I'm pleased to share the announcement that the Children & Nature Network has awarded the 2023 Richard Louv Prize to Luis Alberto Camargo for his innovative and international leadership in nature connection. Luis is one of our heroes. Laura Mylan has written a terrific article about Luis and his work. Here's a small part of it (with a link to the full piece in C&NN's Finding Nature News):
Laura Mylan: For more than 25 years, Luis Alberto Camargo has been connecting children to the natural world. On June 15, Luis was named the 2023 Richard Louv Prize recipient, in recognition of his life’s work, which has impacted 130,000 children and youth across Colombia. The Richard Louv Prize was created in 2022 …This annual $15,000 cash prize is awarded to individuals doing exemplary work to advance equitable access to nature. The prize is open to any individual, anywhere in the world, and is designed to recognize innovative strategies for creating regular access to the benefits of nature. “I firmly believe that nature is essential to children’s well-being. Nature embraces us in many ways and allows transcendent experiences to be part of our learning to connect and become better ancestors,” said Luis upon receiving the award….As the wisest of teachers, we must recognize nature’s immense value and make every effort to learn from, be inspired, and activate our regenerative capacities to heal and restore ourselves, our communities, and our planet,” continued Luis.
To read more of Laura's piece and to learn more about Luis, please click here.
May 11 deadline: The Children & Nature Network is inviting nominations for the second annual Louv Prize for innovation in nature connection, which is accompanied by $15,000. Please nominate one of your heroes who is working to connect kids and families to nature. The prize will be awarded at the C&NN International Conference in Colorado in June.
It was an honor to speak with Dr. Jane Goodall for an hour, at the international Children & Nature Network Conference. Some of the conversation will be available soon from the Children & Nature Network. Also, the Children & Nature Network announced a new partnership with Roots & Shoots USA, Dr. Goodall's youth program.
From the Children & Nature Network: Congratulations to Atiya Wells, founder of the BLISS Meadows project, for being awarded the inaugural Richard Louv Prize for Innovation in Nature Connection.
Growing up in an urban setting, like many African-Americans impacted by the history of segregation and other patterns of systemic racism, Atiya Wells did not have access to experiences that might have fostered a healthy, loving relationship with nature. At the age of 22, she went hiking for the first time and a whole new world opened up.
Atiya then founded BLISS Meadows in her hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, to inspire and connect Black, Indigenous, and People of Color back to nature. The 10-acre land reclamation project provides opportunities for children and their families to get to know their ecosystem, to reframe and reclaim the history of their ancestors’ relationship to land and food and to contribute to a sustainable community resource right in their neighborhood. The award was created by the Children & Nature Network, and named for its co-founder.
"I've been thinking if I deserve to be standing here...and I do!" — Atiya Wells
THE WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED MAY 12….UNTIL NEXT YEAR
The Richard Louv Prize for Innovation in Nature Connection is open to any individual doing exemplary work to advance equitable access to nature in their community or region. The Richard Louv Prize recognizes innovative strategies for creating regular access to the benefits of nature everywhere children live, learn and play.
We believe equitable access to nature is achieved when systemic barriers to nature are removed and all members of a community — regardless of race, income, ability, identity or address — have regular opportunities to spend time in healthy outdoor spaces that are nearby, safe, welcoming and culturally relevant.
The Children & Nature Network created The Richard Louv Prize to honor the visionary leadership and contributions of its co-founder and Chair Emeritus, Richard Louv. His books have been translated and published in 24 countries, and his landmark book, Last Child in the Woods, helped launch an international movement to connect children, families and communities to nature.
When I was asked by John Bowman’s family to write this remembrance, I was honored and daunted. And I knew it would be a longer piece than usually appears in this space. How does one sum up the life of a man who has never quit living? Even now, his daughter Molly says she senses her father’s presence. When she writes, he urges her to use just the right word. Reflecting him, she most often uses the word love.
In the 1990s, a visitor walking into the subdued light of Stroud Tackle, on San Diego’s Morena Boulevard, would have felt transported to a slower, more personal time.
Bill and Eileen Stroud, aging but not old, would have stood like squinting officers on a bridge deck, the identity of the true captain unclear. Behind the counter, grinning, with an unlit pipe clenched in his teeth, would have been the chief volunteer and raconteur John Bowman.
In semi-fictional retirement, JB, as he was often called, spent many of his non-teaching hours either fishing or helping Bill and Eileen. With his neatly trimmed, startlingly white beard and aviator glasses, JB looked like a healthy Hemingway.
He appreciated that comparison, but it fell short.
When traveling, I walk to restore myself. Even in the loudest, most congested cities I usually find remnants of the natural world hiding in plain sight.
I take photographs with my mobile-phone camera of moving water and light and sky, and critters — a groundhog shimmying across the greens of a university campus in upstate New York, a tangle of trout in a Connecticut stream, a fox slipping through downtown Little Rock — and as I stand there, I send these photographs to my wife. The camera gives me the excuse to stop, look, and listen.
One November afternoon in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in search of lunch, I walked out the front door of a Holiday Inn and ambled north along a commercial strip.
There were no sidewalks, so I kept to a grass berm, walking through parking lots, across gravel, to a street with no pedestrian crosswalk or pedestrian light. The drivers were mad with desire, the traffic an endless knot.
Author Richard Louv chats about his book, “Last Child in the Woods” and the meaning of Nature-Deficit Disorder. Videography by Mark Schulze with Patty Mooney as Sound Tech, Crystal Pyramid Productions
On May 16, at the request of the Friends of San Diego Architecture, I spoke about the post-pandemic city. In this 15-minute video, posted on YouTube by the group, I make the case that we have an opportunity to change the course of urban design and architecture by weaving more nature into our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and homes. Why? Because public health will demand it, both because greater biodiversity can help prevent the spread of zoonotic diseases, but also for the therapeutic and social-distancing advantages during a pandemic. In 2020-21, we’ve seen growing awareness of the necessity of nature connection for our psychological and physical health. We’ve also become more aware of the inequitable availability of nature in cities—and the price of human loneliness.
The other day I received a card from some old friends who had just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. When I was growing up, Mr. and Mrs. Sebring were a kind of second set of parents to me.
