16 Ideas for the Planet

FRAN P. MAINELLA
Honorary Doctorate and Visiting Scholar, Clemson University; Former Director, National Park Service

We've got to get our kids outdoors more
Linking our children back to nature is one of the most challenging environmental issues we have. When I used to come home from school, my mom and dad just said, "Go out and play, and come back in time for dinner." But today, because of security issues, children aren't going outside and playing in nature as much anymore, because we want to know where they are every minute; there's a greater need for supervision. And, as much as we love our technology, many children prefer to come home and be on a computer and in a chair rather than being out of doors—it's what Richard Louv [a visiting scholar at Brandeis University and author of "Last Child in the Woods"] calls "nature-deficit disorder." It has health repercussions as well: there's a direct link between a lack of exposure to nature and higher rates of attention-deficit disorder, obesity and depression.

The best way to protect our resources for the future is by helping children develop an appreciation for the outdoors. It's part of a movement underway right now, with people across the nation working on how to get children linked back to nature. One of the things we're doing here at Clemson is, we're working on an institute that may help us link our parks back to our children and to people of different cultural backgrounds who may not be as familiar with the parks. This is a challenge for all of us and something we all need to work on. The best way to protect our parks and our environment is to foster an appreciation for the outdoors. We can call the movement "no child left inside."

MARY C. PEARL, PH.D.
President, Wildlife Trust

Cutting down trees can lead to malaria
One of the most important and overlooked ecosystems in the world is in areas of rapid land conversion, where agriculture is encroaching on wilderness and where wildlife, livestock and humans are in close proximity. When you talk about emerging diseases, that's where they're emerging from. Nipah virus, which was first identified in Malaysia in 1999, is an example. Pig farms were carved out of forested areas, and fruit orchards were planted next to the pig enclosures, which brought pigs into contact with fruit bats, the natural reservoir for Nipah virus. The virus spread to pigs and then to the farmers, and the ones who caught it had a 40 percent mortality rate.

Organizations such as ours are pioneering a new specialty we call conservation medicine. In developed countries, the default assumption is that you're healthy unless you have a specific disease. In developing nations you have a whole cornucopia of pathogens, you have patients with multiple vulnerabilities, malnutrition, environmental exposure to pesticides and other toxins, a heavy parasite load, and people are living among livestock and wildlife. Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin documented a huge upsurge in malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the Peruvian Amazon, corresponding with intensive settlement and deforestation. Clearing the trees changed the population balance among the species of mosquitoes. Those are the kinds of challenges we're increasingly going to face in the 21st century.