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National Park Resources - National Geographic Society

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National Park Resources - National Geographic Society

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National Geographic Education brings geography, social studies and science to life. Using real-world examples and National Geographic's rich media, educators, families, and students learn about the world and the people in it.

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Protect Your Parks - National Geographic Society

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Protect Your Parks - National Geographic Society

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National Geographic Education brings geography, social studies and science to life. Using real-world examples and National Geographic's rich media, educators, families, and students learn about the world and the people in it.

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Marine Ecology, Human Impacts, & Conservation - National Geographic Society

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Marine Ecology, Human Impacts, & Conservation - National Geographic Society

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National Geographic Education brings geography, social studies and science to life. Using real-world examples and National Geographic's rich media, educators, families, and students learn about the world and the people in it.

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Do You Suffer From 'Nature Deficit Disorder'? - The New York Times

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Do You Suffer From 'Nature Deficit Disorder'? - The New York Times

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How much time do you spend outside? Would you rather be inside "where all the electrical outlets are"? Why or why not?

In both an August Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof and an article this week about a kindergarten where kids spend three hours in a forest each day regardless of weather, Richard Louv, author of "Last Child in the Woods" is quoted. Mr. Kristof writes:

...for most of us in the industrialized world, nature is a rarer and rarer part of our lives. Children for 1,000 generations grew up exploring fields, itching with poison oak and discovering the hard way what a wasp nest looks like. That's no longer true.

Paul, a fourth grader in San Diego, put it this way: "I like to play indoors better, 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." Paul was quoted in a thoughtful book by Richard Louv, "Last Child in the Woods," that argued that baby boomers "may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water" [...]

Mr. Louv calls this "nature deficit disorder," and he links it to increases in depression, obesity and attention deficit disorder.

Students: Tell us about your experiences in nature. Do you think you spend enough time in the great outdoors? Do you think your senses are "overtaxed" by modern life, and that time in nature could help correct that? Why or why not?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

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Do You Suffer From 'Nature Deficit Disorder'?

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How much time do you spend outside? Would you rather be inside "where all the electrical outlets are"? Why or why not? In both an August Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof and an article this week about a kindergarten where kids spend three hours in a forest each day regardless of weather, Richard Louv, author of "Last Child in the Woods" is quoted.

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How Much Time Do You Spend in Nature? - The New York Times

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How Much Time Do You Spend in Nature? - The New York Times

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"At a time when Americans fret about terrorism and war and are afflicted by the worst economic downturn in 70 years, let's embrace a remarkable treasure possessed by every citizen of our country...our national parks, national forests and other public lands," writes Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who spent part of his summer backpacking with his family. How much time do you spend in nature? Have you ever been to a national park or forest? Do you agree with Mr. Kristof that many young people need to play fewer video games and spend more time outside?
In "We're Rich! (In Nature.)", Nicholas D. Kristof writes:

Americans love their national parks, but they sometimes love video games more.

The National Park Service reports that the number of recreational visits to our national parks was lower in 2010 than a decade earlier - lower even than in 1987 and 1988. There were 35 percent more backcountry campers in the national parks in 1979 than in 2010.

"Fewer and fewer youth are heading outdoors each year," the Outdoor Foundation concluded in a "special report on youth." It added that "the American childhood has rapidly moved indoors, leading to epidemic levels of childhood obesity and inactivity."

It's tougher to make the argument for wilderness when Americans show less relish for it. Hunting and fishing were once the gateway to outdoor activities, but they're declining, and backpackers, cross-country skiers and rock climbers haven't been able to pick up the slack.

Students: Tell us about your experiences in nature. How much time do you spend there? Have you ever had an experience in which nature challenged, revitalized, humbled, exhilarated or restored you? Do you agree that children today are nature-deprived? Why or why not?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Teachers: Here are ten ways to teach with this feature.

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"At a time when Americans fret about terrorism and war and are afflicted by the worst economic downturn in 70 years, let's embrace a remarkable treasure possessed by every citizen of our country...our national parks, national forests and other public lands," writes Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D.