They were the parents of my best friend, Pete. Decades later, I still can’t bring myself to call them by their first names. They sent a photograph with the card. Both are in their 70s. Mrs. Sebring is beaming into the lens; the flash was a little too close, so her face is slightly washed out, but the outline of her smile is comfortingly familiar. Mr. Sebring sits behind her; his hair white and full, his face square and strong. His features seem to be a bit sharper now. He is smiling the smile of a man who has married well and lived to tell about it.
On the back of the photograph, Mrs. Sebring had written, “Waiting for God.” It was a Sebring joke; it was her light way of suggesting that life was winding down and that, perhaps, something remarkable was about to happen.
My mother called herself an animal lover. By profession an artist, she loved all animals — or most of them. Her eight-year-old son was studying to become a herpetologist, and she had a serious snake phobia.
One afternoon, the mailman delivered a box, about the size of a shoebox, postmarked Silver Springs, Florida. Something moved within it. I peeled back a corner.
“As part of a national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize, California Humanities convened a series of discussion forums throughout the state through the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative. One of our earlier discussion forums was on the topic of Journalism and Democracy in California; and we thought that a post-election blog reminding our readers of the important relationship between the humanities and journalism was needed. Please read through for a blog contribution by author Richard Louv, one of our We Are the Humanities 40 notable Californians, discussing this traditional yet tenuous relationship.” — California Humanites
During my lifetime, the humanities and journalism have been interdependent, each improving and nourishing the other. The future of that relationship is not guaranteed.
… the boys are small. We’re staying in a three-room cabin beside the Owens River on the east slope of the Sierras. We can hear the October wind move down from the mountains. The boys are in their beds, and I read to them from the 1955 juvenile novel, “Lion Hound,” by Jim Kjelgaard.
I have had this book since junior high. I read:
“When Johnny Torrington awoke, the autumn dawn was still two hours away. For five luxurious minutes he stretched in his warm bed, the covers pulled up to his chin while he listened to the wind blowing through the bedroom’s open window. Though the wind was no colder than it had been yesterday, it seemed to have a quality now that had been lacking then.”
Kjelgaard describes the hills of California, still alive with “tawny puffs of smoke” able “to break a bull’s neck and yet are so secretive.” I glance at the boys.
My youngest son’s eyes, made larger by strong round glasses, widen. My older boy tucks his face under the blanket, where he can surely see the lion circling.
Not long ago, my great editor Amy Gash sent me the new jacket design of “Last Child in the Woods." The image has a special meaning for me. Neither Amy or the designer were, at that time, aware of a story I've told to only a few friends. I'll tell it here anyway.
When my boys were small, I considered myself lucky to work at home. At the time, I missed my colleagues in the newsroom. Still do, on both counts. In 1995, I wrote a column about working from home, which was later included in The Web of Life, and adapted here:
We should be cautious when we talk about traditional fatherhood. Which tradition?
As a writer, I spend much of my time in a home office staring at a computer screen. Often on weekends, or after school, my sons head for the small Macintosh that sits a few feet away from my bigger Mac. I work in a virtual blacksmith shop.
Working from home was the norm for many parents before the Industrial Revolution swept men up and sent them off to the widget factories, and later to office parks and office building, where women eventually and rightly joined them.
In those days, fathers spent a lot of time close to their children. On the farm, in the store downstairs, in the blacksmith shop next door, a child might work with his father, might hand him the tools of his trade or might play to one side while his father worked.
The sinew of this earlier tradition was time and proximity. Being there. Being nearby. And of course this was true for mothers and their children, too.
Today, the paperback edition of "Our Wild Calling" is officially released. I hope you'll share this news with friends and colleagues. They may find it especially helpful during the time of Covid, as we increasingly turn to other animals (wildlife and pets) for meaning and connection — not only for our sake, but for the sake of the larger family of animals.
We've added a new section to this edition, including: a comprehensive resource list for people who want to take action at home and beyond (organizations focused on habitat and animal welfare; sources for job possibilities; research and educational resources. Also: a list of discussion questions for book groups, schools and classes (hopefully held outdoors); and an author Q&A related to the pandemic and new research. Hardback, ebook, audible, large print, and foreign editions are also available.
I'm deeply appreciative for the support so many of you continue to give to "Our Wild Calling," as well as "Last Child in the Woods" and my other books; and also to the Children & Nature Network and other good organizations connecting children, families and communities to the natural world.
Recently, I have been thinking about Lucy Hollembeak, a surviver of the 1918 influenza pandemic. I first met her when I worked as a college intern for The Arkansas City Daily Traveler, in a hard-edged little town on the Kansas and Oklahoma border.
I was nineteen and knew no one in the town beyond the paper’s staff. My high school history teacher in Kansas City, Gerald Hollembeak, had suggested I look up his mother.
So I did. In June 1968, I introduced myself to her. Her husband had died in 1959, and since then she had lived alone. Every few evenings we would talk about politics, about religion, about what we came to call “the ache,” the painful pleasure of being alive.
As I came to know and admire her, I was moved by her wisdom—how she conserved what was valuable, appreciated what was small, needed little, but had a mind as broad as the prairie itself. She had written poetry all of her life, scribbled on scraps of paper. When I returned to college, after my summer in Ark City, a poem or two would arrive in the mail now and then.
Decades passed. I had not seen her since that summer.
The term Nature-Deficit Disorder® was introduced in 2005 with the publication of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
I coined the phrase to serve as a description of the human costs of alienation from nature and it is not meant to be a medical diagnosis (although perhaps it should be), but as a way to talk about an urgent problem that many of us knew was growing, but had no language to describe it. The term caught on, and is now a rallying cry for an international movement to connect children to rest of nature. Since then, this New Nature Movement has broadened to include adults and whole communities.
Over a decade ago a small group of hopeful people co-founded the Children & Nature Network. As you know, C&NN was created to bring together unlikely allies from all over the country, and now the world, to build a movement to connect children and nature and overcome what, in Last Child in the Woods, I called nature-deficit disorder.
Each December, my wife, Kathy, and I write a year-end check to C&NN. If you haven’t already become a member of C&NN or made a donation, I hope you’ll join us this week.
