The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 169

children needed to fill their world with stories. 'Childhood,' Griffiths
tells us, 'was to be enclosed as surely as the land.'
The impacts have been pernicious, but they are so familiar that we
scarcely see them any more. The indoor world is far more dangerous
than the outdoor world of which parents are so frightened, the almost
non-existent stranger danger replaced by a real and insidious estrange-
ment danger. Children, confined to their homes, become estranged
from each other and from nature. Obesity, rickets, asthma, myopia,
the decline in heart and lung function all appear to be associated
with the sedentary indoor life.
Some studies, summarized in Richard Louv's topic Last Child in
the Woods , appear to link a lack of contact with the natural world to
an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 5 Research con-
ducted at the University of Illinois suggests that playing among trees
and grass is associated with a reduction in indications of ADHD,
while playing indoors or on tarmac appears to increase them. 6 One
paper suggests that playing out of doors improves children's reason-
ing and observation, 7 another that outdoor education enhances their
reading, writing, science and maths. 8 Perhaps children would do bet-
ter at school if they spent less time in the classroom.
Missing from children's lives more than almost anything else is time
in the woods. Watching my child and others, it seems to me that deep
cover encourages deep play, that big trees, an understorey mazed by
fallen trunks and shrubs which conceal dells and banks and holes and
overhangs, draw children out of the known world and into others.
Almost immediately the woods become peopled with other beings,
become the setting for rhapsodic myth and saga, translate the children
into characters in an ageless epic, always new, always the same. Here,
genetic memories reawaken, ancient impulses are unearthed, age-old
patterns of play and discovery recited.
One difference between indoor entertainment and outdoor play is
that the outdoors has an endless capacity to surprise. Its joys are
unscripted, its discoveries your own. The thought that most of our
children will never be startled by a dolphin breaching, a nightingale
simging, the explosive flight of a woodcock, the rustle of an adder is
almost as sad as the disappearance of such species from many of the
places in which we once played.