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What's the Coolest Thing You've Ever Seen in Nature? - The New York Times

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What's the Coolest Thing You've Ever Seen in Nature? - The New York Times

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Extreme weather? A cute baby animal? A meteor? Glaciers? An ugly or bizarre mammal, sea creature, plant or insect? Giant trees? The northern lights? An amazing rock formation? A frog failing to catch a dragonfly?
What's the coolest thing you've ever seen in nature, and where and under what circumstances did you see it?

In an article in this week's Science Times, "Nature's Drone, Pretty and Deadly," Natalie Angier writes about something we've all seen, but probably misunderstood:

African lions roar and strut and act the apex carnivore, but they're lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue. Great white sharks have 300 slashing teeth and that ominous soundtrack, and still nearly half their hunts fail.

Dragonflies, by contrast, look dainty, glittery and fun, like a bubble bath or costume jewelry, and they're often grouped with butterflies and ladybugs on the very short list of Insects People Like. Yet they are also voracious aerial predators, and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom.

When setting off to feed on other flying insects, dragonflies manage to snatch their targets in midair more than 95 percent of the time, often wolfishly consuming the fresh meat on the spur without bothering to alight. "They'll tear up the prey and mash it into a glob, munch, munch, munch," said Michael L. May, an emeritus professor of entomology at Rutgers. "It almost looks like a wad of snuff in the mouth before they swallow it."

Students: Tell us...

What was the first thing that came to your mind when you read the question, "What's the coolest thing you've ever seen in nature?"

After you clicked on some of the photographs and read the excerpt from Ms. Angier's article on dragonflies, did you think of other things - perhaps some aspect of nature that, like the dragonfly, you didn't initially realize was as interesting as it is?

Where have you seen especially interesting natural vistas, creatures or phenomena? In your travels? In your own backyard? At zoos or aquariums?

In general, how much do you pay attention to the natural world? What effect does it have on you?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

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What's the Coolest Thing You've Ever Seen in Nature?

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Extreme weather? A cute baby animal? A meteor? Glaciers? An ugly or bizarre mammal, sea creature, plant or insect? Giant trees? The northern lights? An amazing rock formation? A frog failing to catch a dragonfly? Look at these photos, then tell us what you've seen.

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Explore the Power of Parks -- National Geographic

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Explore the Power of Parks -- National Geographic

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National Geographic's guide to the National Parks

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A Very Transcendentalist Text Set – Pencils, Post-Its, and Patience

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A Very Transcendentalist Text Set – Pencils, Post-Its, and Patience

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For one of my graduate classes, I was asked to put together a text set for use in a high school literature unit. I chose to compile my text set around the ideals and concepts in Transcendentalist literature from the early 1800s; my goal was to create a body of texts that would work well in a literature...

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Microsoft Word - TCRWP Deforestation Text Set.doc

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Microsoft Word - TCRWP Deforestation Text Set.doc

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In developed countries, people are consuming less. Could we be reaching "peak stuff"?
Will rich societies start consuming less? Could wealth go green? Might parsimony become the new luxury? Surely heresy, you would say. But it might just be possible.

Take Britain. A new study finds that the country that invented the industrial revolution two centuries ago reached "peak stuff" between 2001 and 2003. In the past decade, Britain has been consuming less water, building materials, paper, food (especially meat), cars, textiles, fertilizers, and much else. Travel is down; so is energy production. The country produces less waste, too.

This analysis is not the product of data juggling by a free-market think tank. The author of the study is Chris Goodall, a fully paid-up environmental activist and parliamentary candidate for Britain's Green Party who is also a stat guzzler who once worked for McKinsey & Company. His books include How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.

The stats hold true even when you allow for the ecological footprint from the manufacture of imported goods. And, while the decline in resource use in Britain has accelerated since the economic crisis in 2008, the trend started long before the banking crisis. There was a four-percent decline in overall materials use between 2000 and 2007. So it cannot be attributed entirely to recession and can be expected to survive economic recovery.