A few years ago, I worked with a national awards program called Leadership for a Changing World. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation, it honored grassroots leaders who were making life better in communities of hardship and possibility. That program continued as an initiative of New York University|Wagner. Curiously, these inspiring people did not think of themselves as leaders. But surely they practiced the kind of leadership we need most.
My job was to advise the award-winners on how to best frame and communicate their issues. As part of that work, I put together a list of characteristics of what I considered Leadership Writing. In 2018, these principles may seem archaic, even naive, but I continue to believe in their effectiveness and practice them. I hope these 15 principles are useful to you. Also, as you read the work of journalists, columnists, bloggers—or listen to the speeches of politicians—ask yourself if they exhibit these traits. My favorite leaders do.
Leadership Writing ....
Paints a picture of a world people will want to go to.
Consists of one third complaint, two-thirds solution.
Builds bridges rather than calling names.
Compares and contrasts in a respectful way.
Kills jargon.
Appeals to higher values shared by the opposition.
Offers contrarian, unexpected points of view.
Undermines stereotypes, reaches beyond the writer’s own culture.
Anticipates unintended consequences.
Avoids over-reliance on the “importance” of the issue. (Every issue is “important.”)
Looks for the simplifying model.
Helps people see what they already know but cannot picture.
Uses humor whenever possible.
Serves as an antidote to cultural depression.
Offers accurate hope, because there is no practical alternative.
As mentioned is an earlier post, when working with grassroots leaders some years ago, my job was to help them communicate more effectively with the public—something they usually did just fine on their own. Still, we all need a boost from time to time. For myself and for them, I gathered a collection of my favorite quotes from writers about writing—and offered a few thoughts of my own:
“No Music + Bad TV = Bad Mood + No Pages.” — Hunter S. Thompson
“You only want to work on the stuff you’re not supposed to be working on. That’s how it always is. I’ll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I’ll jump over to something else. That’s how my head has always worked. I don’t know if it’s ‘cause I watched too much TV as a kid or what. It really could be that.” — Dave Eggers, author of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”
“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.” — 
Anne Lamott, author of “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”
Click here to join the Children & Nature Network before December 31, 2017 and be recognized as a Charter Member. As a Charter Member, you’ll have increased opportunities to engage with leaders in our movement, gain valuable support & resources. You will join like-minded changemakers in creating a more powerful constituency for our issue—and help shape the future of the children and nature movement.
Afew years ago, Madhu Narayan, a Girl Scout leader in San Diego, told me this story: “In my first counseling job, with another organization, I took children with AIDS to the mountains who had never been out of their urban neighborhoods. One night, a nine-year-old woke me up. She had to go to the bathroom. We stepped outside the tent and she looked up. She gasped and grabbed my leg. She had never seen the stars before.
“That night, I saw the power of nature on a child. She was a changed person,” said Narayan.” From that moment on, she saw everything, even the camouflaged lizard that everyone else skipped by. She used her senses. She was awake.”
The National Parks are called that for a reason. They’re not the Parks for the One Percent. Not just the Parks for People with Cool Gear.
Some people say there are too many people visiting the nation’s parks. They argue that increasing entry fees specifically during peak visitation times will help keep the parks open and maintained—especially, they say, because the current administration is unlikely to adequately fund them.
It’s true that attendance at some National Parks has skyrocketed, and that some visitors have damaged them. The New York Times reports that Zion National Park’s “delicate desert ecosystem has been battered by tourists, some of whom wash diapers in the Virgin River, scratch their names into boulders and fly drone cameras through once quiet skies.” One suggestion is rather than charging higher fees, parks should take reservations and cap attendance when that’s needed. That’s more equitable than raising fees.
As to the economic argument, the administration is “hoping” that higher fees will bring in an estimated $68 million. But at the same time, the administration would cut the National Park Service budget by a whopping $322 million, through a regressive fee that will hurt new users (who are less likely to buy a pass) the most.
Another truth is that attendance at many of our National Parks dropped radically in past decades. Not surprisingly, so did political support for them. Fortunately, in more recent years, attendance began to rise, in some parks substantially, but that increase appears to be primarily among aging Baby Boomers. Visitations still lag among families with children and people who are not white or affluent. As for overuse, yes, some parts of our National Parks are overcrowded, but congestion is typically on the roads, not deeper in the park. Especially in some of the most popular parks, few visitors get more than a quarter mile, if that, from their cars.
Reducing financial support for parks is unconscionable; raising fees will be counterproductive.
The National Park Service has extended its public comment deadline to Dec. 22.
Six years ago, I gave a speech to high school and middle school students (a tough audience) in La Crosse, Wisconsin. When I finished, a young woman stood up in the front row and challenged me to do what I had just asked them to do — paint a verbal picture of a future in which the human relationship with the rest of nature was a central organizing principle.
“Well, I’ve written two books about that,” I said. She did not accept my answer. “I don’t want to read your books,” she said. “Tell me, right now.” I sputtered out a shotgun response, which later became the essay appearing in the 2012 paperback edition of “The Nature Principle.”
Recently, I posted a version of it on the website of the Children & Nature Network, the nonprofit I co-founded after the publication of “Last Child in the Woods.” Here’s a link to the essay. It imagines a very different future of nature-rich schools, homes, neighborhoods, and cities for children and for adults. I hope you’ll give it a read, and pass the link on to friends and colleagues.
The other day, I received a note from a good friend, photojournalist Anne PearseHocker. In the 1970s, she snuck across a no man’s land into the Wounded Knee encampment, and spent weeks photographing the protest. Those photos are currently in the Smithsonian Museum. A widow, she now lives in a cabin with two dogs, two cats and two hunting falcons.
She loves the wild landscape of the West, is dismayed by new threats to it, and is surprised by a change in her internal landscape.
“Something new is needed,” she wrote. She referenced the Women’s March in Helena: “Here in deep red Montana, over 10,000 people marched in Helena, smashing all records and expectations. The organizers started out hoping for 500. The night before the march they predicted possibly 5,000. Meanwhile, the state’s Central Democratic Committee virtually ignored it. As if it never happened.” She does not believe that her own party understands the growing anger and sense of urgency that she and others like her feel. “Someone or something needs to ride that wind before it gets away.”
