"Nature" and "childhood" are terms that can be moulded into more or less any shape the user wants to make of them. If you're a green activist, nature may be the forests and animals threatened by industrialisation and global warming; if you're an evolutionary biologist, it may be the genetic structure of life; if you're cosmologically inclined, it's every particle that has ensued from the big bang.
For Jay Griffiths, nature is a lost Arcadia. In one of many ecstatic images peppering this book, she writes that, when she was a child, she imagined herself as "the moon's daughter". The moon kept watch over her, she believed, because that's where she came from. She doesn't say if she believed this literally, or in a fairytale sense; nor does she say how old she was when she believed it. Five? Nine? Fourteen? It doesn't much matter, because she's not interested in the specifics of child development, nor in how children may actually think while they are children, but rather in generic notions of childhood and nature: those that conform to a prelapsarian vision of what she calls the "childscape".
There is an interesting idea in here. What Griffiths captures in her title is the original meaning of "kith and kin": kith being the territory, the attachment to place, that emerges alongside an affinity for one's family, or people. Take sheep, as an uncomplicated example. There's a farming theory that explains why lambs can, relatively easily, be suckled and raised by ewes that are not their biological mothers. The primary attachment a newborn lamb feels, the theory goes, is less to a specific mother than to the particular patch of ground on which it is born. If another ewe turns up on that ground, the lamb may be adopted without much more than a bleat.
It's no more difficult to wet-nurse human infants. As Griffiths suggests, place may be just as important to us as parenting. Attachment to, and competition for, territory is common to all animals – the principal distinction being that human territorial attachments have historically resulted in more complex, and usually bloodier, consequences. For Griffiths, however, kith is not merely an inevitable feature of human nature, but an ideal: one to be celebrated and reclaimed from the malign encroachments of modernity.
In her best-known book, Wild, Griffiths chronicled her travels among indigenous peoples in less-trodden parts of the world. In this new book, she draws the well-trodden but erroneous conclusion that traditional societies and tribes treat nature and children better than modern ones. She is no anthropologist, writing rather as a prose-poet of belonging and lost wilderness. In Kith, to justify her veneration of tribal practice, she produces a veneer of modern analysis, citing a 2007 Unicef report that ranked the UK last among 21 industrialised countries for the wellbeing of its children.
No analysis of this finding is provided. Instead, a single idea of lost childhood freedom is dressed up in various shades of orgasmically purple prose and applied to various cultures and reiterated throughout the book. Undaunted by the perils of pathetic fallacy, she writes lines such as: "Indigenous Australians told me not only how children need land, but also how land needs children, to hear their voices and their laughter in order to know that it is not abandoned."
According to Griffiths, what we in Britain lack – presumably to a worse degree than those other 20 countries – is the unenclosed nature and respect for place that would allow our children the freedom to rejoice in their true selves. To universalise her case, she makes claims that shift between the tenuous, the unsupportable and the flagrantly hysterical: that playing on asphalt generates more conflict than playing in greenery, that Norwegian suicide rates rose because its society became more organised, that current western treatment of children is akin to 20th-century ghettoisation of Jews.
But despite its international samples of modern oppression and indigenous freedom, Kith is, centrally, a lament for the English countryside and an expression of a very English Romanticism. The metaphor that dominates the book is that of "enclosure". The historical period that is here defined as the English fall came with the Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries, which curtailed the use of common land and, according to Griffiths, suffocated the true spirit of childhood.
For Griffiths, the poet who best represented the move from a supposedly free-roaming England to one of patchworked agricultural exclusion was John Clare: "The Enclosures spiked the nest of Clare's psyche," she writes. "Where moss and feathers had been, there was now a torque of barbed wire." Notwithstanding the fact that barbed wire didn't exist in Clare's time, this is the most effective evocation in the book: of social change expressed in traumatised Romantic poetry.
But Griffiths's affinity for English Romanticism too easily descends into merely dotty navel-gazing. "Before a mirror had meaning," she writes of herself, "before my skin was a boundary, I remember nature as if it were inside me. Birds sang and I heard it inside. It snowed: I snowed. It rained: I rained… I was all the world and all the world was me."
It's one thing to sing the lament of your own lost childhood; it's another to compose a reactionary ideology of all childhood around it. Griffiths sneers at the modern medical treatment of disordered children; the only diagnosis she permits is "nature deficit disorder". There are almost no accounts of actual children in Kith and certainly not the kind of children whom Griffiths bemoans: the ones who play computer games, or like sports, or dress up like princesses, or get excited by cars, or play with toy guns, or text one another, or generally grow up in cities.
Is it stating the obvious to observe that most modern cities were formed by people fleeing rural poverty or boredom to seek a better life? Is it necessary to point out that children may feel just as attached to a street as to a glen?
Follow the logic of what Wordsworth called the "unrelenting agency" of human consciousness to its conclusion and any distinction between the natural and the synthetic breaks down, because everything that is in the universe is part of nature, including modern consciousness.
Likewise, Griffiths's mystical distinction between the childscape and the domain of adults is no real distinction at all. The child is father of the man. Children are creatures of biology, not myth, and if biological nature is anything, it is adaptive. Children can mould themselves to any of the extraordinary variegations in human society and territory. It's that adaptability that is the most salient distinction between their nature and that of their future, more fated adult selves.
