Last month, UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology published a wondrously strange title: Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open their Doors. It’s a cross between a coffee table book (hardback, lots of glossy photos) and an academic study. A team of anthropologists and archaeologists from the Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) descended on two and a half dozen homes in Los Angeles, then documented the behavior of their inhabitants as if they were prairie dogs on Animal Planet. Researchers “tracked their every move with position-locating devices and documented their homes, yards, and activities with reams and reams of photographs. They asked family members to narrate videotaped tours of their homes and took measurements at regular intervals of stress hormones via saliva samples.”
And as the researchers discovered, this was more like 32 middle-class families who didn’t open their doors, or even move around all that much.
“Nearly three-fourths of the Los Angeles parents and about half of the children spent no leisure time in their backyards over the course of the study,” UCLA’s website notes. “They could not manage to carve out time to relax, play, eat, read or swim outside, despite the presence of such pricey features as built-in pools, spas, dining sets and lounges. Watching television inside proved the most frequent leisure activity for parents, consuming about 50 percent of their already limited leisure time, followed by reading magazines, newspapers and books (21 percent)."
The book puts it more starkly: “Children choose indoor activities for about 90 percent of their leisure time at home, dominated by TV, video games, play with toys and puzzles, and general play with siblings and friends. Much of this play is sedentary and solitary. Outdoor pools, sports equipment, and expansive grassy yards are rarely used. Some families keep blinds and curtains perpetually closed.”
Though most press for the book has focused on the study's conclusions about Americans' unprecedented hoards of stuff—CELF found that “managing the volume of possessions was such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers”—its insights about Americans' relationship with the outdoors are perhaps even more profound. Though it's stressful to have a garage so overstuffed with tools and bulk cleaning supplies you can't park a car in there, the loss of connection to nature may have deeper consequences. It's been proven that hospital patients recover more quickly when their windows face trees, rather than a brick wall, and that too much technology, and too few trips to the park, may make us fat, sick and depressed. As Timothy Egan observed in a New York Times essay earlier this year:
"For most of human history, people chased things or were chased themselves. They turned dirt over and planted seeds and saplings. They took in Vitamin D from the sun, and learned to tell a crow from a raven (ravens are larger; crows have a more nasal call; so say the birders). And then, in less than a generation’s time, millions of people completely decoupled themselves from nature.
"There’s a term for the consequences of this divorce between human and habitat — nature deficit disorder, coined by the writer Richard Louv in a 2005 book, “Last Child in the Woods.” It sounds trendy, a bit of sociological shorthand, but give the man and his point a listen...Kids who do play outside are less likely to get sick, to be stressed or become aggressive, and are more adaptable to life’s unpredictable turns, Louv said. Since his book came out, things have gotten worse.
"The average young American now spends practically every minute—except for the time in school—using a smartphone, computer, television or electronic device, my colleague Tamar Lewin reported in 2010, from a Kaiser Family Foundation study....Understandably, we want to protect our kids from 'out there' variables. But it’s better not just to play in dirt, but to eat it. Studies show exposure to the randomness of nature may actually boost the immune system."
Anthony Graesch, one of the study's authors, stated that it was tough for him to get didactic about kids' tendencies to stay indoors and watch TV ("It’s hard to moralize about any individual way of being human"). The interviewer replied, "But do you really believe that? Come on." Graesch says they found the most interaction occurred between family members while they were watching TV. Of course, these families no longer eat together at one table, but rather at different times in different rooms, mainly relying “on convenience foods like frozen meals and par-baked bread," even though "they saved an average of only 10 to 12 minutes per meal in doing so.”
There are many ways of being human, and an anthropologist's role is to observe, not to judge. But that doesn't mean we aren't fat, sick, depressed, and stressed out, and that our detachment from nature isn't contributing to that. Perhaps we know that intuitively; that would explain the explosion in farmer's markets, and why dustups over front-yard vegetable gardens are making national news. And why pepole like Ferguson resident Karl Tricamo, who just won his appeal with the city to keep his front-yard vegetable garden, fight hard to protect their gardens, even if it means a lot of suffering and inconvenience doing battle with local government. Going outside to grow something, and trading in that Beanie Baby collections for a patch of scarlet runner beans, can really alter your worldview.