It's time to build an NRA for nature — an environmental or conservation force comparable to the nation’s powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association — one capable of striking fear into the heart of, say, any climate-change-denying politician, Republican, Democrat, or Other.
You may or may not like the NRA, but you have to admit that the organization, like the Tea Party, knows how to get its way.
A handful of green groups aspire to that political power, and many have done a good job influencing regulatory policies, but I can’t recall the last time I read about an environmental or conservation group mounting a successful campaign to boot multiple members of Congress from office. Maybe it’s happened, but not often enough. And now the ante is upped. If political candidates aren’t afraid of environmentalism’s political power, what good is environmental activism?
Have we reached a point where environmentalism is less about political power than about moral preening? Or lifestyle choices?
On inauguration day in 1961, I was 11 going on 12. I was home sick, under a blanket, in my grandmother’s parlor. She lived in Independence, Missouri in the white Victorian house her parents built in the 1880s. Her house was a few blocks from the Truman home. She was born in 1884, when Chester A. Arthur was president. He succeeded President James A. Garfield, assassinated in 1881.
She was a kind, quiet widow who took in roomers during the Depression. I don’t recall her ever saying anything unkind to or about anyone. I was convinced the house was haunted.
On the day the young president stepped to the microphone, I was watching a small black and white Philco. I recall that speech, and that room, as vividly as I remember the other images and feelings that came later, on the day he died.
It was bitterly cold on the day of the inauguration. Kennedy did not wear a hat. As he spoke, I sat up, deeply inspired and didn’t know why. It was not what he said, it was how he said it. Even with his flaws, Kennedy lifted us up, made us feel that we were a better people.
Barack Obama was born six months later.
Many years later, I was in a high school auditorium on Chicago’s South Side. I had been invited to attend Obama’s announcement of a White House program that would provide a free annual pass to every 4th grader, and their entire family, to any National Park and many other federal lands and waters. Private money would be raised to provide buses for the kids least likely to experience wilderness.
Before he spoke, about 30 of us were ushered behind a curtain to meet the president.
Photo by Rachel Miles, licensed by Creative Commons
Driving south on Interstate 135, from Salina toward Arkansas City, I can see the giant rolls of hay that look like mammoth shredded wheat, and the long hedgerows of Osage orange trees planted as windbreaks during the Depression, now taller than I remember them.
Cream white waves of tall grass. The wind coming across, always the wind.
This is the flyover land. Jets stream far above and people with briefcases and laptop computers look down and feel glad that they are not driving across this seeming emptiness. But when you drive across north and central Kansas, particularly if you are originally from this country, you do not feel the fatigue and the tension that accumulates on urban freeways.
The land is soothing and nurturing and layered with mystery. Riding a bus across the state in the ‘60s, I remember awakening suddenly, a bit disoriented, sitting up in the night to see long lines of flame stretching across the Flint Hills prairie, annually burned by ranchers.
The lines of flame were galactic in their brilliance and desolation and beauty. Now, decades later, the miles fly by.
ur story – our shared yearning to reconnect children to the natural world – represents one of the few concerns in America that brings people together across partisan and religious lines.
To change a society, as the philosopher Ivan Illich wrote, “you must tell a more powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into our future so that we can take the next step…”
So, today, how do we shine that light? We must continue to support the birthright of all children to a healthy environment and a connection to the natural world, and to teach the responsibilities that come with that right.
We can work to reduce climate disruption and the biodiversity collapse by opposing policies that destroy people and the rest of nature, and by making the case that human beings protect what they love and love only what they know. More than ever, building a future generation of conservationists will depend on helping children and adults fall in love with the natural world.
We can emphasize the healing powers of the natural world: for mental and physical health; for the capacity to learn and create; and for the reduction of violence. We can promote family nature clubs, and similar approaches, as ways to seek meaning and solace in a difficult and alienating time. We can offer Vitamin N for the soul through places of worship. And we can encourage pediatricians, psychologists and other healthcare professionals to prescribe nature.
Thinking about president-elect Donald Trump, and the mystery of his rise, I pulled a copy of my first book, “America II,” from a bookshelf. The book was published more than three decades ago. It was based on months of travel around the United States. To research it, I followed Americans to where the U.S. Census said they were moving, and asked them if they had found what they were looking for.
Although the book has long been out of print, a few reviewers have rediscovered it, and what they wrote reminded me of its basic themes. This morning I flipped through it, wondering if I had overreached. My conclusion: Not on most counts, unfortunately.
The following excerpt is from the introduction of “America II,” first published in 1983:
The America we know is dying, but a second America is rising from the body of the first. This second nation – America II – can best be seen in the South and West, but it exists, in varying degrees, in every state of the Union. It has a physical form: a very different kind of city; a radically changed rural and small-town life; a revolution in shelter; a new workplace. But the second America is also a state of mind: a powerful yearning for opportunity, for old values and new technologies, for refuge and escape.
This book is an exploration of what it’s like to live in America II, or on the outskirts of it. It’s about the people left behind, but mostly it’s about the people who are moving, about condo dwellers and pot farmers, corporate utopians and private police, rural entrepreneurs and urban escapees, computer programmers and unemployed wanderers. It’s about people trying to get control in an economic and social environment that seems out of control. It’s about the search for home, the creation of new nests from the sticks and mud of our fantasies of what home should be. This book is about the unintended consequences of that search.
Share with others how you connect your family and community to nature. Pick one or more of 500 actions from Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life, try them out for a day, a week or a month — and tell your friends and the world about your experience. Please use hashtag #VitaminN — or send an email to vitaminN@chiildrenandnature.org.
