Env 289

Front 1

Gifts of Nature

Back 1

Nature:
amplifies time
Offers healing
inspires creativity
provokes humility
capacity for wonder

Front 2

Nature

Back 2

natura= birth, constitution, character, course of things

includes the material world and all of its objects and phenomena, i.e. a machine is part of nature the alternative meaning is "the outdoors" and this means that man-made things are not a part of nature

Front 3

Natura, nasci

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to be born

Front 4

"A Wilderness of Sweets"

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John Milton's phrase catches the the very real condition of energy and richness that is so often found in wild systems. i.e. the billions of herring babies in the ocean, on the other hand wilderness has implied chaos, the unknown, realms of the taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic. In both senses, it is a place of archetypal power, teaching, and challenge.

Front 5

Nature-deficit disorder

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The lack of connecting with nature

Front 6

Frederick Jackson Turner

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presented his "Frontier Thesis" at the 1893 Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition.

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The Frontier Thesis

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He argued that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward” explained the development of the American nation, history, and character. He linked this pronouncement to results of the 1890 U.S. Census, which revealed the disappearance of a contiguous line of the American frontier—the “closing of the frontier.” This was the same year that the superintendent of the census declared the end of the era of “free land”—that is, land available to homesteaders for tillage.

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Frederick Jackson Turner's argument

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Jackson argued that every American generation had returned “to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line.” He described this frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Basic American cultural traits could, he said, be linked to the influence of that frontier, including “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things . . . that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism.”

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The Second Frontier

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The second frontier existed in Beard’s words and illustrations, and in the family farm, which, though already diminishing in number, continued as an important definer of American culture. Especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, the second frontier also existed in urban America; witness the creation of the great urban parks. The second frontier was a time, too, of suburban manifest destiny, when boys still imagined themselves woodsmen and scouts, and girls still yearned to live in a little house on the prairie—and sometimes built better forts than the boys.

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The First Frontier

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If the first frontier was explored by the acquisitive Lewis and Clark, the second frontier was romanticized by Teddy Roosevelt. If the first frontier was the real Davy Crockett’s, the second frontier peaked with Disney’s Davy. If the first frontier was a time of struggle, the second frontier was a period of taking stock, of celebration. It brought a new politics of preservation, an immersion of Americans in the domesticated and romanticized fields and streams and woods around

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Third Frontier

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Eerily, one hundred years after Turner and the U.S. Census Bureau declared the end of what we usually consider the American frontier, the bureau posted a report that marked the death of the second frontier, and the birth of a third. That year, as the Washington Post reported, in “a symbol of massive national transformation,” the federal government dropped its long-standing annual survey of farm residents. Farm population had dwindled so much—from 40 percent of U.S. households in 1900 to just 1.9 percent in 1990—that the farm resident survey was irrelevant. The 1993 report was surely as important as the census evidence that led to Turner’s obituary for the frontier. “If sweeping changes can be captured in seemingly trivial benchmarks, the decision to end the annual report is one,” reported the Post.

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Dominant Type of Development Pattern

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The newly dominant type of development—with interchangeable shopping malls, faux nature design, rigid control by community covenants and associations—dominates the bellwether metro regions of Southern California and Florida, but also encircles most of the older urban regions of the nation. These dense donuts of development offer fewer places for natural play than the earlier suburbs. In some cases, they offer even fewer natural play spaces than the centers of the old industrial cities.

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Bellwether Metro Regions

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an indicator or predictor of something, so the bellwether regions of Florida and Southern California are the regions with nice weather and popular metro regions

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Green Design

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“there is a sense that cities are and ought to be places where nature occurs.

Front 15

The De-Natured Child

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territory; the criminalization of natural play, for example, which is both a symptom and cause of the transformation, is occurring without much notice. Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by modern families, more time in front of the TV and the computer, and growing obesity among adults and children because of diet and sedentary lifestyles.