Our new word for this week is “biophilia”: the innate need and sensitivity that human beings have for other living things. Put simply, we have been hugging trees for millennia, so it is dumb to stop now. We have a biological need, created by centuries of proximity, for nature. And denying our biophilia makes us behave very oddly indeed. I refer in particular to children – the small, slightly irascible, bug-eyed creatures you find lurking indoors in small groups around the television, computer, fridge or X-box. Pale and biophobic, these children are suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder, an epidemic recently identified in America. Long ago, children roamed in grubby, half-clad packs across the landscape, hitting one another with sticks, making mud pies and hiding in bushes. Now, in the Dark Ages, most of these activities are illegal, or considered downright dangerous. Last month, the online magazine Salon lamented “the decline in kids’ contact with nature and the rising obesity epidemic; the criminalisation of old-fashioned play; and the loss of the simple pleasure of having dirty hands and wet feet.”

Returning from a biophiliac week on the bodacious west coast of Scotland made me painfully aware of the sudden nature deficit. On arrival back in the Finchley Road, which boasts more than 30,000 cars a day, I ate an instant Indian from a cardboard container and rushed out to catch Sin City “the coolest noir film of the year”, based on a cartoon novel series. Sin City is überurban, stylish, and terrifically violent, causing one to linger in the Ladies’ a lot. It was rather a jolt after long days of swimming in an icy loch, cuddling sea slugs, diverting streams unnecessarily, catching your own dinner, and building forts. In the night, my mind riven between town and country, I wondered if Sin City was the ultimate expression of Nature Deficit Disorder.

Fortunately, a book has just appeared so we can all discuss this. Journalist Richard Louv has written Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, and, after ten years’ research, guess what? He has concluded that children who are regularly exposed to nature “thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their ‘shut-in’ peers do not”. Even football practice is not enough: “A natural environment is far more complex than a playing field… Outside, you’re required to make decisions that aren’t encountered in a more constricted, planned environment – ones that not only present danger, but opportunity.”

Naturally, we as parents deny that opportunity in cities, for fear of – well, what exactly? Despite obsessive press coverage of abductions, children are statistically safer than in the past. But we no longer allow freedom and self-determination. We no longer throw our children alone into the streets and parks until dinner time. Instead, we imprison them in SUVs and schlepp them to extra-curricular activities, or just park them in front of the telly. How on earth do you maintain your agility, your fight-or-flight mechanism if you’re never caught stealing apples from someone else’s garden?

Sometimes, I send two kids for milk, or to the postbox, but rarely do I see other people’s ten-year-olds walking alone. I wonder if that’s the city, but Louv’s study showed that it’s the same for children in rural areas. We make the child’s world smaller and safer in the country, too, hence the incongruous sight of plastic swings in the backyards of farms surrounded by natural toys like trees. It’s all very Brave New World, that business of giving babies electric shocks as they crawl towards vases of flowers, because liking flowers will not encourage capitalist consumption. In academia, Louv says few researchers want to tackle the subject of the nurture of nature, apart from one study that shows “nature play” is therapy for kids with Attention Deficit Disorder. “I call these researchers brave because most of them are not winning big grants – since, as one of them explained to me: ‘Who’s going to pay for a toy you can’t sell?’”

So let’s hear it for biophilia, I think, as I take my kids off in their hoodies to skateboard under the Westway, where the graffiti is generous and the Tube trains rattle by at eye level like a scene from The Blues Brothers. Of course, every child should also develop essential urban life skills, such as being ironic, avoiding eye contact with strangers, rapping to a reasonable standard, and ordering confidently from a Chinese takeaway menu. But sometimes I feel it’s as though we have shut our offspring up in the Big Brother house, and are just sitting back waiting to see who suffocates and who wins.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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