Today, parents, grandparents, pediatricians, teachers and others are looking for ways to connect children to the natural world. This summer, to bring together that motivation with ideas from the community, the Children & Nature Network (C&NN) is launching the #VitaminN Challenge. The challenge is an opportunity to get more nature into our lives and to share ideas. C&NN co-founder Richard Louv’s new book, Vitamin N, presents over 500 nature-oriented actions for families, organizations and communities. In addition, C&NN’s online resources and a list of similar books, blogs and nature-focused websites offer a wide range of ideas that will help you take the Vitamin N Challenge. But, most importantly, C&NN is looking to YOU for ideas for getting more #VitaminN! Here’s how to participate:
Featured recently on CBS This Morning and NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Vitamin N is a comprehensive and practical guidebook for the whole family and the wider community. It includes actions for parents eager to share nature with their kids, and also for grandparents, teenagers, teachers, health care professionals, mayors and anyone else who wants to create a nature-rich life. “Issuing an imperative that everyone should heed, this important new book provides the tools to reclaim the wonders and health benefits of nature.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review. Here’s a sampling of what families and communities can do:
Outside Atlanta, after returning from a class hike through the woods, an excited six-year-old grabbed his head and said, “There’s so much nature and I only have two eyes and one brain and I think it’s going to explode!”
A teacher at the nature-based Chattahoochee Hills Charter School shared that story about her student with me a couple weeks ago. Telling it, she seemed just about as excited as the six-year-old, though she did not grab her head.
We were watching a CBS This Morning television crew roam the grounds. They were working on a piece about schools that emphasize the natural world as a learning environment (barring a Trumpian implosion or other massive world event, the segment will run on April 8th, sometime after 8 a.m. Eastern time). Here’s what they saw: a series of classrooms, each in its own building; the front of every classroom is glass to let in natural light, and teachers can open that side of the room to the elements. Surrounding the school is a forest laced with walking trails. From deep in those woods came the sounds of young laughter, running feet and learning.
At Chattahoochee Hills Charter School, students spend about a third of their time learning in the outdoors.
n a world filled with dismal news, 2015 was a banner year for the new nature movement. Here’s a sampling of some of the inspiring trends and stories from the past year.
In the 21st Century, our Great Work – as Thomas Berry put it – must be the creation of a new, restorative relationship with the rest of the natural world. It’s time to envision that future.
It’s time to bring down the barriers, including these — which are not only between people and nature, but also between people.
Want to make a decent living and a better life? Here's one way. Get a job – a nature-smart job. Or better yet, be a nature-smart entrepreneur. By that, I don't mean a career devoted only to energy efficiency. That's important, but there's a whole new category of green jobs coming. These careers and avocations will help children and adults become happier, healthier and smarter, by truly greening where people live, work, learn and play.
Here are some exciting careers that you—and your kids— may never have considered:
MELBOURNE, SYDNEY, BRISBANE AND ADELAIDE | Saturday, 22 February 2014 to Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Richard Louv is a journalist and the author of eight books about the connections between family, nature and community.
The value of nature as an essential aspect of our health, creativity, intelligence and wellbeing is often overlooked. Yet when nature is diminished, so are we.
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle, uses the term nature-deficit disorder to explain the correlation between an increase in social, mental and physical health problems with less time spent in nature in our increasingly busy and technology-driven lives.
ACF is delighted to be hosting Connected by Nature: In conversation with Richard Louv, a series of public events in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide from February 22-26.
Richard Louv argues that by tapping into the restorative powers of nature - by getting a strong hit of ‘vitamin nature’ - we can boost mental agility and creativity; promote health and wellbeing; build smarter and more sustainable businesses, communities, and economies; and ultimately strengthen human bonds.
Connected by Nature: In conversation with Richard Louv will offer renewed optimism while challenging us to rethink the way we live.
For individual event details and to purchase tickets, click on each event below.
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) is bringing me to several cities in Australia on Feb. 22 to Feb. 26. And Australia is hopping with folks committed to the children and nature movement.
Here's a list sent to me by Antje Dun, librarian with ACF, about some of the great organizations doing inspiring work. I'm hoping to meet folks from many of these organizations during the tour.
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 teenager) 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
Love lists became a Christmas morning tradition in the Evangelist household—and in many other homes, as well, including those of other religious (and non-religious) persuasions. One year, in the holiday season, 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.
When AnneliesHenstra, a Dutch human rights attorney, talks about the right of children to a meaningful connection to the natural world, she calls it the “forgotten human right.” Now, at least for some, it is remembered.
In September, the World Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), meeting in Jeju, South Korea, passed a resolution declaring that children have a human right to experience the natural world. Henstra, and Cheryl Charles, who is president of the Children & Nature Network, and others made the case to the Congress—attended by more than 10,000 people representing the governments of 150 nations and more than 1,000 non-governmental organizations.
The resolution, “the Child’s Right to Connect with Nature and to a Healthy Environment” calls on IUCN’s membership to promote the inclusion of this right within the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The resolution recognizes “concern about the increasing disconnection of people and especially children from nature, and the adverse consequences for both healthy child development (‘nature deficit disorder’) as well as responsible stewardship for nature and the environment in the future.” And it recognizes that:
“...children, since they are an inalienable part of nature, not only have the right to a healthy environment, but also to a connection with nature and to the gifts of nature for their physical and psychological health and ability to learn and create, and that until they have these rights they will not bear responsibility for nature and the environment…”
This is an important moment for anyone concerned about the future relationship between humans and the rest of nature.
Ray Bradbury died on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, at the age of 91. In 2001, I had the pleasure of interviewing him. To many in my generation he was a hero and a truth-teller, as he saw the truth. Here’s to Ray.
So you don’t like to be thought of as a science-fiction writer, said the reporter to the great writer.
“No,” said Ray Bradbury, who called back after the fax had rolled in. The fax machine is one of his only concessions to post-modern technology. “Have you noticed that we have all these machines but no one calls anymore?” he added.
Well, it’s true, said the reporter, thinking of something his 19-year-old son had told him.
The “post-information” society, that’s what his son and some of his intellectual friends call today’s emerging culture. By post-information they mean: We’ve reached a stage in history, an evolutionary leaping-off point, when we’re overwhelmed by so much information that information doesn’t mean anything anymore—and the only real meaning is found in the direct communication between two people.
“That’s right,” said Bradbury, approvingly. “You pick and choose. Use what you want.”
This was high praise for an idea, coming from the dean—the master—of dark, nostalgic futurism. The author of such classic works as “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “The Martian Chronicles,” “I Sing the Body Electric” and “The Illustrated Man,” he is neither pessimist nor optimist.
