Blog Posts: January 2012
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.
