“I am not an atheist but an earthiest” wrote the naturalist Edward Abbey, park ranger and author of the classic Desert Solitaire. But if Abbey eloquently spat on civilization back in the 1960s, he might be too appalled for words today. Visits to national parks have decreased by over 20 percent since 1988, and most of the decline, according to a 2006 study in the Journal of Environmental Management, can be attributed to movies, the Internet, video games, and the soaring price of oil. In fact, in 2005, journalist Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe how modern life has literally “scared children straight out of the woods and fields.”
I think I may suffer from that disorder myself. I live in New York City — the Internet is my gateway to infinity, and my recreation is an occasional foray to Central Park, where I can commune with trees and motorcycles in the same breath. It’s been five years since I walked through a grove of wildflowers and aspens at 10,000 feet in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. Lately, I’ve felt as if I’m dying from lack of nature. I look at the spindly city trees and think, empathetically, “You’re too well behaved. So am I. You don’t risk enough. Neither do I. You dutifully breathe in smog, grow only to a certain city-ish height, and leave immensity and eternity to your redwood brethren in the Northwest. I guess you and I are both suffering, but hey, it’s adapt or die, right?” Well, as an Australian friend who owned 30 acres of temperate rainforest outside Melbourne said once, “If I ever turn to you and call Central Park nature, take me outside and shoot me.”
Around the same time as my friend said that, my uncle Phil piped up at a Thanksgiving dinner with this pronouncement: “I don’t think you can live a truly spiritual life apart from nature.” My aunt Vassa and my uncle Phil (who practice and teach the African Ifa religion) own a 10-acre retreat in central Florida that, prior to tectonic shifts, was a part of Morocco, and on which, my aunt says, she can feel the ancestral African energies. In those days, I defended the glories and grandeur of New York City and quoted poet Hart Crane’s rhapsodic lines about the Brooklyn Bridge: “O harp and altar, of the fury fused / How could mere toil align thy choiring strings?”
These days, I think Vassa and Phil have made an absolutely brilliant choice. I still cherish the city, but we have not evolved to live packed into concrete beehives, peeking out our portholes to the spikes of high-rises, thwarting circadian rhythms with incessantly buzzing fluorescent lights, waking to traffic instead of birdsong. We adapt, but do we thrive?
In 1989 Harvard University naturalist E.O. Wilson put forth his theory of biophilia, the human love of living things, and suggested: “To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained . . . More complexity exists in a handful of soil than on the surfaces of all the other planets combined. Life around us exceeds in complexity and beauty anything else humanity is ever likely to encounter.”
I suppose my own private epiphany came on the day, last March, when I pushed the button of my Sound Oasis machine to listen to a repeating loop of ocean surf, rather than the noxious city noise outside my window. And I noticed my entire body relaxing, as if my very stem cells were programmed from timeless time to know that sound, to love that sound, that primordial music of moving water.
So I called my friend Tyler Volk, an earth scientist at New York University (who, in the best of all possible worlds, has a high-rise apartment in Greenwich Village and a trailer in the Gila Wilderness) and said, “I need wild nature, but I can’t and won’t live too far from New York. Where can I go?” And we agreed that the border of wilderness starts at the ocean. Because there is quite a bit of ocean near me, I began to house hunt in charming, hilly beach towns about two hours from the city. And when I stood on a stretch of empty beach, in front of an expanse of endless water, and scooped up a smoothed ochre stone from the sand, I began to sense where my life might be headed.

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Jill Neimark is a journalist, novelist, and poet.