The old chest of drawers proved to be a treasure chest. It was a small piece of furniture, perhaps an old washstand, with three drawers. It sat in a storage unit for over a year, and when we bought a house with a garage, we moved it there, along with stacks of boxes filled with the remains of my mother's life. As everyone must do someday, my wife and I sorted out the heirlooms. But for the longest time I could not bear to disturb the chest, as if it slept.
This chest had held my mother's art supplies. She made her living as a greeting card artist. She began working in Kansas City, at age 16, for Hallmark Cards and over the years became known as one of the best free-lance greeting card artists.
I grew up watching her work. I would stand next to her art table and watch her hand move the brush expertly across the paper and then move to the right, to the chest, where she would dip it into blotches of paint or stir the brush loudly in an old fruit jar of water.
The paints and an airbrush and her heavy tape dispenser and her scissors were kept there. From time to time, the tape or the scissors would disappear, and she would call out irritated to her two boys to bring them back. But she never banned us from her desk. The squares of blotter paper she cut out were just right for our drawings, and our drawings littered the floor below the table.
I love nature. I like high-tech. There, I’ve said it.
In 1982, I bought an IBM Displaywriter — a “word processor” as we called the first post-Selectric writing machines. The Displaywriter was the approximate size of a Chevy Vega and sounded like a garbage truck. As the years passed, I stayed on the leading edge of communications technology.
Now that I own three computers, a Kindle, an iPhone and an iPad, I just may have gone over the edge.
Understand, I recognize the benefits of technology, otherwise I wouldn’t be using the Internet or refrigerating my food. And the Internet has certainly been essential for building the children and nature movement.
But consider a few recent findings, reported here in the Twitter tradition of 140 characters, more or less:
Every child needs nature. Not just the ones with parents who appreciate nature. Not only those of a certain economic class or culture or gender or sexual identity or set of abilities. Every child.
If a child never sees the stars, never has meaningful encounters with other species, never experiences the richness of nature, what happens to that child?
In economically challenged neighborhoods, towns and rural areas, the impact of toxic dumps is well known. The evidence makes it clear that when we poison nature, we poison ourselves. But there’s a second, related threat that is less familiar.
What do we know about how human beings, particularly children and their families in poor communities, are affected by the absence of nature’s intrinsic benefits? Research suggests that exposure to the natural world – including nearby nature in cities – helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.
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.
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.
Do children – do all of us – have a right to meaningful connection to the natural world? AnneliesHenstra, 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.
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 teenager) 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.
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.
”Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” —Gary Snyder.Â
A few 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.
She and others asked: If nature were the prism through which the future was imagined, what would it be like to live in that future?
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:
“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.
Despite some signs of progress, the impact of recession on public access to the natural world is a reality, and it could get worse.
Take California, for instance. In coming months, as many as 70 parks, many of them in or near urban areas will close, according to California State Parks Director Ruth Coleman. This, she says, is the only way to absorb a $33 million parks budget cut over the next two years. “California has never closed its parks in its history, through two world wars and the Great Depression,” Coleman said two weeks ago, in her keynote speech at the annual C&NN Grassroots Gathering.
Never, until now. During the Great Depression state and national parks were valued not only for the nature they preserved but for the jobs they provided and their positive economic impact on nearby private businesses. That was then, this is now. A different political climate, changing economic realities, and the widening gap between rich and poor could, literally, change the landscape.
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
 Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
 ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Why is the future so often portrayed as a post-apocalyptic dystopia, filled with human brutality and stripped of nature?
For decades, our culture has struggled with two addictions: to oil and to despair. But what if our lives were as immersed in nature as they are in technology every day? What if we not only conserved nature, but created it where we live, work, learn and play? What if something large and hopeful is already forming out there; what if we’re part of it?
NEW YORK—It’s midnight at ground zero. During the day, the endless funeral procession crosses the Williamsburg Bridge or comes up out of the subways or arrives on streams of yellow taxis. People cry on the way to the towers, a Haitian cab driver will tell you. Or they’re quiet, as if holding their breath.
The smell is famous by now, a new kind of celebrity. But it only comes now and then, when the wind shifts. During the day, ground zero is dominated by the familiar spine and its attachments; the teeth and skeletal fingers reaching up toward the lost bowl of the sky. But at midnight, the fingers and the teeth disappear, and you see something else.
For stressed-out families, spending more time in the natural world — a nature stimulus package — may be just what the doctor and the economist ordered. Here are a few of the benefits:
1. With gas prices on the rise, families are rediscovering both the joy and the cost-effectiveness of getaways in nearby nature, including regional, state or national parks. As Outside magazine puts it, “near is the new far.”
2. Unless we’re talking about a new bass boat or a high-tech tent, nature toys are free or cheap, and they encourage self-directed creativity. In 2008, the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, N.Y., inducted the stick, which it called not only possibly the oldest toy, but “possibly the best.”
3. Green exercise is free. In the United Kingdom, and now in the United States, families are eschewing commercial indoor gyms. Groups of families form ” green gyms” and meet once or twice a week to hike, garden or take some other type of exercise in the natural world.
once met an instructor who trains young people to become the pilots of cruise ships. He described the two kinds of students he encounters. One kind grew up mainly indoors, spending hours playing video games and working on computers. These students are quick to learn the ship’s electronics, a useful talent, the instructor explained. The other kind of student grew up spending a lot of time outdoors, often in nature. They, too, have a talent. “They actually know where the ship is.”
He wasn’t being cute. Recent studies of the human senses back that statement up. “We need people who have both ways of knowing the world,” he added. In “The Nature Principle,” I tell that story to describe what I call the “hybrid mind." I make the case that one goal of modern education should be to encourage such flexible thinking. Is education moving in that direction? Some schools are, but too many are putting all their eggs on one computer chip.
Almost as an article of religious faith, school districts are flooding students with computers and other Internet-connected gadgets. Yet, as The New York Times reported on Sept. 3, 2011, "to many education experts, something is not adding up." Schools are spending billions on technology "even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning."
