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, [...]
After “Last Child in the Woods” was published in 2005, a handful of like-minded individuals came together to form the Children & Nature Network. Our mission: to help build a movement to reconnect children, their families and their communities to nature—for human health and well-being, cognitive development, stronger community — and for the good of the planet. For [...]
With the leadership of Richard Louv and the Children & Nature Network, and the hard work of many people across the country, the word is spreading about the critical importance of unstructured play in nature for children and adults. Energy is now being focused on solutions – the cure, if you will, to “nature-deficit disorder.” [...]
“Nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’… it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.” — Aldo Leopold. 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 [...]
It’s the season — that time of year when, whatever our religious beliefs, we often think most directly about family ties. We’ve made the case at C&NN that nature experiences can tighten family bonds, most recently in our guide for families, “Together in Nature” (please also see Marti Erickson’s C&NN paper on family bonding and [...]
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, [...]
“Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” —Gary Snyder. 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 [...]
For many 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, updated from an earlier post: 1. With high gas prices, families are rediscovering both the joy and the cost-effectiveness of getaways [...]
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 [...]
Want Your Kids to Get Into Harvard? Tell ‘em To Go Outside. I 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 [...]
First of two in a series 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 [...]
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. [...]
In the San Diego bioregion, Jerry Schad has accomplished more than anyone I know to create a deep sense of place. Word now comes that Jerry has final-stage kidney cancer and is in hospice care. When I spent time with him several years ago, what impressed me most was not his formidable knowledge but his [...]
In a recent feature on Orion magazine’s Web site, the editors asked me this question: “Does technology merely distract us from the natural world—or can it help us gaze more intently at its varied forms?” My article, answering that question, is here. In it, I described how I spend more time carrying a camera than a [...]
“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 Principle In “Last Child in the Woods,” I focused on why children need nature. In my new book, “The Nature Principle,” [...]
