The Geography of Childhood
Nabham, Gary Paul and Trimble, Stephen (1994).
Boston: Beacon Press; 184 pages. $22.00 (hard); $15.00 (paper). ISBN 0807085243.
The late twentieth century has benefited greatly (if not always graciously) from the publication, for general readers, of startling but eloquent books by natural scientists exposing gross environmental stupidity. Here such authors as Rachel Carson, Rene Dubos, Paul Ehrlich, and Aldo Leopold come to mind. Gary Paul Nabham and Stephen Trimble, authors of The Geography of Childhood, are highly accomplished natural scientists (the jacket identifies them as a conservation biologist and the author of an award-winning natural history, respectively) who approach a different kind of environmental crisis: children's estrangement from the natural world.
Such a subtle crisis demands subtle treatment. The seven first-person essays in The Geography of Childhood (which were not co-written; each is credited to one or the other author) are intended to be not only non-alarmist but highly subjective. Their authors aim to come across as at once meditative free spirits in the tradition of Thoreau and as scrupulously factual evidence weighers in the tradition of contemporary social science. This is indeed a challenge; let us see how Nabham and Trimble rise to meet it.
The preface promises that the authors will be sticking to what they know from direct experience and that the book is
an exchange of ideas, images, and stories between two natural historians who are finding their way as fathers while they watch their children's behavior in the wild unfold. For guidance, we look to our own childhoods, to our own children, and to children of other places and cultures with whom we have spent time.
Actually, though, intermingled with the reflections and ruminations (and with Trimble's superb photographs, which have a childlike directness) are references to many authorities on children and the environment; Children's Environments readers thus will find many familiar names in the text and in the footnotes. There is regret, even occasional anger in these authors at our increasingly synthetic environment and the vicariousness of experience, but they are often loath to express these feelings without expert corroboration.
The authors are at their best, I think, when reflecting on their own direct experience. In one especially eloquent chapter, “A Wilderness, With Cows,” we are treated to Trimble's walks and talks with children from a Nevada ranch (almost all of the book concerns the American Southwest and adjacent areas of Mexico, a region with which both authors are on intimate terms). This is no report of a journalist sticking a microphone into children's faces, but the outgrowth of a close and trusting friendship. Trimble notes the children's estrangement from wildness as they grow and absorb the purely economic concerns of their parents and grandparents, forsaking the plants and animals they loved just for their sensuous qualities, and instead reverencing commodities such as alfalfa and cows. But, Trimble asks, does it even matter? Hardly any of these children will be able to make their living off the land anyhow.
The extinction of cultures that are non-consumerist and non-saturated in media, whether of the American ranch or miraculous survivors from pre-Columbian Mexico, is a frequent theme in The Geography of Childhood and brings out some of the authors' most visceral prose. Here is Nabham on his friends in Mexico:
No wonder the Tohono O'odham tribe of southern Arizona refers to itself in English simply as 'the Desert People’; their very blood, muscles, and minds were literally made of molecules from desert seeds, desert meat, desert earth. Today, however, their molecules have nearly the same elements in them as mine: beef from Monfort's feed lots in Colorado; winter apples shipped from Puerto Montt in Chile; potatos [sic] mass-produced by a Mormon millionaire in Idaho.
Similarly arresting passages are those in which the authors draw from memory, such as Nabham's accounts of his boyhood encounters with reptiles- in which both fascination and sadism figure prominently -and Trimble's moving thoughts on the death of the beloved dog that had kept him company through bachelorhood, a loss that coincided with the birth of a precious daughter. Other passages, unfortunately, read like a standard academic literature review (in one two-and-a-half-page subchapter on sex differences in play behavior, no less than five authorities are cited). The authors certainly have done their homework- but with the result that their book sometimes reads like homework.
If one were pressed to label the core concern of such a book as The Geography of Childhood the answer would have to be “environmental education.” In the times of Blake or Emerson such a concept would, of course, have been expressed more poetically, perhaps as something like “the child and the cosmos” -a term more in keeping with the spirit of the present volume. This is about environmental education not as public television or an afternoon at the pond with a uniformed “interpreter” speaking through a megaphone. It is instead environmental education as a way of life- but not one that parents, with sufficient will and wealth, can carve out for their children in a harsh world, as so many how-to books on parenting promote. It is a way of life that hinges on the moral trajectory of world culture.
Nabham and Trimble borrow Edward 0. Wilson's somber phrase, “the extinction of experience” to describe what is at the bottom of the problem as they see it. Nabham is particularly disturbed by a recent formal study, which he and a colleague administered, showing that children (again, in the rural American southwest and in adjacent areas of Mexico) were spending little time alone in nature, were not commonly collecting such natural objects as feathers and stones, were learning most of their knowledge of the natural world in the classroom, and that, most sadly, showed little interest in receiving the rich store of information on local conditions which their “uneducated” parents and grandparents have to offer. It is this fragile tradition of environmental knowledge that Nabham and Trimble wish to impart to their own young children.
They give no reason to doubt that they, as individuals, are doing what must be done; where we are left in grave doubt is whether there are enough sensitive adults (parents, educators, activists, politicians, etc.) around to make the crucial difference to the world.
For a slim volume, The Geography of Childhood is somewhat of a rambling read. Make no mistake: this unusual, eclectic work is highly rewarding, but we are asked to indulge the authors' literary whims: they share with us a stream of consciousness punctuated by statistics and by snippets of chats with environmental educators. We go with the literary flow, only to have to pause to note some interesting finding or look up some promising footnote, then, critically considering facts and findings, we are led back to the authors' stream of consciousness.
But I may be nitpicking. Maybe this device is how Nabham and Trimble, in the finest tradition of the environmentalist literary genre, try to tell us that while facts are fine, we must feel what goes on and that, conversely, when all meditation is done we must take a hard look at things- at the whole child-nature situation. Then, increasing and synthesizing our knowledge of it, we can better be able to do something about it. If so, their book is a loving contribution to that urgent task.
Reviewer Information