Wonderful World of Cycling!

They promise a lot: " We can help you get the right equipment and ensure you enjoy it fully. We can show you how to avoid the common mistakes we made as beginners." and "What’s more, we’ve loaded this website with information about us, our products and cycling so that you may access what you need even when our store is closed."

Okay, then, let's see what they have to say about common mistakes.

http://pedpow.com/page.cfm?pageID=65

The first time I ran across this gem by Lisa Myklak, I blamed the shop. Turns out that's just not fair. Ms. Myklak probably has nothing whatsoever to do with Pedal Power Bike & Ski. She's a mountain biker and that essay gets posted at every third bike shop on the web (unscientific estimate -- might be closer to one in two).

But Pedal Power should still be held accountable for this, because I'm going to assume that they wouldn't include it if they didn't agree with her that a seat low enough to put your foot on the ground inevitably is a bad riding position (and no other considerations are relevant), riding inevitably involves copious amounts of sweating and therefore street-normal attire is inappropriate, and that not only do you really have to wear padded spandex bike shorts, you shouldn't be wearing anything else under them.

Given my goals and constraints and expectations, and their idea of cycling, I don't think these people are going to help me avoid mistakes. I think these are the kind of people who'll helpfully sell me something that won't work for me. I think I would not do business with any shop that posted that essay by Ms. Myklak, even tho I think it's kind of nice they bothered to include something written by a woman.

I've been trying recently to get the whole family out riding, all together or in various subgroups. A. is still a little young, but we've got the gear for when she's a bit older. The trick right now is trying to manage the transition for T., who is resisting riding in the seat and/or trailer and wants to ride his own bike. I keep landing at Sheldon Brown's extensive website:

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/tandkids.html

Unfortunately, Mr. Brown had his own ideas about What It Means to Cycle. I'll state up front that I agree with his assertion that a tandem is a fine idea for a kid and parent (we're planning on buying one) and then I'm off to pick pick pick.

"Adults and children can ride together on solo bikes, but it is not much fun for either. The child is likely to feel pushed and overworked; the adult will want to go farther and faster than the child, and get tired of waiting up.

An adult cyclist will find that a 10 mile ride at 6 miles per hour with a child is harder than a 30 mile ride at 18 miles per hour, even though both take the same amount of "saddle time". The the slow pace will cause less of the adult's weight to be borne by the legs, and more by their tush and hands. Although the slow, short ride is easy on the legs and lungs, it is more likely to cause saddle sores, sore wrists, hands and necks to the adult members of the group."

First off, I'll absolutely attest to the idea that a slow, highly interrupted ride with a little guy is pretty exhausting! The panic attacks when a teenage driver approaches. Worrying about whether to ask T. to stop to let the pre-adolescent boys go by, knowing they're going to turn around and come back and we'll have to do this again and again and the more I make T. stop the longer it lasts. Trying to avoid ditching the bike when T. cuts across in front of me unexpectedly. Again.

However, with the correct bike, it's not tiring or injury-inducing in the way Mr. Brown says it is. You need a cushy saddle and an upright riding position that takes the weight off your wrists and you are in business. Unless, that is, you were on some kind of schedule and now you're late. Best of all, you'll arrive perspiration free, so you can wear whatever you like. Hopefully, something stylin'. If your seat is low to the ground and you have a slack tube or a crank forward bike, you can put a foot down and just hang whenever things are going a little too slowly to continue pedaling. Or when T. has decided to go check out another driveway.

I won't quibble with Mr. Brown's remarks about the relative endurance of adults and children, other than to note that he's completely wrong. I will, however, quibble with this:

"Children lack the experience to know their own limits. They may start out like gangbusters, leaving the adults in the dust, until they suddenly bonk, and it becomes painfully difficult for them to keep up any kind of speed at all. At this point, you may have to call for a sag wagon."

Tough to know about the knowing their own limits. I know plenty of adults who screw up there, and plenty of kids who know when to take it easy. The real problem in this scenario is the adult who is all goal oriented, go fast, get through 30 miles, blah blah bleeping blah. Family cyclists do recognize that kids will often decide enough is enough and stop (or won't want to go home); one of the rationales for the Xtracycle is the TrayBien, which lets you drag the kids bike along while they ride on a PeaPod or just on the back rack. Henry has a lovely picture of a WorkCycles Fr8 with a loopfiets and its rider both sitting on the front rack.

The remainder of the article I would leave alone, other than to note that Mr. Brown chose not to contemplate giving that poor kid a freewheel to coast on while the adult is Going Places and Pedaling Like Mad, except for this bit:

"Even the youngest stokid's pedals should be equipped with toe-clips (or clipless pedals), even for stokers who don't use toe-clips for solo riding. Since the stoker can get clipped in before the bike starts up, it is very easy for even very young children to use them. Toe clips improve the child's ability to spin, and also keep the child more securely attached to the bike.

If the child looses contact with the pedals while the adult continues pedaling, the whirling pedals may bang up the child's feet or shins fairly badly."

So, basically, ya gotta clamp your kid into this machine. For their own good. Doncha know.

Fuck that nonsense. Get a freewheel for the stokid.