A governor in his natural state

In 2005, Richard Louv published a 300-page book called “Last Child in the Woods,” that urges kids to go out and play. He wants them to appreciate and benefit from nature, a fine idea. Still, 300 pages on an impulse as natural as a sneeze, and now Gov. John Baldacci wants to turn Louv’s ideas into a state issue.

Baldacci’s press conference this week to announce the related new program “Take It Outside!” (officials use exclamation marks to suggest excitement when it doesn’t exist) coincided with an evacuation of 66 Girl Scouts camping at Baxter State Park, who had taken it outside and then took it back inside once it was believed a “suspicious” man may have been in the area. Scouts had the option of going home or to another camp.

I understand and sympathize with the Scout leaders, and I don’t have their liability worries. Ten years ago, for instance, I installed a deadbolt high up on the back door of our house because our older son, then 2, would dash for the door and, beyond that, nature whenever he could. Between him and nature was a set of steps he wasn’t especially good at navigating and what with endless dangers his parents imagined awaited him were he to make it outside alone – grizzlies, puma, assorted pestilence, cement trucks that had lost their brakes and were careening at that very moment through our yard – my wife and I kept that door locked for quite a while. Now he’s 12 and has a brother so we don’t care anymore.

The point of “Last Child in the Woods” is to clear away the barriers to the kind of unstructured and unsupervised play that children once did without a second thought – climbing trees, collecting bugs, chasing butterflies and generally rubbing their noses in nature without being part of an enrichment program that requires a thoughtful essay on what they have just experienced. Louv concedes early in his book that he lacks data on how much less time children spend playing in the woods or along a stream compared with 30 years ago, but he builds a persuasive case that the change has occurred and that it is detrimental.

To build his case, he reaches deep into how Americans live, and finds a turning away from nature because of time, fear, distractions, suburbs and exurbs, regulations and expectations. His observations about parental anxiety, in particular, are well worth considering. “Fear,” he says, “is the most potent force that prevents parents from allowing their children the freedom they themselves enjoyed when they were young.”

The governor, freshly back from climbing Mount Katahdin (though not, as far as I know, the suspicious man of Girl Scout nightmares) believes state intervention is needed. He not only has asked state agencies to look over what they might do to help encourage children to have a greater connection with nature, but he is also planning a Blaine House Conference on Youth and the Natural World. He gives the impression that he’d like to have the problem solved by next spring. But just helping adults over an unjustified fear of letting their children play outdoors would be quite an accomplishment.

Some fun facts to move the cause along: Louv quotes a researcher named Joel Best, who looked into the countless stories parents have passed on to their children about the dangers of eating uninspected Halloween candy – the razor blades, pins, drugs and other hazards. Best chased down 76 specific stories spanning 26 years, and concludes, “We couldn’t find a single case of any child killed or seriously injured by candy contamination,” he said. “The Halloween sadist is an urban myth.”

So too is the widespread fear of child-snatching, according to Louv, who says that at the fear’s height, missing-children organizations were claiming that 4,000 kids a year were being killed by strangers during abductions. Louv cites research that shows the total number of abductions (not killings) regularly is between 200 and 300 a year, and most of the people doing the abducting are not strangers but family members or someone familiar.

There’s more in the book, but this argument is not going to be won by knocking down one fear at a time; there are just too many of them, and the Internet provides an unhealthy resupply to keep parents continuously nervous. Even the local playground serves as the frontline for the contagious anxiety of conspicuous parental hovering, where only bad parents stand far enough back to risk their child scraping a knee now and then.

Scabby knees are part of nature too, of course, and the governor is going to hear about those and more if he goes beyond the locked door and into the fears that lead parents to keep children from exploring the world.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. Readers may contact him at tbenoit@bangordailynews.net.