“…I was encouraged to find that many people now of college age—those who belong to the first generation to grow up in a largely de-natured environment—have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand what they have missed. This yearning is a source of power. These young people resist the rapid slide from the real to the virtual, from the mountains to the Matrix. They do not intend to be the last children in the woods.” (Louv 3)

I carried Richard Louv’s words in my pack from one side of Spain to the other. It was hard not to feel like I was one of these children he used to preface his work The Last Child in the Woods. I spent my summers skipping smooth stones across olive-colored rivers, bushwacking my way through blackberry thickets, and ducking all-too-courageously into hopefully-deserted bear caves. I had the taste as a child, of how one can loose a sense of time and identity in the forest, in the whadow of a mountain, or waist deep in a flow of mountainmelt. I undertook my walk without the company of my classmates, but I seldom felt lonely. I never forgot that there was life all around.

Every city that I arrived in, Madrid, Burgos, Pamplona, Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela, was in stark contrast from the mountain paths that I became very comfortable on. Upon entering these dense metropolitain areas, I was unsettled. There were the crouds of people, on their phones, looking into their palms. The sounds of traffic flowing along arterial highways drown out the birds that sung the anthem of my walking. When I passed by children at reccess, they were very blaitantly caged, or “containerized”, as University of Maryland professor Jane Clark puts it. I sat with a few friends at a beach in Finisterra, and children had been let out for reccess on a school up on the hillside. Many of the children reached through the bars of the fence surrounding their concrete play-area, waving down at my group and I, skipping stones out into the calm cape.

So why were those children so strictly contained to a concrete jungle when a beautiful beach lay just down the hill? The plain truth is that “countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order” (Louv 27). Out of petty fear of scraped knees and seaside-kidnappers, those kiddos are on a daily basis deprived of the adventure and exploration that is ceasslessly available on a sandy beach. My friends and I spent hours stacking rocks (physics), playing frisbee (motor control), and meeting foreigners on the sand (social skills). Those children spent their reccess clinging to a metal fence, staring down the hillside at us.

“[W]e can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors…and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems” (Louv 31).

As modern societies advance further down a dominantly digital pathway, mental and social maladies become ever-more prevalent among our youth. I rarely saw children in the small mountain pueblos through which I passed daily, and in the cities, I had several run ins with angsty and sometimes threatening young people. A friend and I once came upon a gang of teenagers throwing stones into windows several stories above. They shouted indecipherably at an old woman making her way home. She was so frightened by their rambunctious behavior that she asked us to walk her to her door. While their actions cannot directly be attributed to living in a city and deprived of nature, they did live in the projects of Madrid, and not the valleys of Cantabria.

Luckily, within the problem lies the solution. Alienation from the natural world breeds problems, but immersion can be incredibly nurturing and healing. I began my walk to Santiago de Compostela having just shakily separated with my significant other. In the city of Burgos, I struggled to clear my head. After leaving the city, I was much more easily able to cope. My thoughts and feelings were more clear in the mountains and beside the ocean. In a matter of days I was “over it”. There is something about nature that calms the mind. Thoughts and feelings come and go like clouds. The pace of the mind is slowed. During my walk I learned to trust myself, in a time when many people my age don’t have the confidence to order a pizza over the phone.

The closer we grow to the intangible companion of technology, the further we stray from our home. Louv’s “nature deficit disorder” becomes an ever growing problem, and our school systems do little to bridge the gap. The is getting outside. Instead of watching on a screen, get out and see it for yourself. The natural aspects of our world are quickly being extracted and used up, and our humanity goes with it.