THE NEW NATURE MOVEMENT
The Age of Emptiness or the Coming Creativity?
One day, while driving down a freeway, I looked up to see an empty sky where there had been mountaintops.
Dust was rising as massive earth graders rumbled across a now-blank plain. Seemingly overnight, they had sliced away the horizon. Later came rows of mini-mansions devoid of color or individuality or visual meaning, and shopping malls, one after another after another after another, with the same anchor stores, the same stucco, the same cars, the same dreamlessness.
Perhaps you’ve shared this feeling – this solastalgia, as Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls it: a form of human psychic distress caused by the loss of nature. Read Full Post.
You're Part of the New Nature Movement if…
- You want to reconnect with real life in a virtual age.
- You’re a student who’s decided to build a career connecting people to nature.
- You’re an entrepreneur who wants to build a business connecting people to nature.
- You’re a parent, child or therapist who believes that the family that plays in nature together stays together.
- You’re a biologist, landscape architect or policymaker dedicated to transforming cities into engines of biodiversity and human health.
- You're someone who understands that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that nature is a window into that wonder. Read Full Post.
And Now a Few Words About the Children & Nature Network
After “Last Child in the Woods” was published, a handful of like-minded individuals came together to form the Children & Nature Network. Our mission was simple: to help build a movement to reconnect children and their families to nature—for their physical health, cognitive development and emotional well-being, and for the good of our communities and the planet. Many groups have been committed to this issue for decades. But we believed that a new network of people and organizations could accelerate efforts to connect children and adults to the natural world.
The Forgotten Human Right
Do children – do all of us – have a right to meaningful connection to the natural world? Annelies Henstra, a Dutch human rights attorney, thinks so. She calls it the “forgotten human right.”
In the March 2009 issue of Orion Magazine, and then in a more detailed chapter in “The Nature Principle,” I sketched out a case for that right; not as legal argument, but as moral stance. And I emphasized that this birthright is accompanied by a responsibility to protect and care for the natural world.
That idea had already begun to take root as part of the children and nature movement. In 2007, California adopted the first statewide children's outdoor bill of rights, followed by similar symbolic statements in other states, including Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Kansas, and most recently Wisconsin. Cities and regions around the country have embraced similar declarations.
Now the concept is spreading internationally.
Read Full Post.
Christmas Love Letters
The following piece doesn't have a lot to do with nature, at least not directly, but bear with me.
One December, I wrote a newspaper column about Linda Evangelist, of El Centro, California, who did not enjoy shopping.
Linda and the members of her family decided that, rather than buying each other presents, each would write a love letter to the other family members, to be read aloud on Christmas morning. The love letters would list at least twenty-five reasons why the person receiving the letter was loved or valued.
Among the reasons her son Brad (then a teen-ager) gave for loving his dad: "You would bribe me to go get ice cream late at night after Mom went to bed." Among the reasons her two sons gave for loving their mom: "You come up with weird ideas like this one." Among the reasons the brothers gave for loving each other: "You rode me on your handlebars to school when I was in junior high," and "You were considerate enough to put your banana peels under the couch." And so on
Christmas morning love lists became a tradition in the Evangelist household—and in other homes, as well. One year, at Christmas time, a talk-show host on L.A. radio station KFI read the column over the air. The idea began to spread. So I decided that my family had better get on board, too.
Read Full Post.
The Lady Across the Lake
On the way to Mrs. Townsend's house, I would stop and listen to the sound of ice expanding. Pinpointing where the frozen booms came from was impossible, so I would hunker down in the Kansas wind and keep walking. Even so, I was easily distracted. Now and then, I would encounter the staring eye of a bluegill, suspended in the ice like a prehistoric fly caught in clear amber.
When I reached the far side, Mrs. Townsend would wave me into her cottage. A widow, she lived alone and published our little community newspaper. I do not remember her first name. Adults did not have first names in those days. In the fading light, I would sit down on her settee, and she would sit in her wingback chair on the other side of the fireplace, which was always lit on winter evenings. I handed her my column.
“Typed. How nice,” she would say. Then she would lean back and read it, and I would hold my breath. When she began to laugh, the fire seemed to grow brighter and hotter. Read Full Post.
The Little Things
On Thanksgiving
The little things. The click of your wife's makeup bottles and brushes in the bathroom in the morning, the subsurface sound of them, a kind of music. The accompaniments: the older boy's bedroom door opening and shutting in haste, a faucet running, a gust of wind in the eucalyptus, the last rain on the window. The little things are what we remember, what we know, of family life. Of life.
The large events have their place, but even the large events of a family's passage are assembled from little things. The rush to the emergency room and the way the air feels there and the brave little chin thrust up beneath the mask, the small choked cry and the sound—especially this sound—of the thread being pulled through the wound, and the way the little hand holds tight to your finger. The little things. Read Full Post.
The Cure
Took medicine for nature-deficit disorder with buddy John Johns on Wednesday.
Feeling better, thanks.
Photo by John Johns Read Full Post.
21 WAYS TO PLANT A RESTORATIVE CITY
During the first week of November, members of the American Society of Landscape Architects and their colleagues from around the country – over 5,000 strong – met at the San Diego Convention Center. Saving the world was somewhere on the agenda.
Could they be the group with the most influence on human habitat in the future, particularly when it comes to the connection between children and adults to the rest of nature? “Because of their training, landscape architects are big thinkers, or tend to be,” says my friend, Vicki Estrada, a landscape architect, urban designer, and president of Estrada Land Planning in San Diego.
Asked to speak at the conference, I offered a starter list of suggestions for how landscape architects, and the rest of us, could truly green our cities:
DO YOU LIVE IN A "RESTORATIVE CITY?"
"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home." -— Gary Snyder
Afew months ago, at the Minnesota Arboretum, several hundred people from a variety of sectors – tourism, housing development, health care, education, and others – came together for a conference focused in part on the Nature Principle.
I was especially intrigued by the remarks of Mary Jo Kreitzer, a nursing professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the university’s Center for Spirituality and Healing. She said the state should make it a goal to become the healthiest state in the country, and that viewing the future through the prism of the Nature Principle could help Minnesota reach that goal. Read Full Post.
