Read Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder for Free Online

and definition of life is, or soon will be, from the experiences of us adults. In our childhood, it was clear enough when a man was a man and a mouse was a mouse. Implicit in some of the newest technologies is the assumption that there’s little difference between living and nonliving matter at the atomic and molecular level. Some see this as one more example of turning life into a commodity—the cultural reduction that turns living bodies into machines.
    As the twenty-first century dawned, scientists at Cornell University reported building the first true nanomachine—near-microscopic robot—capable of movement; the minuscule robot used a propeller and motor and drew power from organic molecules. This development opened “the door to make machines that live inside the cell,” one of the researchers said. “It allows us to merge engineered devices into living systems.” At Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, a scientist predicted that a system of “massively distributed intelligence” would vastly increase the nanorobots’ ability to organize and communicate. “They will be able to do things collectively that they can’t do individually, just like an ant colony,” he said. Around the same time, an entomologist in Iowa created a machine combining moth antennae and microprocessors that sent signals of different pitches when the antennae picked up the scent of explosives. Researchers at Northwestern University created a miniature robot equipped with the brain stem ofa lamprey eel. And a Rockville, Maryland, company engineered bacteria that could be functionally attached to microchips; the company called this invention “critters on a chip.”
    We can no longer assume a cultural core belief in the perfection of nature. To previous generations of children, few creations were as perfect or as beautiful as a tree. Now, researchers flood trees with genetic material taken from viruses and bacteria to make them grow faster, to create better wood products, or to enable trees to clean polluted soil. In 2003, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded researchers to develop a tree capable of changing colors when exposed to a biological or chemical attack. And the University of California promoted “birth control for trees,” a genetically engineered method of creating a “eunuch-tree that spends more of its energy making wood and not love.”
    For baby boomers, such news is fascinating, strange, disturbing. To children growing up in the third frontier, such news is simply more hair on the dog—an assumed complexity.
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A hyperintellectualized perception of other animals
    Not since the predominance of hunting and gathering have children been taught to see so many similarities between humans and other animals, though now those similarities are viewed in a very different, more intellectualized way.
    This new understanding is based on science, rather than myth or religion. For example, recent studies reported in the journal
Science
describe how some nonhuman animals compose music. Analyses of songs of birds and humpback whales show they use some of the same acoustic techniques, and follow the same laws of composition, as those used by human musicians. Whale songs even contain rhyming refrains, and similar intervals, phrases, song durations, and tones. Whales also use rhyme in the way we do, “as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material,” the researchers write. According to their study,whales physiologically have a choice: they could use arrhythmic and nonrepeating tunes, but instead, they sing.
    Such information is not a substitute for direct contact with nature, but this kind of knowledge does inspire a certain wonder. My hope is that such research will cause children to be more inclined to cultivate a deeper understanding of their fellow creatures. Sure, romanticized closeness—say, swimming with dolphins at an animal touchy-feely resort—may soften some of our