Reviews for The Nature Principle
“Just when I get the bleakest, I tend to remember the Chinese proverb, ‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.’ So I ask myself, who’s planting the world of tomorrow today?”
—Eric Utne, Utne Reader
“Six years ago, Richard Louv wrote his groundbreaking book Last Child in the Woods, in which he examined how today’s kids were coping with what he termed “nature-deficit disorder.” This year, in The Nature Principle, he’s back, looking at how the same condition affects grown-ups. “What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?” he asks, and “How can each of us help create that life-enhancing world, not only in a hypothetical future, but right now, for our families and for ourselves?” Combining fascinating personal anecdotes (a trip bear-sniffing with his family in Alaska) with the latest relevant studies (hospital patients in rooms with tree views had shorter stays and less need for pain medication than those with brick views) with practical ways to bring nature back into your life (what he calls “deep green exercise”), The Nature Principle manages to both teach and delight. Think of it as a refreshing hike for the mind and soul through 320 pages.”
—Leigh Newman, Oprah Winfrey’s 2011 Summer Reading List
“A last call for human sanity in a digitized world and a summons home to the nature that nourishes the best human qualities of creativity, intelligence, connection, and compassion…The Nature Principle is mandatory for teachers, parents, designers, urban planners, and anyone who just loves a good book. The message is urgent: unplug, boot it down, get off line, get outdoors, breath again, see, experience, touch, hug, feel, become real in a real world.”
—David Orr, author of Earth in Mind and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse
“[THE NATURE PRINCIPLE] may be just what our high-tech, urban culture needs to bring us down to earth.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Louv’s vital, inclusive, and inspiriting call to better our lives by celebrating and protecting the living world marks the way to profound personal and cultural transformation.”
—Booklist, starred review
“In THE NATURE PRINCIPLE, Richard Louv has given us once again exactly the book we most need, for now and for all time. Our expanding species hasn’t a chance to continue living well and happily in a finite world unless we adapt our hungry lives to the rest of nature better than we have. This elegant, original, good-humored, and stunningly thorough work shows us our way home in the world: it is no less than a new Law of Nature, and we had better pay attention.”
—Robert Michael Pyle, author of The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland and Mariposa Road
“Deprive an individual of everything that nurtured them—and you’re going to have a mess. Deprive a species of everything that nurtured us—you have 21st century Americans. We grew up in the wild, and when we moved from the African veldt to the European and North American forests, the wild went with us. Now we have set up an elaborate society designed to strip us of the environment that made us—and Richard Louv is speaking out, inspirationally, on why it doesn’t have to be this way.”
—Carl Pope, Chairman, The Sierra Club
“We have created environments that make us sad, fat and unhealthy. Richard Louv has made an insightful diagnosis and offers powerful treatment with the medicine we all need, Vitamin N.”
—Richard J. Jackson, MD, Chair, Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA School of Public Health
“Richard Louv helps us remedy nature-deficit disorder through his wonderful new book THE NATURE PRINCIPLE, which shows all of us—children through seniors—how to reconnect to nature in a way that will also help the environment.”
—Fran P. Mainella, 16th Director of the National Park Service and Visiting Scholar, Clemson University
“Put the remote down and get outside. Richard Louv’s new book is a refreshingly personal and eloquent case for building nature-smart communities that will not only protect the diversity of life on the planet, but also sustain our communities and ourselves.”
—David Yarnold, President & CEO of The National Audubon Society
“As a pediatrician for nearly 40 years and leader in the American Academy of Pediatrics I have seen that nature isn’t the only solution to problems like obesity, mental health, and health disparities, but it has tremendous potential to alleviate all these issues. Thanks to Richard Louv for reminding us all to reconnect with nature and for providing hope.”
—Mary Brown, M.D., FAAP (Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics)
“Does contact with nature enhance mental and physical health and creativity? Richard Louv has collected the research and emerging practices that say yes. Can individuals and communities cherish and sustain nature where they live? A wealth of examples show the way. Above all, Louv shows that we can come home to nature while still affirming human values and human ingenuity.”
—Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom
“We are blessed to have Richard Louv among us because with compelling research, personal stories, and the movement that he has been instrumental in creating to connect us to nature, he is helping us all—adults and children—thrive in today’s complex world.”
—Ellen Galinsky, President & Co-Founder, Families and Work Institute, and author of Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs
“Richard Louv seeks through his latest book to inspire a new social network that ensures nature is an essential and everyday part of modern life, community, and business. This is an important and powerful vision that offers us a blueprint for a better world and happier, healthier inhabitants.”
—Sally Jewell, President & CEO of REI
“Wonderful! THE NATURE PRINCIPLE is a splendid synthesis, gathering abundant evidence for a truth that should be achingly obvious to all, but has somehow been hiding behind the gleam and flash of our contemporary concerns: our health, our creativity, and our basic sanity depend upon regular contact and interchange with the living land around us.”
—David Abram, author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous
“Our alienation from the rest of Creation represents a fundamental shift in human evolution. Louv has eloquently documented our schism from nature and the very real physical and psychic consequences. This book provides a way back to where we belong, a world full of reverence, joy and discovery.”
—David Suzuki, author of Sacred Balance
” Louv’s aims are bold, but he builds his case by presenting mountains of research on humans’ capabilities and what we’ve lost by seeking to conquer nature and live apart from it…We ignore this book and what it can teach us at our peril.”
—Andy Thompson, Richmond Times-Dispatch
” Louv’s books are a must read.”
—Wired Magazine
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