Richard Louv Quotes

While outdoor activities in general help, settings with trees and grass are the most beneficial.

I do not trust technology. I mean, I don't think we're in any danger of kids, you know, doing without video games in the future, but I am saying that their lives are largely out of balance.

Being close to nature, in general, helps boost a child's attention span.

What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?

Prize the natural spaces and shorelines most of all, because once they're gone, with rare exceptions they're gone forever. In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chapparal, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness. We require these patches of nature for our mental health and our spiritual resilience.

A natural environment is far more complex than any playing field.

What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family's garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by morning sun, like bumblees quivering on harp wires? What then?

Until recently, most environmental organizations offered only token attention to children. Perhaps their lack of zeal stems from an unconscious ambivalence about children, who symbolize or represent overpopulation. So goes the unspoken mantra: We have met the enemy and it is our progeny.

Quite simply, when we deny our children nature, we deny them beauty.

Other species help children develop empathy.

As the nature deficit grows, another emerging body of scientific evidence indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for physical and emotional health. For example, new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children's cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.

Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

It takes time
loose, unstructured dreamtime
to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, not because we intend it to shrink, but because time is consumed by multiple, invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play.

I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing ... - WOODY GUTHRIE

An environment-based education movement
at all levels of education
will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination.

For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality.

Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses.

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.

If war occurs, that positive adult contact in every shape is needed more than ever. It will be a matter of emotional life and death. There's not a handy one-minute way of talking to your kid about war.

In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.

Here is the beginning of understanding: most parents are doing their best, and most children are doing their best, and they're doing pretty well, all things considered.

Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokemon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree.

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime - especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play - is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

Wilson defines biophilia as the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.

Though we often see ourselves as separate from nature, humans are also part of that wildness.

There's a generation now that didn't grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don't know where to start.

To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen.

Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.

Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.

Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children's sports in history.

Children need nature for the healthy development of their senses, and therefore, for learning and creativity.

This seems clear enough: When truly present in nature, we do use all our senses at the same time, which is the optimum state of learning.

For the young, food is from Venus; farming is from Mars

When you're sitting in front of a screen, you're not using all of your senses at the same time. Nowhere than in nature do kids use their senses in such a stimulated way.

As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically.

It was frightening and wonderful to surrender to the wind's power.

Nature introduces children to the idea - to the knowing - that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist alongside their own.

And old Indian saying: 'It's better to know one mountain than to climb many.

Spare time in the garden, either digging, setting out, or weeding; there is no better way to preserve your health.

The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents ... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.

Numerous studies document the benefits to students from school grounds that are ecologically diverse and include free play areas, habitats for wildlife, walking trails, and gardens.

Nature can help people recover from "normal psychological wear and tear" -

We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past
the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest.

There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.

This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache ... Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.

Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers.

To me, still being considered a kid, it can't be too much to ask. We should have the same rights as adults did when they were young.

Quality of life isn't measured only by what we gain, but also by what we trade for it.

In every bio-region, one of the most urgent tasks is to rebuild the community of naturalists - so radically depleted in recent years, as young people have spent less time in nature, and higher education has placed less value on such disciplines as zoology ... ... The times are right for the return of the amateur, twenty-first-century, citizen naturalist. To be a citizen naturalist is to take personal action, to both protect and participate in nature.

There's no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion, without a force to balance it, creates the hole in the boat - draining our ability to pay attention, to think clearly, to be productive and creative.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood.

This principle holds that a reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival.

These ecstatic moments of delight or fear, or both, "radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives," as Chawla eloquently puts it, are most often experienced in nature during formative years.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus.

You can solve any large or complex problem by breaking it down into smaller, simpler problems.

She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty - and refuge. "It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it's polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's like you're free when you go out there. It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad - and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why."
The she described her special part of the woods.
"I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."
The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.
"And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me.

Isolated patches of wild land are valuable to know, as are isolated people.

Increasingly the evidence suggests that people benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy.

In the meantime, relax. Take a break. Look at the clouds. Listen to the wind. Let the birds do the heavy lifting. A

Children who played outside every day, regrdless of weather, had better motor coordination and more ability to concentrate.

Nature - the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful - offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling's world within a world; Twain's slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

It's easy to blame the nature-deficit disorder on the kids' or the parents' back, but they also need the help of urban planners, schools, libraries and other community agents to find nature that's accessible.

By letting our children lead us to their own special places we can rediscover the joy and wonder of nature.

In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation'
a devaluing of the world and its creator.

If no one ever tried anything, even what some folks say is impossible, no one would ever learn anything. So you just keep on trying and maybe some day you'll try something that will work.

Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the Earth while we expand our culture's capacity for joy.

The times I spent with my children in nature are among my most meaningful memories-and I hope theirs.

You probably learned from your failures more than from success.

That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident- but more often than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world. One often overlooked value of children is that they constitue the future political constituency, and their attention or vote- whicich is ultimately based more on a foundation of personal experiance than rational deciscion making- is not guaranteed.

Our kids are actually doing what we told them to do when they sit in front of that TV all day or in front of that computer game all day. The society is telling kids unconsciously that nature's in the past. It really doesn't count anymore, that the future is in electronics, and besides, the bogeyman is in the woods.

Nature offers a well from which many, famous or not, draw a creative sense of pattern and connection.

As the young spend less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically and this reduces the richness of human experience we need contact with nature.

Each of us-adult or child-must earn nature's gift by knowing nature directly, however difficult it may be to glean that knowledge in an urban environment.

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.

We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.

I have a soft spot in my heart for tree houses, which have always imparted certain magic and practical knowledge.

The dugout in the weeds or leaves beneath a backyard willow, the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between the front yard and the road-all of these places are entire universes to a young child.

What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew it's biological name? Did it exist?

All spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and nature is a window into that wonder.

As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.

Every child needs nature. Not just the ones with parents who appreciate nature. Not only those of a certain economic class or culture or set of abilities. Every child.

Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.

Natural play strengthens children's self-confidence and arouses their senses-their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.

Use all of your senses.

We do not raise our children alone ... Our children are also raised by every peer, institution, and family with which they come in contact. Yet parents today expect to be blamed for whatever results occur with their children, and they expect to do their parenting alone.

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

Freud regarded childhood as a time in which our lowest, most animalistic impulses are strongest.

Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually.

Going out into nature was one outlet that I had, which truly allowed me to calm down and not think or worry.

What if more and more parents, grandparents and kids around the country band together to create outdoor adventure clubs, family nature networks, family outdoor clubs, or green gyms? What if this approach becomes the norm in every community?

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that the number of overweight adult Americans increased over 60 percent between 1991 and 2000. According to CDC data, the U.S. population of overweight children between ages two and five increased by almost 36 percent from 1989 to 1999.

Time in nature is not leisure time; it's an essential investment in our chidlren's health (and also, by the way, in our own).

We are telling our kids that nature is in the past and it probably doesn't count anymore, the future is in electronics, the boogeyman is in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.