The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 167

10
The Hushings
. . . the smashed faces
Of the farms with the stone trickle
Of their tears down the hills' side.
R. S. Thomas
Reservoirs
Of all the world's creatures, perhaps those in the greatest need of
rewilding are our children. The collapse of children's engagement
with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural
world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which
many of us were immersed has gone. Since the 1970s the area in
which children may roam without supervision in the UK has decreased
by almost 90 per cent, while the proportion of children regularly play-
ing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten. 1
Parents are wrongly terrified of strangers and rightly terrified of
traffic. The ecosystem of the indoor world has become ever richer and
more engaging. In some countries, children are now demonized and
harried when they gather in public places; their games forbidden, their
very presence perceived as a threat. 2 But as Jay Griffiths records in her
remarkable topic Kith , they have also been excluded from the fortify-
ing commons by the enclosure and destruction of the natural world.
The commons was home for boy or bird but the Enclosures* stole the
nests of both, reaved children of the site of their childhood, robbed
* Enclosure, the worldwide process of privatizing or in some cases nationalizing com-
mon land, excluding the people and the uses to which it had formerly been put, was