In July, as an onboard lecturer with Lindblad Expeditions on the National Geographic Explorer, I received, as did my wife Kathy, a great gift of nature. The kind of experience that one fully appreciates only after coming home. How many people today, by luck and privilege, are able to reach the very edge of the polar ice cap? How many in history? (We were far north of indigenous populations.) Here are a few words I posted about the trip:
Midnight snow in driving wind and intimate fog. The ship moves through a portion of Hinlopen Strait, which runs about 110 miles northwest to southeast. On the morning deck, the hardier souls look upward at one of Svalbard’s largest concentrations of nesting seabirds. Here, at KappFanshawe on the high cliffs of Alkefjellet, the sheer walls of dolerite are alive. The climate is high Arctic, snow turning to sleet, ice forming on the beard of the Zodiac driver. At Torelneset we hike across gravel and tundra and the sky grows larger. The island and sky and water are so broad and grey that our eyes lose perspective. Here, giant features can seem small; the tiniest flowers, Arctic buttercups, loom large. Lindblad naturalist Elise Lockton points to the bones of whales and walruses, remnants of past lives having ridden rock upward for tens of thousands of years. The ancient past seems casually present....
Some photos I took during this amazing experience, with, well, my pocket camera....
September is back-to-school month, and the chanting begins: Drill, test, lengthen the school day, skip recess, cancel field trips, and by all means discourage free time for (gasp!) self-directed play. Is that approach working, particularly in science learning? Not so well.
A few months ago, I met with a dozen biology professors at Central North Carolina University. They were deeply concerned about the dramatic deterioration of student knowledge of what’s out there: these students can tell you all about the Amazon rain forest, but nothing about the plants and animals of the neighborhoods in which they live.
Every December, my wife, Kathy, delivers small gifts to the neighbors on our block, usually a jar of home made jam or a little vase of dried flowers, or something like that.
Now she’s come up with an idea for a different kind of gift. She announced it as we were working on our yard. “This year,” she said, “I could give seeds or little starts of butterfly-attracting plants, suggest they plant them, and then our neighborhood could become a butterfly zone!” That’s a terrific idea, I thought. And, as I discovered later, it would be one way to build what Doug Tallamy suggests: a “Homegrown National Park.”
Our goal was to revive our struggling yard by planting part of it with species native to the San Diego bioregion, and support native birds, butterflies and bees (especially the California species; honeybees are, in fact, not native) and other insects essential to pollination and migration routes. These, in turn, nurture and grow wild populations of animals and plants. Tallamy, chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware and author of “Bringing Nature Home,” makes the case that everyday gardeners are the key to reviving urban biodiversity - maybe global biodiversity.
Today, in a feature on Orion magazine's Web site, the editors ask this question: "Does technology merely distract us from the natural world—or can it help us gaze more intently at its varied forms? Richard Louv, author of the new book The Nature Principle, discussed this and more during Orion’s live web event in June, “Reimagining Nature Literacy.” Listen to a recording of the conversation here." My article, answering that question, is here. In the piece, I described how, these days, I spend more time carrying a camera than a fishing rod. And I wrote:
I find that the camera makes me slow down and look more intently than I normally would. After one hike, I was sitting at my computer, reviewing photos of rock patterns and tree bark. I was suddenly startled by something I had not seen when I took the picture. Hidden in the bark was an eye, looking back at me.
When I posted the address to the Orion article on my Facebook page, one reader asked me to post the actual photograph. A wonderful conversationensued. People posed their theories as to just who's eye that was, if it was an eye. One mother showed it to her son, and he concluded that the eye belonged to a dragon. I went with her son's theory. What do you think? Here's the photo.
File this under: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. In Oak Park, Mich., a woman faced a jail sentence for the plants in her front yard. “The illegal growth is tomatoes. And zucchinis, peppers and other edible and what normally be legal plants,” ABC News reported. “The officials in Bass’ hometown….have charged her with growing ‘vegetable garden in front yard space.’ If convicted, she could have spent up to 93 days in jail.” The case was been widely reported. Jason Knapfel, writing for DietsinReview.com, surmises, “Apparently the difference between a green pepper and a bush is enough to possibly land the vegetable grower in jail for three months.”
The city officials enforcing the rules aren’t the issue. They’re usually just doing their job. The real question is why the public puts up with and even encourages such restrictions, whether they’re written by public officials or private governments. Around the country, city ordinances and community association regulations have targeted children as well as adults. In April, homeowners in a Silver Springs, Fla. community, ostensibly concerned about “safety,” tried to ban children from playing outdoors, and proposed fines of $100 for each transgression. When such cases (usually more nuanced than they’re reported) reach the news media, they’re usually dismissed, as happened with the Oak Park charges. But what about all the ones that don’t get coverage?
“Connected and honored, natural teachers could inspire other teachers; they could become a galvanizing force within their schools. In the process, they would contribute to their own psychological, physical, and spiritual health.”— The Nature Principle
Not long ago, I was speaking with a middle school principal in Austin who was sympathetic to the cause, but felt overwhelmed by all the demands that he and his colleagues already face. “Look, you want me to add this to my plate when it’s already overflowing?” he said. “I can’t do this without outside help.”
He was right. Bringing the classroom to nature and nature to the classroom is an enormous task, and educators need community and political support. Schools, businesses and outdoor organizations can work together to introduce students to nature centers and parks, and sponsor or promote overnight camping trips. Parent-teacher groups can raise financial support for field trips and nature programs; they can sponsor family nature nights at schools; they can give awards to those teachers who, year after year, get their students outside.
No doubt about it, schools need community support. But educators can lead the way, and one teacher can make a difference — especially if he or she reaches out to another.
Both THE NATURE PRINCIPLE and LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS offer chapters on education. And in the video above, I share some thoughts about education with filmmaker Camilla Rockwell. But here are a few additional resources to get started (and keep going):
I recall my father's dark tanned neck, creased with lines of dust, as he tilled our garden. I ran ahead of him, pulling rocks and bones and toys from his path." -- The Nature PrincipleÂ
In "Last Child in the Woods,†I focused on why children need nature. In my new book, “The Nature Principle,†I tell how the whole family – and whole communities -- can become happier, healthier and smarter through more contact with the natural world. I do hope you'll read the book to find out how, but for starters, here are 10 reasons children and adults need nature:
For years, I have secretly believed that the dog I grew up with was something of a moral teacher in our family. Admitting this belief, I invite all sorts of critiques from those who, for religious or scientific reasons, object to attributing humanlike behavior to nonhuman animals. So be it. I’ll bet you had such a special friend, too.
