A male rose-breasted grosbeak visits our new bird feeder, bringing a bit of wonder into our small suburban yard.

I just finished reading The Nature Principle by Richard Louv, a follow up to his book, The Last Child in the Woods. Louv writes about our growing disconnect with the natural world and how restoring that connection benefits our health, both physical and mental, our families, and our communities. I find his work inspirational and very, very accurate. We humans forget that we are part of nature to our own detriment.

A few years ago, I accompanied my son on a Cub Scout campout when my husband was too ill to go. I hadn’t been camping in decades, and my own connection with the woods had long ago been discarded. I didn’t really want to do. I went into the weekend anxious, expecting to be uncomfortable, cold, and maybe even a little bit bored. I was uncomfortable (the scouts popped my air bed using it as a trampoline), and I was cold despite sleeping in two layers, gloves, and a ski cap, but I was never even a little bored. Rather, I was more relaxed and more genuinely myself than I had been in a decade. I learned that weekend that I NEED to camp, and it surprised me.

We humans tend to forget that we didn’t evolve in air-conditioned homes, lounging on upholstered furniture and watching tv. We are wired for woodlands and prairies, rivers and lakes, mountains and deserts. Our minds and bodies need to hear birdsong, feel breezes, and smell the rich soil of the forest floor. I experienced this connection on that weekend away, and since then I’ve chased the nature high in a number of ways, including hiking in the mountains of upstate New York, trekking through the dunes of Cape Cod, and bird watching in the jungles of Costa Rica.

The central point of The Nature Principle, though, is that I should not need to travel to the ends of the world to get my fix. I can find nature in my daily life here in suburban New Jersey if I take the time to look. The recent addition of bird feeders to our yard is a good start, and the whole family is working to learn to identify the daily visitors to our home. We even have several species nesting in our landscaping, and I have taken to getting my daily dose of birdsong by doing my morning reading out on my porch, sitting in the hammock beneath the house wrens’ nests.

Beyond my own yard, my community has many opportunities to get in touch with nature. There is a huge park with more than 4 miles of running paths a short walk from my home, and it is home to a growing herd of deer, foxes, and coyotes as well as smaller mammals, frogs, turtles, snakes and birds. I usually run there with my headphones on for my training, but taking them off for some of my runs would allow me to have a deeper experience there. There is a county park nearby as well, where the paths aren’t paved and the woods are just slightly more wild. This might be a good spot to take my children on weekly hikes.

Even further out, there is a network of county, state, and national parks that would offer a variety of places to hike, fish, and explore. Perhaps I can make a point of taking my family on a monthly trip to explore a new place, hike a trail they’ve never seen before, and fish a spot they’ve never seen (yes, we fish, but it’s all catch and release). Maybe I’ll even invite other families in our community to join us, forming a little family nature club much like the ones described in the book. Anyone interested in joining in?

My town used to have its own regional mall. It first opened its doors when I was around six. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of resenting being left at home with a babysitter when my parents were invited to attended the opening night gala because my father was one of the urban planners who had worked with the town through the development approval phases of the project.

Dad was still working with the town decades later when another developer came in to tear down the dead retail hulk that the mall had become and replace it with shiny new Target, Costco, Work Out World and other associated retail uses. Our mall had died slowly over the course of several years due to a variety of things including mismanagement and the failure to find and keep a third anchor as one department store after another filed for bankruptcy, but mainly what killed it was the decline in mall usage in general. Our mall was not the only one in our region to die.

Many of these malls are being be torn down and replaced with a newer retail model, something I call the drive-only village, with a cluster of large box stores placed so far apart that you have to get in your car to go from one to the next. Many others are being given superficial face lifts and interior renovations in the hopes of breathing new life into them. However, as Mother Nature Network points out, these building also present an opportunity for adaptation to newer, perhaps greener, uses:

Well, if a mall hasn’t already closed, it can consider one of the new iterations of the contemporary mall. Communities and city planners have gotten creative, using abandoned mall spaces for schools, government offices, medical clinics, casinos, wedding venues, call centers and churches. And while some malls are being torn down and housing or completely new retail buildings are being built, it is much more economically savvy and green to reuse the existing infrastructures.
via A green revolution at our nations malls | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

One of my recent clients did something like this. He found a dead strip mall which has withered from a vibrant retail center to a mostly empty hulk housing only two small restaurants, a dry cleaners, and the occasional short-term furniture liquidator tenant. He cleaned the whole place up, reworking the parking fields, refacing the entire building, and then rather than finding a bunch of chain stores to lease his space to, he creating a new business to occupy the bulk of it–an indoor amusement center and entertainment/banquet venue. He took this huge indoor space and made it home to carnival rides, laser tag, a go-cart speedway, several restaurants, and a classic seaside arcade. What was once an homage to consumerism is now a place where families can spend an afternoon or evening actively playing together and having fun.

While this is not necessarily a “green” use, the clever reuse of the existing building shows that there is truly hope that all these huge buildings littering our communities can be successfully adapted to non-retail uses. I would love to see the indoor park idea brought to life–in fact I suspect that doing so in a mall on life-support might even boost its viability. If the mall had comfortable and landscaped indoor running paths for me to use, they would be luring me in several times a week rather than several times a year! And who’s to say that I wouldn’t wind up stopping by the Starbucks for a post-run drink or check out the newest in running shoes while I was there?