Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Read Online Free PDF Page A

imagined to be the frontier stretching from Ralston Street beyond the edge of the known suburban world.
Closing One Frontier, Opening Another
    In the space of a century, the American experience of nature—culturally influential around the world—has gone from direct utilitarianism to romantic attachment to electronic detachment. Americans have passed not through one frontier, but through three. The third frontier—the one that young people are growing up in today—is every bit as much of a venture into the unknown as Daniel Beard experienced in his time.
    The passing, and importance, of the first frontier was described in 1893, during Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition—a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. There, at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis.” He argued that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward” explained the development of the American nation, history, and character. He linked this pronouncement to results of the 1890 U.S. Census, which revealed the disappearance of a contiguous line of the American frontier—the “closing of the frontier.” This was the same year that the superintendent of the census declared the end of the era of “free land”—that is, land available to homesteaders for tillage.
    Little noted at the time, Jackson’s thesis came to be considered one of the most important statements in American history. Jackson argued that every American generation had returned “to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line.” He described this frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Basic American cultural traits could, he said, be linked to the influence of that frontier, including “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things . . . that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism.” Historians still debate Turner’s thesis; many, if not most, have rejected the frontier, as Turner saw it, as
the
key to understanding American history and sensibilities. Immigration, the industrial revolution, the Civil War—all had a deep formative influence on our culture. Turner himself later revised his theory to include events that were frontier-like—the oil boom of the 1890s, for example.
    Nonetheless, from Teddy Roosevelt to Edward Abbey, Americans continued to think of themselves as frontier explorers. In 1905, at President Roosevelt’s inauguration, cowboys rode down Pennsylvania Avenue,the Seventh Cavalry passed for review, and American Indians joined the celebration—including the once-feared Geronimo. The parade, in fact, announced the coming of the second frontier, which existed mainly in the imagination for nearly a century. The second frontier existed in Beard’s words and illustrations, and in the family farm, which, though already diminishing in number, continued as an important definer of American culture. Especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, the second frontier also existed in urban America; witness the creation of the great urban parks. The second frontier was a time, too, of suburban manifest destiny, when boys still imagined themselves woodsmen and scouts, and girls still yearned to live in a little house on the prairie—and sometimes built better forts than the boys.
    If the first frontier was explored by the acquisitive Lewis and Clark, the second frontier was romanticized by Teddy Roosevelt. If the first frontier was the real Davy Crockett’s, the second frontier peaked with Disney’s Davy. If the first frontier was a time of struggle, the second frontier was a period of taking stock, of celebration. It brought a new