Goodall says he believes he has glimpsed "fairly robust changes in long-term trends." And this is not just about Britain. Similar trends are starting to emerge fitfully across Europe, where household energy consumption in 2009 was nine percent below the 2000 level. France, Sweden, and the Netherlands were all down 15 percent.

Car purchases have been in long-term decline in the rich world for a couple of decades now, because cars last longer these days. But, more surprisingly, car use has also been declining since around 2004 in Germany, France, Australia, Sweden, and Japan as well as in Britain.

Even in the U.S., the capital of consumption, there are signs that something similar could be afoot. American truck mileage has been on a plateau for a decade now. The number of cars on U.S. highways is also flat. And per-capita mileage is falling. As a result, gasoline consumption was expected to be at a ten-year low last year, according to the Department of Energy.

These big materials consumption numbers don't include the water needed to run our households and grow our food. Each day, we consume in this way about a hundred times our own body weight in water. But domestic water use, too, has been on the decline in most advanced nations. In the U.S., it is down about five percent from the peak in the 1980s, in large part because of low-flush toilets.

What's going on? Where has this megatrend come from? Is it real at all?

Optimists such as Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York, see a long-term and unstoppable trend that is the logical outcome of what economists call the environmental Kuznets curve, after its inventor Simon Kuznets. This suggests that as countries industrialize, they pass through an early "cheap and dirty" phase during which they waste resources and generate massive pollution, but then they pass a tipping point beyond which they begin to invest in using resources more efficiently.

Those advancing countries don't initially use less. But there is a gradual decline in the amount of materials and energy it takes them to generate every dollar of gross domestic product (GDP). Ausubel calls this process "dematerialization."

In the past, rising GDP has almost always camouflaged this dematerialization. For instance, since 1973 the U.S. economy has each year gotten an average of 2.8 percent more dollar value from each unit of energy consumed. But energy use has still been rising.

However, Goodall says that the pace of dematerialization may be speeding up. Some countries are now reaching the point where GDP and resource use decouple so much that they see actual reductions in materials and energy use. Ausubel inclines to that view. It's still in the early days, he says, "but Goodall's paper is potentially very significant and jibes with our work and expectations on dematerialization."

And what if the drivers are not just economic? What else might be going on? Some see deep-seated cultural trends at work. The decline in car use in the U.S. is greatest among the young. The proportion of 17-year-old Americans with driver's licenses has fallen from about three-quarters to a half since 1998. Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist at the University of Toronto, sees a new "culture of urbanism" in which online shopping, telecommuting, social media, and walkable urban areas are reducing the reliance of the young on cars.

My own theory is that it could be partly the fallout from an aging society. The old tend to replace their household goods less frequently. And they don't commute (though they may take more vacations). So it could be no coincidence that "peak car" happened first, in the 1990s, in Japan, the oldest society on Earth.

A pressing question is whether the apparent decoupling of economic growth and resource use is a result of something rather nastier-growing income inequalities. After all, if you give the rich more money, they can invest it; if you give the poor more money, they will be more likely to spend it. So if, as plenty of data suggests, the growing GDP is mostly going to the rich, then the chances of decoupling are far greater.

The one certainty, however, is that it doesn't mean our planet's problems are over. The majority of the world is still living on the wrong side of the Kuznets curve. And China's assault on the world's resources continues apace. It consumes around 40 percent of the world's cement and steel, some 30 percent of its rubber and coal.

Equally important, a lot of environmental impacts are cumulative. Even if we are destroying less rainforest each year, we are still reducing the amount of rainforest left for future generations.

Similarly, carbon dioxide emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. We cannot escape our polluting past. China's emissions of CO2 today may be the world's largest (and 15 times those of Britain). But if you tagged every molecule of the gas in the atmosphere according to its origin, there would still be more up there from Britain than from China.

