Few today would question the notion that every person — especially every young person — has a right to access to the Internet, through a school district, a library, a city’s public Wi-Fi program. We accept the idea that the “digital divide” between the digital haves and the digital have-nots must be closed. But do we have a right to a walk in the woods? The answer to that question is yes, if we can agree that the right at issue is fundamental to our humanity, to our being.
Science sheds light on the measurable consequences of introducing children to nature; studies point to health and cognition benefits that are immediate and concrete. But there is also a moral argument to be made, one based on science but also on what we know to be true.
In our time, the eco-theologian Thomas Berry has presented this inseparability most eloquently. Berry incorporated E.O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis (that our attraction to and need for the natural world is part of our genetic code) within a wider, cosmological context. Berry wrote: “The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral Earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.”
Speaking of absolutes may make us uncomfortable, but surely this is true: As a society, we need to give nature back to our children and ourselves. Not doing so is immoral. It is unethical. “A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans,” Berry wrote. “If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress.” We can care for nature and ourselves only if we see ourselves and nature as inseparable, only if we love ourselves as part of nature, only if we believe that human beings have a right to the gifts of nature, undestroyed.
Richard Louv is the author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Atlantic Books) www.richardlouv.com
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