Louv loves the outdoors, dislikes hunting
After listening to an interview with Richard Louv on NPR one day, I was excited to read his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder.
There’s nothing about being a hunter that requires me to encourage others to hunt. Nor was it incumbent upon Richard Louv to include hunting as a way of bringing kids closer to nature. Still, I was a bit surprised by his treatment of the topic, and the queasy tone that crept into his prose, at the first mention of our popular American pastime.
“For reasons that have more to do with emotion than reason,” Louv writes, “I don’t hunt, nor do I encourage my boys to hunt—and they are appalled at the idea that others hunt. I acknowledge that there is a slim moral logic dividing hunting and fishing.”
What he knows, but leaves out, is the fact that most people eat meat, but don’t hunt. Likewise, most people have feelings toward mammals “that have more to do with emotion than reason.” Yet Louv aims to awaken awareness in people by helping them develop emotional connections to the outdoors.
Would Louv also agree then that non-hunting meat-eaters, including himself, who cannot bear to face the emotional reality of their role as animal killers, are possibly, to use a pop-clinical phrase, “on the spectrum” of Nature-Deficit Disorder, the insidious effects of which they are warning us about?
When he wants to get really close to animals Louv is “ …prejudiced in favor of fishing as a way for children and adults to experience something beyond the voyeurism that sometimes passes for nature experience.” He might not want to get his hands bloody, but Louv doesn’t mind getting them slimy, even though fishing is a “. . . controversial topic to some people, but others see it as one way to introduce their children to ethical questions about conservation, our relationship with other animals, and life and death.”
Actually, fishing, while it might be a great way to get kids outside, is a terrible way to introduce children to “ethical questions about conservation,” because the ethical implications of killing fish are downplayed in ours and most societies to a larger extent than the ethics of killing mammals. Which, of course, provides an easier path for Louv to take en route to his endorsement of fishing, over hunting. And even with Louv’s inclusion of fishing as a great way to experience nature, he notes that, “that fish should be caught and, most of the time, released.”
To ensure us he hasn’t formed his beliefs in some kind of feel-good, hippie vacuum, he brings in his polar opposite pal, Nick, who “believes that violence is inevitable, that suffering is redemptive, and that a father must teach his children about the harshness of life by exposing them to that harshness.” Louv would have nothing of such savagery, and feels “It’s my job to protect my sons from the brutality of the world for as long as I can.” Then, quoting from another one of his own books, The Web of Life, Louv recounts the traumatic experience of Nick’s little girl, who came home to find her favorite goat skinned, quartered and strung up in family barn. “She knew from that moment on, and will for the rest of her life, where the meat that she eats comes from, and that meat is not born plastic-wrapped. This is not the kind of experience I would have wanted for my children, but I have had a different life.”
Keep in mind, Louv is not a vegetarian, and makes no effort to criticize the meat industry yet, for some reason, has a problem with his daughter finding out that the meat she eats “is not born plastic-wrapped.” Where are we supposed to go from here?
Paul Shepard is all about the psychology of nature, and the nature of the hunter's mind
I turned directly to Paul Shepard, an influential voice and pioneer in the field of “eco-psychology.” His 1972 book, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game is a brilliant analysis of the role of the modern hunter, and a reaction to mankind’s separation from the natural and visceral. “Squeamishness about taking creatures apart,” he says, “so often encountered among today’s youth, is a measure of the extent to which parents and society try to isolate themselves and their children from life . . . The claim that they are sensitive or that they are passionately devoted to the living whole animal is a self-deception masking fear.”
The more one reads Shepard, the less truth one can find among Louv’s ideas. How can he say he wants his kids to understand the natural world, much less develop their imagination, if he shields them from the gore? What can we make of Louv’s earlier insistence that, “ . . . we require fully activated senses in order to feel fully alive.”?
Do the acts of patiently waiting for, killing, and cutting up an animal not activate the senses to a sufficient degree? Shepard has an answer: “When approached with an appropriate sense of wonder and discovery, of gratitude to and respect for the dead creature, dissection of hunted game is an excursion into new terrain—and therefore into new realms of the mind. It is appropriate, moreover, that the organism be eaten (if edible) after dissection. Assimilation is a suitable expression of love.”
I’m not saying Louv should have changed the subject of his book, or even that I’d respect him more had he suggested it might be OK as long as one eats what one kills. Because that’s not was Paul Shepard is saying.
Louv denies not only that hunting is a great way to spend time outdoors, but that that killing our own food makes us think harder about the food we buy at the grocery store. As environmentalists focus more and more on meat production as a huge factor in climate change, the connection between our ecosystem, and our diet becomes more important to average Americans. Simply being in the woods, for any reason, gives a child the chance to develop the very kind of abstract imagination Louv tries to instill in his own kids, but which he denies can be achieved by taking them hunting.
“The childhood training of hunters,” Shepard says, “is not so much practical training as the opening of spiritual doors by leisured and generous people. Nothing that men do comes so close to fulfilling the promise that the imagination builds in youth as hunting.”
Louv’s omission of hunting is, in a way, easy to understand. Not very many Americans hunt, anymore. Numbers have been steadily declining for a couple of decades, and Louv knows that the subject of chasing and killing animals for fun or food is a high-voltage wire running down the middle of two potential markets for his book—hunting conservationists and non-hunting environmentalists. To take sides on the matter would surely cost Louv fans in one of the two camps.