I am a Brit. For sure, we still have an outsized legacy of planetary destruction. Even so, as Goodall put it to me, "This country is probably the most 'virtual' and 'dematerialized' in the world . . . a possible exemplar." ❧
-Fred Pearce
Chris Goodall's analysis can be found at www.carboncommentary.com

This article is an adaptation from a story originally published at Yale e360. Read the full article here.
Photo: Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan ©Donna Martin
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In developed countries, people are consuming less. Could we be reaching "peak stuff"? Will rich societies start consuming less? Could wealth go green? Might parsimony become the new luxury? Surely heresy, you would say. But it might just be possible. Take Britain.

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By Jenny Price
"Is there nature in Los Angeles?" people typically respond when I tell them that I write about nature in my city. The question sometimes betrays sarcasm, but sometimes not. L.A., after all, has long been decried as the Anti-Nature: it's the American megalopolis with brown air, fouled beaches, pavement to the horizon, and a concrete river. It's sort of the Death Star to American nature lovers. But I have happily ended up here, exactly because L.A. has become perhaps the finest place in America to think and write about nature as well as the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature.

In the past 25 years, the venerable American literature of nature writing has become distressingly marginal. Even my nature-loving and environmentalist friends tell me they do not read it. Earnest, pious, and quite allergic to irony: none of these trademark qualities plays well in 2007. But to me, the core trouble is that nature writers have given us endless paeans to the wonders of wildness since Thoreau fled to Walden Pond, but still need to tell us far more about our everyday lives in the places where we actually live.

Historically, nature writing has hewn to a powerful definition of nature as only the wild things, which we destroy and banish when we build cities. This way to define nature-the great American nature story, and the heart and soul of nature writing-has become so firmly entrenched that seeing nature in other ways has been next to impossible.

To be sure, I head for L.A.'s wild spots whenever I can, and I delight in hawks, dolphins, and sunsets as much as the next nature lover. I have a special soft spot for ducks. But the nature anthologies ignore about 90 percent of the nature in L.A. and all the other places we live, as well as most of people's encounters with nature on Earth. What the crisis of nature writing amounts to, in a few words, is that Thoreau really, really needs to Get on the Bus.

My own list of favorite representative topics for more comprehensive, on-the-bus nature writing in Los Angeles would have to include mango body whips, the social geography of air, and Zu-Zu the murdered Chihuahua. And, of course, the L.A. River, where all the possible kinds of nature stories in L.A. converge.

The mango body whip story begins like this: Soon after I moved to L.A., a woman who ran into my car while it was parked on the University of Southern California campus left a note on the back of a sales receipt for a mango body whip she'd purchased at SkinMarket at the Beverly Center mall. What's a mango body whip? I didn't know. Skin product? More perverse? I made a trip to the Center and found out that it's a mango-infused, thick, and buttery skin cream.

Nature stories abound in such an encounter. Begin with the mangos. Follow them, and you can tell an intricate set of stories as farm workers harvest mangos in rural Mexico and drivers truck them into the L.A. area and into the SkinMarket factory in Simi Valley-just over the L.A. County line-where workers use industrial technologies to turn them into skin butter and distributors transport them to upscale malls like the Beverly Center, where shoppers cart them away to bathrooms in adjacent Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and to other places throughout the country.

Mango body whip stories, in other words, look for and follow the nature we use. They watch it move in and out of the city to track specifically how we transform natural resources into the mountains of stuff with which we literally build cities and sustain our urban lives. These tales might track nature through cars. They could be about soap or magazines. They can look for the nature in refrigerators, sushi, dog food, TVs, linguine, baseball caps, closet organizers, digital cameras, bracelets, concert halls, laptop computers, bicycles. If you tell stories that follow nature through our material lives, you will see a lot of L.A.-
the city's warehouses, factories, commercial strips, cultural centers, and residential neighborhoods, some of which have a great deal more stuff than others.

