The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865 by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (review)

The cover image on Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s The Nature of Childhood perfectly captures one of the most important organizing themes in this ambitious synthetic history: many adults preserve, either literally or figuratively, a snapshot that depicts their nostalgic ideal of the perfect union of childhood and “nature.” Riney-Kehrberg offers her readers a family photo from the 1970s, showing a gap-toothed cowboy (cowgirl?) who appears as proud of his fringed vest as he is of his prowess in climbing the white birch tree in which he is perched. However, throughout the text Riney-Kehrberg also asks readers to ponder the photograph’s negative, as it were. Alongside those idyllic images of happy children frolicking in “nature,” she argues, adults harbor disquieting anxieties about the dangers that lurk in what they consider less savory environments. The rub, of course, is that adults and children do not always agree about which landscape is salubrious and which potentially salacious. Moreover, as adults become parents, they tend to forget a truth they learned as children: whatever the particularities of the landscape, it was the freedom to roam unsupervised within it that truly rendered the natural world miraculous. These perceptual fractures cleave the contested terrain which forms the underpinning of Riney-Kehrberg’s book.

Despite its slightly misleading subtitle, An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865, the text does boast a broad temporal and geographic sweep. This is, however, largely a twentieth-century story, with brief forays into the farms and urban neighborhoods that populated the rapidly evolving landscape of fin-de-siècle America. And, as Riney-Kehrberg acknowledges in the introduction, this work is not so much an American history as it is a middle-American history, with the bulk of its most compelling primary source materials originating in the Upper Midwest and Great Plains. Neither of these observations should dissuade readers, since the text is at its best when it remains closest to the landscapes in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Colorado, with which the author is most conversant.

The book’s organization privileges landscape, while still moving logically through time. The first three chapters discuss the Progressive Era, in its rural, urban, and fledging suburban manifestations. The second half of the book moves on to post-WWII suburbs, child-friendly “wild” places, and finally to, well, the couch—where contemporary children languish in front of a variety of screens. Oddly, though, The Nature of Childhood is less successful when it is focused on the landscape itself, and much more insightful when it engages the environmental messages that children have been taught about the landscape. Fortunately, these chapters comprise the heart of the book and lead readers from Progressive Era nature appreciation lessons to the birth of midcentury environmental awareness programs. Chapter 3 largely offers a synthesis of secondary scholarship on the nature programs of voluntary youth organizations, as well as programs based in summer camps. Chapter 4 extends this discussion into the 1950s and 60s but also includes some fascinating original work on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the Forest Service’s Woodsy Owl, and Ranger Rick of the National Wildlife Federation, all of which, Riney-Kehrberg argues, raised the environmental awareness of America’s last generation of “truly free-range” children (136).

One of the author’s stated goals for The Nature of Childhood is to take those children seriously as active agents of environmental change who viewed landscapes differently than adults (3–4). Admirable as this is, it is a difficult promise to keep and one that mostly eludes Riney-Kehrberg—except in chapter 5, “Along the High Line.” Thanks to oral histories and the author’s personal reminiscences, Metropolitan Denver’s High Line Canal comes alive as an “urban wild space” shaped by the children who spent their abundant free time exploring its many treasures...