Not long ago, I asked an animal behavioralist if dogs can be moral teachers to children. (I suppose they can be moral teachers to adults, too, but children and dogs, like Elwood P. Dowd and Harvey, can be especially attuned.) This particular animal behaviorist also earned a doctorate in the psychology of human behavior, and he is an expert on pet therapy for children.
Pets, he said, are often moral teachers, though that is not their intent. For example, pets teach children about death. “The death of a dog or cat can be the single most profound loss a human being can experience. Some people don’t want to accept the fact that an animal can mean as much, or more, to a human being as another member of the family. But it can. Children learn about dying; they can afford this price more than they can the loss of a parent.”
Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, by word and example, that any movement — any culture —will fail if it cannot paint a picture of a world that people will want to go to. As others have said, his speech was not called “I Have a Nightmare.”
For decades, our culture has struggled with two addictions, to oil and to despair. It’s pretty clear by now that we can’t kick one of those habits without kicking the other. Yet, for many Americans, perhaps most of us, thinking about the future conjures up images of “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max” or Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”: a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of nature. We seem drawn to that flame.
It’s a dangerous fixation. Think how children and young people must feel today, growing up in a time when so many adults seem to accept, with a shrug, only darkness ahead. The key question here is: How do we change our vision of the future? Where do we start? Here’s one suggestion: reconceive environmentalism and sustainability – help them evolve into a larger movement that can touch every part of society.
One day after a talk in Seattle, a woman literally grabbed my lapels and said, “Listen to me: adults have nature-deficit disorder, too.” She was right, of course. As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights are touched by the natural world. While individuals can find immeasurable joy in a great work of art, or by falling in love, all of life is rooted in nature, and a separation from it desensitizes and diminishes us. That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture.
However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health. While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance intelligence.
At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative….
You can’t know who you are until you know where you are. —Wendell Berry
M
y wife, Kathy, was raised in San Diego. I moved here from Kansas in 1971, just out of college. She had spent little time exploring the natural habitats of this region, and I viewed it as a resort city, beautiful in its way, but I missed the green woods and plains of the Midwest. So when I looked for nature here, I saw less than met the eye.
For years, we were restless. We bored our friends with all our talk of moving, of finding our one true place. We even bored ourselves. One day Kathy said, “Our tombstones are going to say, ‘We’re moving.’”
Today, I feel differently. I may never bond to this region as I did to the woods behind my boyhood home, and who knows, we may yet move. But I no longer have quite the same reaction when people ask me where I am from.
Remember the special place in nature that you had as a child—that wooded lot at the end of the cul de sac, that ravine behind your housing tract? What if adults had cared just as much about that special place as you did, when you were a child? Here’s an idea (described in my new book, THE NATURE PRINCIPLE), whose time may be coming: the creation of "nearby-nature trusts.” Land trust organizations could develop and distribute tool kits, and perhaps offer consulting services, to show how neighborhood residents could band together to protect those small green parcels of nearby nature. What might these little parcels be called? How about ” button parks?”
For the past couple of days, my younger son and I have been trying to cure our nature-deficit disorder. Right now, I’m sitting in bed in a Bishop, California motel that, well, isn’t the Ritz. Matthew, who is 23, is still asleep, and deeply. A few hours ago we staggered across the clumped grass and mud along the Owens River, struggled to keep our balance as 40 mph gusts tangled our fly lines. We froze and sweated in the sleet as the snow line crept lower on the Sierra. Fishing was terrible, we were miserably cold, and perfectly happy.
Can libraries connect children to nature? You bet. “Today, via a library’s outdoor learning space, librarians are participating in the growing movement to connect children with the environment,” write Tracy Delgado-LaStella and Sandra Feinberg in this month’s issue of American Libraries magazine. The excellent piece describes the efforts of Middle Country Public Library in Centereach, New York, which has created The Nature Explorium.
In collaboration with the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation and Long Island Nature Collaborative for Kids (LINCK), the library converted an adjacent 5000-square foot area into a outdoor learning environment, “including a climbing/crawling area, messy materials area, building area, nature art area, music and performance area, planting area, gathering/conversation place, reading area, and water feature.”
Adapted excerpts from Richard Louv’s plenary keynote address to the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference, Oct. 2, 2010 in San Francisco. On Oct. 1, Louv made similar remarks at the UCSF Conference, Children First: Promoting Ecological Health for the Whole Child.
More than three decades ago, when Dr. Mary Brown’s children were growing up in Bend, Oregon (she describes it as a city at the base of the Cascade Mountains with a world class fly-fishing river running through it and where the sun shines over 300 days a year), it never occurred to her that much of her practice as a pediatrician would one day be so focused on childhood obesity and depression.
Hop Studios | author photo by Eric B. Dynowski
This chest had held my mother's art supplies. She made her living as a greeting card artist. She began working in Kansas City, at age 16, for Hallmark Cards and over the years became known as one of the best free-lance greeting card artists.
I was especially intrigued by the remarks of Mary Jo 
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.
1. With gas prices on the rise, families are rediscovering both the joy and the cost-effectiveness of getaways in nearby nature, including regional, state or national parks. As Outside magazine puts it, “near is the new far.”
A few months ago, I met with a dozen biology professors at Central North Carolina University. They were deeply concerned about the dramatic deterioration of student knowledge of what’s out there: these students can tell you all about the Amazon rain forest, but nothing about the plants and animals of the neighborhoods in which they live.
emember the special place in nature that you had as a child—that wooded lot at the end of the cul de sac, that ravine behind your housing tract? What if adults had cared just as much about that special place as you did, when you were a child? Here’s an idea (described in my new book, THE NATURE PRINCIPLE), whose time may be coming: the creation of "nearby-nature trusts.” Land trust organizations could develop and distribute tool kits, and perhaps offer consulting services, to show how neighborhood residents could band together to protect those small green parcels of nearby nature. What might these little parcels be called? How about ” button parks?”
Hop Studios