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

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. I believe that, as a parent, it’s my job to protect my sons from the brutality of the world for as long as I can.
    In an earlier book,
The Web of Life
, I described the relationship that Nick and his children had to animals and food:
    When Nick’s children were small and he and his family still lived on their farm down a dirt road in a valley of adobes and cottonwoods and chiles, his daughter came home one day to find her favorite goat (not a pet, really, but one that followed her around) skinned, gutted, and strung up in the barn. This was a time when Nick’s family was short on shoes, and the meat they ate was meat that Nick butchered or shot. It was a terrible moment for his daughter.
    Nick insists he has no regrets, but he still talks about it. She was hurt, he says, but 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.
    Few of us miss the more brutal aspects of raising food. For most young people, however, memory supplies no experience for comparison. More young people may be vegetarians or consume food from the health food store, but fewer are likely to raise their own food—especially if the food is an animal. In less than a half century, the culture has moved from a time when small family farms dominated the countryside—when Nick’s way of understanding food was dominant—to a transitional time when many suburban families’ vegetable gardens provided little more than recreation, to the current age of shrink-wrapped, lab-produced food. In one way, young people are more aware of the sources of what they eat. The animal-rights movement has taught them about the conditions within, say, poultry factory farms. It’s probably no coincidence high school and college students are adopting vegetarianism in increasing numbers. Such knowledge, however, does not necessarily mean that the young are personally involved with their food sources.
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The end of biological absolutes. Are we mice or are we men? Or both?
    The young are growing up in an era without biological absolutes. Even the definition of life itself is up for grabs.
    One morning in 1997, people around the world opened their newspapers to see a disturbing photograph of a live, hairless mouse with what appeared to be a human ear growing from its back. The creature was the product of a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had introduced human cartilage cells into an earlike scaffold of biodegradable polyester fabric implanted onto the back of the mouse. The scaffold nourished the ersatz ear.
    Since then, one headline after another has announced some potential blending of machines, humans, and other animals. The implications have evaded the public for two decades, according to the International Center for Technology Assessment, a nonprofit, bipartisan organization that assesses technological impacts on society. Human genes—includingthose for human growth and nerves—have been inserted into rats, mice, and primates to create creatures called chimera. These new creatures are to be used primarily for medical research, but some scientists seriously discuss the possibility of chimera someday existing outside the lab. In 2007, the chairman of the Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and his colleagues created the world’s first human-sheep chimera, which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs. This line of research may lead to the common use of animal organs for human transplant surgeries.
    Think what it means for children to grow up now, and how different their experience of nature