Straight from Wikipedia:Nature Deficit Disorder, a term coined by Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, refers to the alleged trend[1] that children are spending less time
outdoors,resulting in a wide range of behavioral problems.
I don't know if anyone has studied the impact of a lack of interaction with the natural world on adults, but I have experienced them first hand. Philadelphia is assuredly not the least green city in the world. The historic parts of town have a fair number of trees, and residents have planted cute little window boxes of flowers and greenery. William Penn built some nice parks & a parkway into his master plan for the "faire greene towne" (t
hough only a couple of them survive today). And it does boast the largest park within a U.S. city limits (Fairmount Park). Every once in awhile you run across a "pocket park," where a house fell down & someone was kind enough to turn the empty lot into a little open space with playground toys and benches. But the weather just plain sucks, inhibiting the frequency & quality of interaction with nature, and most of these spaces are quite manufactured, not truly "natural." So in our 3 years there, I can definitely say we had fewer and lamer conversations with mother nature.
I firmly believe that we both became crankier and more "half full" people than we used to be. We took
to drinking coffee almost daily, after 45 years of not even enjoying the bean. I also saw how other residents felt and behaved, and compared it to other places I've lived. There's less respect for the earth, the environment, and the few wild places left. There's a lack of awareness of how our own actions connect to those things. I lived on a street where everyone was of above average income & education, yet several of the families didn't even bother to do simple recycling - they generated more trash each week than we did in a month.
The good news is that NDD is curable. I felt it slipping away even as we were driving through the hills of Western PA. The waves and breezes on Lake Michigan blew more of it away. The rolling farmlands in Minnesota soothed the ragged edges. I slipped into an agricultural coma driving across South Dakota - cornfield, soybeans, wheat, corn, corn, corn, soybeans, corn, wheat, more corn ... zzzzzzz
They we got to Rapid City, turned left, and within minutes (after fighting its suburban rush hour traffic for oh, maybe 4 minutes) we were looking at hills and pine trees again. I opened the sunroof and smelled something familiar. Wow, it smelled just like Colorado! My heart lifted instantly. At that moment, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were going in the right direction.
We stopped in a kitschy little tourist trap of Keystone so we could see Mt. Rushmore
for the first time. While certainly impressive, it's again man-made. It's natural setting is incredible so it still felt good. The next morning we drove through Custer State Park, the breathtaking beauty of which is surprisingly underpublicized. The wildlife and landscapes served to confirm the feelings of the day before, and say "Welcome home."
