| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
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the “new day” Butterfield envisioned in 1919, coinciding with the back-to-the-country movement, has been realized in our own century. A 2003 study at Cornell University suggests that children who merely grow up with a “green view” from their window are better equipped to handle stress.12 Nature education, reports the California Department of Education, resulted in 27 percent better science scores for week-long campers than for those trapped in traditional classrooms (ibid). And yet for all their newness, these studies confirm what those who love the land have long known. Golden Age nature writer Dallas Lore Sharp said this in his book The Lay of the Land in 1908: “The best good, the deep healing, comes when one, no longer a stranger, breaks away from his getting and spending, from his thinking with men, and camps under the open sky, where he knows without thinking, and worships without priest or chant or prayer.”
Record-high national park attendance likewise affirms the American public’s subliminal understanding of nature’s balm and succor, the very affinity between humans and the natural world biologist Edward O. Wilson calls “biophilia.”13 We love nature, or the idea of nature, to death, it seems, and to such a degree that media coverage of national parks in the last decade has focused on degradation caused by overuse, over-love. In the face of record attendance in the early and mid 1990s—figures that have remained steady in the decade since14—Americans increasingly find in the popular press not coverage of the parks’ natural wonders but advice on how to avoid peak times at the five most visited national parks—Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Olympic, and Yellowstone—and, unbelievably, how to stay safe. To wit: the Associated Press’s Matthew Daly details in “Forest Service Reports Surge in Violence Against Rangers” an all-time high in “attacks, threats, and lesser fights” in the parks in 2005. In the same article, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, charged
12 ”How Heading to the Woods Can Heal a Child,” Toronto Star, A05, June 11, 2006.
13 Deardorff, “Nature Deficit Sends Kids …”
14 Richard Louv, “The End of Nature—Parcel by Parcel,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, G-3, June 1, 2003, LexisNexis.