Louv spends considerable time talking about how modern man has come to “hyperintellectualize” animals by looking at them through a scientific lens. The result for Louv though, is the converse of what we have come to expect to hear from scientists, that animals are actually so much like humans that we need to maybe treat them more as humans. He apparently doesn’t want to admit that he himself is a product of the same culture that he criticizes for taking an unrealistic view of animals. He anthropomorphizes animals to the extent that his own emotions are affected in the exact opposite way he is suggesting they are. That is, rather than crediting the science of biological wildlife management for making hunting a legitimate American past time, he credits science for discovering things like whale communication which, for him, is an obvious sign that animals are more like us than we ever thought, and that we should think twice about killing them.
The pages of Louv’s book are void any discussion about conservation groups made up primarily of hunters, such as Ducks Unlimited, or the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. He does a lot of whining about how liberal environmental groups are so anti-population-growth, that they can’t bear the thought of you even having a kid, let alone sending the child outdoors for some unsupervised mischief. He gives a single, short paragraph to the Sierra Club’s Inner City Outings program, which gives urban kids a chance to get into the woods. He doesn’t mention the successful hunting and fishing Sportskids campaign, operated by Sierra Sportsmen, a Sierra Club sanctioned offshoot.
The author loved tree houses as a child, and it's a huge reason he wrote this book
Louv loves talking about tree houses, which work great as a metaphor about imagination in the wilderness, and a real summer project every kid should take on, for the betterment of the soul. Clearly, he wants children to understand that the power of human genius is a power of great responsibility, that must be controlled for the sake of the potential impact we might have.
He’s also suggesting, however sheepishly, that people can modify their environment in ways that can be fun, and don’t cause any harm. But he never really puts it that way. It’s more like he’s saying, nail up as many boards in the woods as you want (which can be fatal to trees), but just don’t kill anything or ride loud, smelly four-wheelers through the woods.
Louv is clearly conflicted about some issues related to his Nature Deficit Disorder theory. For example, instead of simply being upset about the fact that parents are more infrequently taking their kids out to the woods to do fun things, Louv complains that “young people who try to recreate their parent’s childhoods may face misdemeanor charges or see their parents sued.” Why? Because “public government restricts children’s access to nature,” by making it illegal to go around nailing up boards to build tree houses. Boo-hoo.
As a child, I was able to evade those public government restrictions and have my own character-building tree house experience. True, I did have to break a rule or two, specifically the well-reasoned law against nailing boards to trees on National Forest property. And it wasn’t exactly a tree house I built, so much as a lofty, strategic vantage point along a well-used deer trail, from which I had hoped to arrow an unsuspecting whitetail the following Autumn.
Sure, I could have just purchased an aluminum tree stand to put up, sparing the white oak permanent damage from my nails, but like Richard Louv must have thought back in the fifties when he built his tree house, all the measuring and sawing and pounding just seemed more fun. I never ended up shooting a deer from that stand, but I know many guys have killed deer from it, and the stand itself has undergone repairs and improvements over the years by others who recognize that someone had chosen a great ambush spot. If only they knew that the friend I built the stand with was a vegetarian who was opposed to hunting! He still had fun building it, though.
Louv addresses the impact of building a tree house, comparing it to ATV activity, which “drowns the senses in noise and fumes, and leaves tracks that will last thousands of years.” But the difference between that and building a tree house which, he believes, is a better way of “experiencing joy in nature [which] excites the senses,” is “one of degree.” How can this be? Declaring that you think building a tree house is more fun than riding a four wheeler is not a spectrum of fun. It’s a spectrum of opinion. And to even make your sensual excitement the primary reasoning for building a tree house to begin with, is stupid.
One of Louv’s most startling oversights comes when he tries to simplify the effects of modern, “de-naturing” activities like watching TV, messing around on the computer, and otherwise remaining disconnected from the outdoors and thus, our senses. But for Louv, the good old days were only about sixty years ago when many Americans still lived a wholesome, agrarian lifestyle, celebrating ecological harmony by sowing seeds and reaping the bounty that water, sunshine and hard work provided. He lumps together the ostensibly earth-wise virtues of pre-agrarian, hunter/gatherers with those of the livestock and crop farmers, simply because both types of people work a lot outdoors.
Just because you get up early to milk the cows and bail the hay doesn’t mean you have a more important, respectful, or even symbiotic connection to the earth than someone else. It just means you live on a farm, and that you rely on a synthesis of ingenuity and natural processes to pay the mortgage.
From this perspective, farming is a far cry from the freedom of nomadic bands of hunter/gatherers, and more resembles a situation of pastoral bondage from which the only escape is through the accumulation of additional land and/or the procurement of slave labor, or a John Deere combine. Only then do the conditions become right for Louv’s theoretical farm kids to explore their world in earnest, “Their unregimented play . . . steeped in nature.”
The two lifestyles are as different from one another as cavemen were from Renaissance poets. We don’t even know enough about early humans to say how much they hunted, how much they gathered, or the exact roles men, women and children played in those efforts. Regrettably, Louv misses the fact that not only are hunter/gatherers separated from farmers by thousands of years of unrecorded history, but that farming itself was the beginning of man’s separation from the earth, the start of the very sense-deadening boredom that he doesn’t see any evidence for until the advent of The Dukes of Hazard, and Facebook.
His fatal underlying assumption is articulated late in the book, when he wonders, “What message will the students take home about human involvement in nature? Will they learn that humans have always shaped nature in order to sustain it, in order to survive?”
He’s already made it known that, research-wise, he suffers from ADD, or Anthropology Deficit Disorder, but he should at least realize that the whole reason nomadic, prehistoric man is considered the model of sustainability is precisely because they avoided shaping nature. They didn’t feel the need to build a tree house.