Which brings me to the social geography of air. The air in L.A., if polluted, is not equally polluted everywhere. The coastal and mountain areas, which tend to be the wealthiest, enjoy the cleanest air on average. On the inland flats, the poorest, least-white, and most-industrial neighborhoods in L.A. suffer the worst air.

While mango body whip stories follow nature as resources through L.A., geography-of-air tales narrate who encounters what nature where. They ask, importantly, who benefits most and who suffers the worst consequences as we use and transform nature. But they also ask who eats what foods and who doesn't, who plants what in their gardens, who lives nearest to and farthest from a city's parks, who hunts and fishes or watches birds, and who chooses parrots or pit bulls or rabbits or goldfish as pets. This brand of tale asks how different people encounter nature differently.

Nature writers have largely ignored the resources we use and who uses them. It has been a literary universe in which we visit and contemplate wild nature but seldom use and transform nature: when the mango becomes a mango body whip, it ceases to be nature, as does the oil in a laptop computer or a maple tree that becomes a table. And the genre describes nature as a unitary force or kind of place that Man encounters and where we'll find universal meanings-but seldom as something you encounter from a specific social position and point of view.

But such a way of seeing cannot fully explain any encounter with nature in 2007, whether in a wilderness area, on a farm, or at the Beverly Center mall. I love to go hiking on the vast trail network here in the Santa Monica Mountains. Sure, that's a typical nature story in which I seek refuge and simplicity and quiet in L.A.'s wilds as antidote to the stress and noise of my daily life. But to narrate all the encounters with nature that define my hike, I also have to ask where the natural resources in my GORE-TEX shell and hiking boots come from-the oil, stone, metals, and animal skins in my twenty-first-century hiker gear, which keeps me warm and dry and makes my closet look like an REI outlet. How do they connect me to the global transformation of nature? And how do they shape my experience of hiking? The Simple Life out in nature is complex as hell. I'd also have to narrate how wealthier Angelenos are more likely to live near L.A.'s mountain parks-and to own cars to get to them. And how does the particular work I do at a desk all week make a strenuous weekend hike sound like a good idea in the first place? The hike has to be a story about how our connections to one another define our encounters with nature. And it's about how the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains has chosen my favorite trail routes, and how they manage fire suppression, and how they draw up hundreds of rules and policies to keep both the visitors and the parklands happy.

Which brings me to Zu-Zu, the murdered Chihuahua. As The Los Angeles Times reported, Zu-Zu's story begins, or ends, like this: In summer 2002, a coyote entered the yard of a casting director in the Silver Lake area west of downtown and ate her Chihuahua, Zu-Zu. Coyotes, her husband warned bitterly, are "urban terrorists": the bereft owner said, "I have no liberty in my front yard." A letter to the Times, though, lionized the coyote as the real victim, an indigenous animal encroached on by evil yippy Chihuahuas (if, like me, you tend to agree, then try substituting a Labrador retriever puppy for Zu-Zu).

Zu-Zu stories narrate how we change places and how they respond and how we respond back and so on and so on. They're about paving, building, planting, bulldozing, fires and fire suppression, polluting and cleaning up, pet keeping, earthquakes and seismic retrofitting, water supply and flood management, sewers, gas lines, lawns, gardens, roads, trails, and parks.

Nature writers have in fact told this kind of story-usually, however, with an evil Chihuahua moral in which Man stomps into Nature Primeval and ravages and desecrates it. But as guidance for how we can inhabit places, seeing people only as invaders in these stories works about as well as branding coyotes as terrorists. An "evil Chihuahua" moral demands that we leave the nature we live in as it is (in which case we'll die), but a "terrorist coyote" moral urges us to eradicate nature (in which case we'll die). Neither approach helps us navigate how to keep pet animals in a landscape with native predators-or how to make a road or build a house or ensure a water supply or figure out how to keep the air and water clean. Ideally, Zu-Zu stories should help us ask how we can create livable and sustainable cities. They should be deeply informed by knowledge of the ecology, geology, and natural history of the place. They should help us walk the essential line between doing nothing in nature and doing whatever we want. Like mango body whip tales, they should seek to understand what our connections to nature actually are so that we can think about what our connections should look like.

