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is
urban
and what is
natural
. Perhaps because of the expansiveness of our ecological resources and land base, we have tended to see the most significant forms of nature as occurring somewhere else—often hundreds of miles away from where most people actually live—in national parks, national seashores, and wilderness areas.”
    These are some of the trends that form the American context for a de-natured childhood, something that is perhaps as mysterious as—and certainly less studied than—the march of the nanorobots or the advance of the chimera.

3. The Criminalization of Natural Play
    For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms
. . .
    —H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU
    C ONSIDER M ISTER R ICK’S neighborhood.
    Fifteen years ago, John Rick, a middle-school math teacher, and his family moved to Scripps Ranch because of its child-friendly reputation. Set in a lush old eucalyptus grove in a northern San Diego neighborhood laced with canyons and linked by walking paths, Scripps is one of those rare developments where parents can imagine their children enjoying nature, just as they did. A sign near its entrance reads, “Country Living.”
    “We have more Scout troops per capita than just about anywhere else in the country,” says Rick. “The planners fought to have vast amounts of open space for kids to play in and parks for every neighborhood.”
    A few years after moving to Scripps Ranch, Rick started reading articles in the community’s newsletter about the “illegal use” of open space. “Unlike where we had lived before, kids were actually out there running around in the trees, building forts, and playing with their imaginations,” he recalls. “They were putting up bike ramps to make jumps. They were damming up trickles of water to float boats. In other words, they were doing all the things we used to do as kids. They were creating for themselves all those memories that we cherish so fondly.” And now it had to stop. “Somehow,” says Rick, “that tree house was now a fire hazard. Or the ‘dam’ might cause severe flooding.”
    Authoritative adults from the Scripps Ranch Community Associationchased kids away from a little pond near the public library, where children had fished for bluegills since Scripps Ranch had been a working cattle spread many decades earlier. In response to the tightened regulations, families erected basketball hoops. Young people moved their skateboard ramps to the foot of their driveways. But the community association reminded the residents that such activities violated the covenants they had signed when they bought their houses.
    Down came the ramps and poles, and indoors went the kids.
    “Game Boy and Sega became their imagination,” Rick says. “Parents became alarmed. Their kids were getting fat. Something had to be done.” So the parents supported the creation of a skate park in a more willing neighborhood. That neighborhood was ten miles away.
    Rick is free to move to another neighborhood, but in the growing donuts of development surrounding most American cities, such restrictions are becoming the rule. Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents and kids now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law.
    One source of constriction is private government. Most housing tracts, condos, and planned communities constructed in the past two to three decades are controlled by strict covenants that discourage or ban the kind of outdoor play many of us enjoyed as children. Today, more than 57 million Americans live in homes ruled by condominium, cooperative, and homeowners’ associations, according to the Community Associations Institute. The number of community associations burgeoned from 10,000 in 1970 to 286,000 today. These associations impose rules on adults and