| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
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aggressive logging in the national forests and proposed drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Thus despite the fact that farmers now make up less than 2 percent of the nation’s workforce, the Golden Era of agricultural and conservation is perhaps more relevant today than at any time in our nation’s history. Just how country we are as a nation and what exactly country means shed light on our actions at home and abroad.
The Progressive Era reasserts itself, too, in contemporary pop culture, most especially in our popular concern for, and delight in, nature. Richard’s Louv’s surprise 2005 bestseller, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder resurrects, Lazarus-like, the nature study agendas long-ago championed by the contributors to this volume: Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Burroughs, Kenyon L. Butterfield, H. W. Foght, John Muir, Edward Payson Powell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dallas Lore Sharp, among others. And just as Progressive Era social scientist Kenyon L. Butterfield proposed heading off delinquency and depravity among boys and girls via garden clubs and city farming, so our era relentlessly catalogues the deficiencies of children by measuring them against cotemporary notions of naturalness. Cultural observers decry the estimated 16 percent of U.S. children that are obese9 and the thirty-nine hours per week the Kaiser Family Foundation reports Americans aged eight to eighteen spend with television, computers, and video games.10 Studies undertaken with new zeal find that children who play on natural playgrounds are more likely to make up their own games and be more cooperative than those who play on man-made equipment. And recent work from the University of Illinois shows that exposure to nature may effectively reduce attention deficit disorders in children.11 Moreover,
9 Colleen Long, “Journalist Says Kids Suffer from ‘Nature-Deficit Disorder,’” Associated Press State and Local Wire, July 13, 2005, LexisNexis.
10 Leslie Brody, “Take a Hike; Reintroducing Kids to Nature Becomes a Crusade,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), A01, June 8, 2006, LexisNexis.
11 Julie Deardorff, “Nature Deficit Sends Kids Down a Desolate Path,” Herald News (Passaid County, NJ), B04, February 28, 2006, Knight Ridder News Service.