Natural Ammenities

I read a column today that really struck a chord with me. In it, Nicholas Kristof points out the value his family places on interacting with nature, and then posits that the current generation is increasingly not exposed to the natural world at all.

Such time in the wilderness is part of our family’s summer ritual, a time to hit the “reset” switch and escape deadlines and BlackBerrys. We spend the time fretting instead about blisters, river crossings and rain, and the experiences offer us lessons on inner peace and life’s meaning — cheap and effective therapy, without the couch.

All this comes to mind because for most of us in the industrialized world, nature is a rarer and rarer part of our lives. Children for 1,000 generations grew up exploring fields, itching with poison oak and discovering the hard way what a wasp nest looks like. That’s no longer true.

Paul, a fourth grader in San Diego, put it this way: “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Paul was quoted in a thoughtful book by Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods,” that argued that baby boomers “may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.”

Only 2 percent of American households now live on farms, compared with 40 percent in 1900. Suburban childhood that once meant catching snakes in fields now means sanitized video play dates scheduled a week in advance. One study of three generations of 9-year-olds found that by 1990 the radius from the house in which they were allowed to roam freely was only one-ninth as great as it had been in 1970.

A British study found that children could more easily identify Japanese cartoon characters like Pikachu, Metapod and Wigglytuff than they could native animals and plants, like otter, oak and beetle.

Mr. Louv calls this “nature deficit disorder,” and he links it to increases in depression, obesity and attention deficit disorder. I don’t know about all that, although his book does cite a study indicating that watching fish lowers blood pressure significantly. (That’s how to cut health costs: hand out goldfish instead of heart medicine!)

I’d like to point out the irony that Kristof only vaguely seems to notice. The suburbs were originally dreamed of as an idyllic mix of urban access and rural life – a place where you could enjoy the income of work in the city while living close to nature. The irony is that as more and more low density development has spread out from our cities it’s now difficult to even decide where the countryside begins. The neighborhoods that offered access to nature fifty or sixty years ago are now usually surrounded by thirty or fourty miles of continuous urbanity.

There are a lot of reasons to value preserving nature – but for the ardent capitalist I offer this last one as the most relevant for Houston. This city experiences significant seasonal flooding. We could mitigate a lot of that by better protecting our waterways. Why don’t we treat every waterway as a natural corridor – a preserve that provides both a recreational ammenity, an uplifting environment, and flood management?

We have a great example of what a win-win this can be running due west out of Downtown. Buffalo Bayou has a wide, undeveloped park along its banks, and two excellent parkways providing significant mobility on either side of it. If we had developed all of the Bayous in this manner we would have better flood management, a better transportation system, a truly unique natural ammenity for our citizens, and – if Mr. Louv’s theory is correct – a healthier generation of children in Houston.

These kind of issues are where certain, specific forms of planning are most useful. It’s not possible to buy up all the land flanking every Bayou and build scenic parkways on both sides all at once. It is possible, however, to have a vision and use the City’s ordinances to ensure that the City grows towards the vision. Keep these kinds of opportunities in mind the next time the discussion of the merits of Comprehensive Planning in Houston comes up.