Michael Harris, «Solitude: In Pursuit of A Singular Life in a Crowded World»:

I spoke with a bright teenager called Derrick who told me that, for him, communing with nature means first getting a friend to be the “designated texter.” He let the phrase dangle there a moment.

At last I bit. “What’s a designated texter?” His explanation was heartbreaking: Derrick and his friends are so inundated by messages from anxious parents that, in order to feel properly free when they go exploring, they are forced into a bit of trickery. Half a dozen phones will be left in the care of the “designated texter” (they take turns), and, free at last, the others will wander into the woods, or down to the beach, confident they won’t be hassled for a few hours at least. 

The texter, left in a basement or bedroom with a movie to watch on a laptop, responds with neutral comments to parents who feel compelled to check in; the texter provides a banal assurance, which is all that’s needed to grant the others some untethered recreation.

What struck me was not the deception, per se, but the way these youths (always depicted in the media as phone junkies) had engineered a disconnection into their lives. They weren’t experiencing total solitude when they tramped off with their friends—but they were lowering their levels of connection, mediating things in order to experience an authenticity and communion with nature that their parents took for granted only a few decades earlier. And yet they could accomplish this only through subterfuge. They were like bandits forced to steal an encounter with the wild. While we talk about the rights of impoverished children to have access to the Internet, perhaps we need to also talk about their right to access nature.

Digital natives like Derrick live within a bizarre paradox. On the one hand, they spend their lives exploring territories that their parents could only dream of accessing: Pterodactyl porn? Don’t mind if I do. But on the other hand they’re physically constrained in the real world to a degree that would have left their parents bucking. In the United Kingdom, for example, the radius around a home that children freely wander in has shrunk by a stunning 90 per cent since 1970. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, has described an epidemic of “nature deficit disorder”—the human cost of alienation from nature—which includes “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.” 

Stephen Moss, one of the U.K.’s leading nature writers, produced a report for the Nature Trust in which he insists this is “not an anachronistic lament on modernity” but rather an assertion of an inalienable right, a right to see things growing and peer into wide-open sky, a right to build a fire on the beach or hike a country trail with a sense of true autonomy from the usual authorities. It ought to be a right to walk out into the green and blue world.

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