Last week I went to a talk by Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. I was impressed with his devotion to the notion of finding ways to connect young people with nature. He mentioned that even in Northern California, a place that is still largely forested, children no longer spend much time outdoors in nature. Young folk, he says, know nature as an abstract: the arctic ice fields, the Amazon river and rainforests—all places they are supposed to protect and be concerned about. But they have no experience of the wild, the patterned, the sacred landscape of nature. They do not have “a landscape of the heart” to ground them and to return to over their lifetimes. Read the rest of this entry »