The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture

Rating:
Summary: Less than I was hoping for
Review: Kahn explores the issue of children's developing understanding of the environment and themselves as a part of it. That raises huge issues:

Are human children predisposed to "love" more "natural" settings than those more artificially developed?

Or, is a healthy sense of self-in-nature something that is acquired, learned? And do some cultures do a better job at educating children toward an environmental conscience?

And how do humans come to regard and value other creatures and their presence in the world? What is our ethical relationship to the land and life around us?

Good questions, but unfortunately, the premises so often restrict the findings here that Kahn, who must proceed scientifically from premises to research to conclusions, does not provide what the reader looks for: a more open-ended discussion of all the basic questions I listed above. The book seems a strange hybrid, something not quite a scientific book, but not quite a book open to the general public, either (who will find his chapter on methodology either a waste of time or something to pick apart at the premises).

Kahn keeps to his scientific surveys of children, and his findings are worth noticing. But these findings could have been summed up in a single journal article, and really do not show anything that common sense would not have predicted (children value nature). I found myself arguing with him about the findings, too; he seems to make conclusions that one could argue could easily go in other directions. At times he seems to have decided about the categories in which to fit the children's views. But this seems to be playing a game of squashing round pegs into squares. Wouldn't it be better to let the categories be determined by the answers rather than be established beforehand?

A good thing in this book that I hope to see more of: Kahn mentions "generational amnesia"--the tendency of people to think only in terms of their own experience. In short, everyone tends to value the environment they experienced as "good enough", and "forget" the fact that it has been deteriorating slowly across generations. The result is that we get people who grow up and don't dream of America the way it was, say, in 1800 or even earlier.

A final puzzlement: Kahn mentions George Lakoff's work in this book; yet I wondered why Kahn didn't pursue or explore that cognitive scientist's (and others') philosophical conclusions about "the human relationship with nature." In the end, I found Kahn's weddedness to "structural-developmental" theory a much cloudier way of thinking about these issues than Lakoff's theory of "embodied realism" and the assumption that all human meaning arises out of our embodied interaction with the environment. (A good look at Lakoff et. al. would also point out why one cannot assume that people's conceptual categories are stable or even consistent.)