True, there's a lovely yearning in the American vision of nature as a wild place apart-for simplicity, for a slower life. There's great wonder about the natural world and terrific love for wild places and things. There's legitimate bewilderment in response to the mind-boggling complexity of modern connectedness (how could I possibly keep track of where the nature in my Toyota wagon comes from?). There's a large dose of real regret for the wanton destructiveness of toxic industrialism and excessive consumerism. And there's powerful, overriding denial in the service of powerful self-indulgence and material desire, which push us to imagine nature out of rather than into our lives.

Just how powerful? Well, in L.A., enough to let us lose track of an entire river-not just the nature in the stuff in our houses. We can't find L.A.'s major waterway, although it sustained L.A. for 150 years and now runs under ten gridlocked freeways through the heart of L.A. County. A 51-mile river in plain sight: lost.

The saga of the concrete L.A. River plays out as every brand of nature story I can think of. First, a "what-nature-means" tale: Angelenos reimagined the river as nonexistent and banished it from their collective imagination of history and place. Also, a traditional tale of wild things: many birds and frogs continued to use the river (they apparently hadn't received the memo that it was no longer a river), but other birds and most fish species did disappear along with extensive wetlands and riparian habitat.

Also, a Zu-Zu story. As Los Angeles altered the Southern California landscape to control the river's floods, we largely ignored the basic hydrological processes. The jacketed river could no longer flow out into its basin and therefore no longer replenished the aquifer with water, the soils with nutrients, and the beaches with sand. The county designed the storm sewers, however, to empty into the channel, which promptly turned the river into L.A.'s Grand Sewer, gathering pesticides, motor oil, trash, dog feces, and many hundreds more pollutants from driveways, lawns, roads, and parking lots across the 2200-square-kilometer watershed and rushing the toxins downstream into the Pacific Ocean. And yes, floodwaters have stayed safely within the concrete walls, but the extra water from the storm sewers has actually dramatically increased the volume of the river's floods.

The cement channel also constitutes L.A.'s strategy to move storm water, that life-giving natural resource, through the city. Here is the river's mango body whip story: a city with a semi-arid Mediterranean climate pours as much rainwater (which we get from the sky for free) as possible into the storm sewers, through the river, and into the Pacific-and then pays dearly to import water by aqueduct from up to 400 miles away. Call it watering the ocean, by draining watersheds across the West.

And finally, a social-geography-of-air story: L.A. may have wild places, but as the American city that has so consistently valued private property over public spaces, it historically has also set aside remarkably little public park space per capita-and L.A.'s poorest areas suffer the worst shortages of neighborhood park space, enjoy the least private green space, and lie farthest from the mountain parks. In this infamously fragmented city, the poorest neighborhoods also invariably have been the most chopped up by freeways and industry. The concrete river channel turned the basin's most logical site for green space-as well as the city's major natural connector-into an outsized open sewer that carves a no-man's-land through many of the city's most fragmented and park-starved areas.

In sum, L.A.'s errant treatment of a major natural feature has profoundly exacerbated nearly all of L.A.'s notorious troubles-environmental chaos, social inequities, community fragmentation, water shortages, water imperialism, and erasure of civic memory.

The good news, on the other hand, is that by using and managing this nature more sustainably and fairly, we can make the city a healthier, more equitable, and all-around lovelier place to live in. First, though, you have to see the nature in the place. You have to find it.
About the Author
Jenny Price is a writer in Los Angeles, where she lives on Venice Beach and happily gives tours of the L.A. River. An earlier form of this essay appeared in Believer Magazine.

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By Jenny Price "Is there nature in Los Angeles?" people typically respond when I tell them that I write about nature in my city. The question sometimes betrays sarcasm, but sometimes not. L.A., after all, has long been decried as the Anti-Nature: it's the American megalopolis with brown air, fouled beaches, pavement to the horizon, and a concrete river.