Where the Pavement Ends : ‘When they cut the forest down to make a city, do the forest rangers become police?’ the writer’s son asks. : THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD: Why Children Need Wild Places, <i> By Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble (Beacon Press: $22; 216 pp.)</i>

Twenty years ago, a summer volunteer for a group that took Atlanta city children out to the country made a comment I’ll never forget--though it was 20 years ago. These kids didn’t “know how to walk” on the grass, she marveled, describing how her charges rolled gleefully around in the meadows as though on another planet. “They had only walked on cement before.”

Today the number of children exposed to wild lands and animals is smaller than ever before in human history, lament naturalist writers Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, in a provocative and compelling collection of essays, “The Geography of Childhood.” City kids get most of their information about wilderness and wild animals--nowadays, even farm animals--through picture books and television, a fact these authors find troubling. Even the parks and playgrounds children play in are often denuded of natural vegetation “with which to form nests, shelters, wands, dolls and other playthings,” Nabhan writes in one essay.

In the opening essay, Nabhan recounts the grim statistics on how many children will be born this decade in urban slums (57% in developing countries, 25% in the United States alone). And the authors note in their preface that for children of the most dangerous inner cites, survival depends more on learning to discriminate between sounds of different automatic weapons rather than any natural sights and sounds of generations past.

While some may regard wilderness and nature experiences as a luxury many parents can ill afford, these writers regard them as a necessary part of a child’s education, in fact a “basic human need,” that our culture too often ignores. “To counter the historic trend toward the loss of wildness where children play, it is clear that we need to find ways to let children roam beyond the pavement, to gain access to vegetation and earth that allows them to tunnel, climb or even fall,” they urge.

Offering children experiences in the wild is one of the most important gifts that parents and teachers can give them, the authors write, because it can teach caring, humility, tolerance for other creatures and “nourish a lasting attachment to the earth.” They even give nature experiences credit for nurturing self-esteem, that trendy buzzword of child development experts.

Children are becoming, for lack of a better term, environmentally handicapped. To answer the question posed in their book’s subtitle, “Why Children Need Wild Places,” Nabhan and Trimble bring to bear intimate personal vignettes from their own children’s and friends’ children’s experiences and reminiscences from their own childhoods, as well as useful insights from less subjective sources--child development experts, psychologists and environmental educators.

Ethnobotanist and nature writer Gary Nabhan, author of several volumes of nature writing, including three on the plants and people of the desert Southwest, is co-founder and director of Native Seeds/Search, an organization dedicated to preserving wild native seeds. Joining him is a less well-known photographer and author of books on Southwest landscape, Stephen Trimble, who adds a number of new essays to this anthology of pieces, several of which have been previously published. Both writers have long explored the proper relationship between human beings and nature. But here these writers explore the wondrous, fascinating and adventuresome response of children to being in nature--new terrain through their children’s eyes.

The world from knee-height is a marvel where Nabhan finds “Lilliputian landscapes often overlooked by educated adults seeking The Big Picture.” His probes show kids adventuring down holes and hollows, up trees and mountainsides, on hands and knees, while documenting their discovery of frogs, lizards and other creatures, their taking of found objects, their finding shelter in nooks and crannies. Trimble finds ranch and farm kids who “rely on animals as friends when human friends are few and far between.”

Unlike many new books on the market that dutifully laud the benefits of instilling environmental awareness in children, “The Geography of Childhood” suggests that children also have a lot to tell us adults about natural exploration, wonder and renewing bonds with nature. As the authors explain in their foreword, the book is hardly a how-to-handbook for parents and teachers on how to bring children into nature or a tip sheet on how to guide them in it. “Rather it is an exchange of ideas, images and stories between two natural historians who are finding their ways as fathers while they watch their own children’s behavior in the world unfold.”

Because nature doesn’t judge, Trimble reflects, “one route to self-esteem, particularly for shy or undervalued children lies in the out-of-doors.” Likewise, he notes, nature teaches, through its astonishing diversity, an inherent democracy. “The endless forms generated by evolution subconsciously reassures us of our validity. No matter that we differ a bit from our peers: Difference is the norm.”

As with any book of essays originally published elsewhere this one proceeds in a fairly unstructured fashion, with shifting perspectives and some overlap. (Several are expansions of earlier shorter pieces, such as Nabhan’s opening essay, “A Child’s Sense of Wildness,” which appeared in Orion and Northern Lights before that.) But the book hangs together as a whole nevertheless, with essays alternating between the two authors like a dialogue between them, two friends who have known each other a long time, Nabhan originally a city boy, Trimble a country boy, both now fathers of two small children.

Nabhan’s essays are rich with anecdotes about his children, Laura and Dusty (aged 5 and 7 at the time of writing) and comments from them. “Over time,” he writes, “I’ve come to realize that a few intimate places mean more to my children . . . than all the glorious panoramas I could ever show them.” Children’s responses are the real subject of this book, and, not surprisingly, some of the passages that ring truest come from the children themselves. “When they cut the forest down to make a city, what do the forest rangers do then? Do they become police?” asks Dusty in a conversation about encroaching urbanization.

Trimble, son of a map-maker for the U.S. Geological Survey, grew up in the West. One of his best essays in this volume has much to say about the impact of geography on one’s sense of self. “My childhood in the West--where geology overwhelms biology, lightly vegetated landscape commands attention, and weather is intense--surely gave me an edge in mental map-making.”

Along the way, too, the reader is introduced to some wild and woolly characters of the West, such as a hermit of the O’odham Native tribe living on the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, who does “a great imitation of a Zebra-tailed lizard running with its tail curled up like that of a scorpion.” A board member of a unique ranch on the California-Nevada state line, Deep Springs, designed to teach teen-agers the value of “a life of service” through hard work, describes what is gained: “A breakfast table looks different to someone who has milked cows, churned butter, slaughtered hogs, candled eggs, and dug potatoes.” We meet also Kamau Kambui, a member of Minnesota’s Wilder Forest staff who has made a conventional nature walk “into something far more emotionally rich,” a re-enactment of abolitionist Harriet Tubman to relive what it feels to escape slavery by passage through the wilderness.

There is much refreshing and informative material in this book, which comes with a useful bibliography to boot. However, it could have benefited from less nostalgic reminiscence and more fresh creative suggestions about how children can be offered more nature experiences in places far from wilderness. The few programs that are described here just make us hunger for more discussion of practical solutions: We learn about innovative programs scattered about the country, such as Vision-Quest, to put troubled youth in better touch with nature, and hence, through vital rites of passage to adulthood. And Nabhan, at least, offers an intelligent critique of modern formal playgrounds, arguing that children should be encouraged to do more exploration in real natural habitats in parks. He also urges parents and teachers to do what they can to encourage spontaneous hands-on contact with plants and animals, especially in native habitats.

Can urban gardens serve the same purpose as wilderness? the authors provocatively ask. The answer lies in this passage: “We need not try to do what television does, which is to set up the assumption of immediate intimacy with all animals, even when that cannot be achieved in the field,” writes Nabhan. “Real attention to a covey of quail, a swarm of termites, a litter of pack rats will do for most kids I know.”