Nature for the urban culture is mostly unnatural, compacted, specifically placed and maintained. When this culture reads Richard Louv’s arguments against these places they tend to think. A lot. And get angry sometimes. Feeling all their actions and memories of the natural world slip slowly away into the unnatural.-- Upon opening Louv’s novel Last Child in the Woods, and reading the first line of the book, “If, when we were young...” one can’t help but thinking of his father or even grandfather beginning a story of the past: Nostalgic memories from generational gaps. Louv begins by creating and defining the gap between his generation and ours. RealIy I should say mine; growing up in the great urban environment. I found the natural world as something rare and untouchable. Matching Louv’s thesis exactly. Though I did, however, feel, as a child, the same freedom to explore and create as a child does in the woods. My backyard, instead of being the idolized garden leading into an unkempt world, was an alleyway leading into the maintained and chaotic world of purely human interaction. My places of solitude and rest, of creation and friendship, the place where I never inhibited Louv’s ‘bored syndrome’, were places uninhibited by the human populace or by social pressure. It was in these places I felt the comfort and freedom to do as I please. But in all honesty a parking lot or an empty trash can only serve for half his argument. These are places of escape, and solely that. The child that is surrounded by nature has an escape and beyond that; a place to grow. I agree with the author though it tends to be hard for it chastises my own relationship to the natural world.
I find most of Louv’s arguments valued though written in conversational and comfortable form. Such passionate issues would stir up pointed fingers and blaming faces from anyone who isn’t a journalist. But Louv is, and therefore his argument points anger to few specifically. Instead he writes as a kind of therapeutic teacher leading parents into his arms and giving them nature as a chance for their children. His subtle writing matches the subtelty of his indoctrination. Unconsciously (or conciously) Louv chooses the child, the most sympathized cultural entity to impassion the reader. It is not only the child that Louv speaks to, but the whole nation, people of all ages.