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Blog Posts: 2021
A Challenge to Make Your City the Finest City in America for Children and Nature
Richard Louv's Challenge to Become a Nature-Rich Community from Human-Kind Productions on Vimeo.
Read Full PostFive Questions About Nature-Deficit Disorder
Read Full PostThe Bowman Echo: Remembering JB
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.
Read Full PostNature is Where You Find It — Even in a Strip Development
Excerpted from “The Nature Principle: Reconnecting to Life in a Virtual Age”
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.
Read Full PostThere 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.
Talking Nature-Deficit Disorder
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
Read Full PostWill Urban Design and Architecture Incorporate More Nature after the Pandemic?
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.
Read Full PostBeing a Good Parent-Neighbor
From another decade. Excerpted from “The Web of Life”
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.
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My Mother Was an Animal Lover
Excerpted from OUR WILD CALLING (Algonquin Books)
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.
Read Full PostWhat the Humanities Mean to the Future of Journalism
This essay was first published by California Humanities in 2016:
“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.
Read Full PostThe Lion
________
The time seems like just the other day …
… 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.
Read Full PostMy 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.
The Special Meaning of a New Cover Design for "Last Child"
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.
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