PARKS GUIDE 2019
Dustin Parks can picture the faces of “nature-deficit disorder.” They’re attached to third graders on a bus crossing the 14th Street Bridge. As the Outdoor Leadership Institute program manager for the Blue Sky Fund, Parks drives all over the city, seeking out experiences for urban kids that will spark a sense of wonder in the natural world. He remembers the third graders seeing the James River and asking him, “Is that the ocean?”
Brad Cooke directs Collegiate School’s outdoor adventure and education program, Outdoor Collegiate. He knows the faces, too. The West End, he says, “has very little access to the river, so [students] don’t see it as much. And they live in this bubble where they just don’t get into the city. It feels a little foreign to them, maybe a little dangerous. … It’s a different set of challenges.”
When Richard Louv coined the term nature-deficit disorder in his 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods,” it wasn’t meant as a medical diagnosis. He conceived the phrase to shine a spotlight on the price humans pay for their growing estrangement from nature. The book focused on children, but research since then has produced mountains of evidence suggesting it is a problem for adults as well.
Louv’s 2011 follow-up, “The Nature Principle: Reconnecting With Life in a Virtual Age,” asked a simple question: “What could our lives and our children’s lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?”
Eight years after he posed this question, how many of us have an answer we’d want to share? In 2017, Common Sense Media found that daily mobile media usage among kids under 8 was nearly 10 times higher than it was in 2011. In 2018, Nielsen released a study showing that American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media.
Every week, it seems, we see another headline about how screens are contributing to our epidemic of inactivity. Burrow deeper into the news, and you’ll also find headlines about how time spent outside can counteract the negative effects of our modern age. Time spent in nature, according to recent research, can have positive impacts on health problems from anxiety and depression to obesity, high blood pressure and more.
Is there reason to believe Richmond is any different from the rest of the country when it comes to our alienation from nature and its restorative effects? Perhaps. The year after Louv posed the question above, Richmond was on the cover of Outside magazine as the Best River Town in America. Our James River Park System is by far the most visited attraction in the region, boasting nearly 1.8 million visits from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. That would put it in the top 20 among America’s national parks by visitation.
Former JRPS Manager Ralph White has called Richmonders “the people of the river,” and it only takes traveling to other cities to see how special our relationship is with the river that sustains us. And the James River Park is far from the only green space in the area with the potential to heal our physical and psychological wounds: Richmonders can choose from a wealth of nearby city, county and state parks to get their nature fix.
Just in the past few years, doctors across the country — pediatricians, psychiatrists, primary care docs and more — have begun “prescribing nature” to their patients as they would an antibiotic to someone with an infection. In the Richmond region, we’re lucky to have plenty of that drug to go around. Turns out, nature can help fight a host of ailments — and it’s free.
