Excerpts from Last Child in the Woods

Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 2005. 

Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment, but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. 

Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom, while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. 

Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature in positive ways. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature. 

Reducing that deficit - healing the broken bond between our young and nature - is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends on it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes, and our daily lives. 

Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood. It serves as a blank slate upon which a child draws and reinterprets the culture's fantasies. Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. 

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

Studies over the past decade have shown that participants in adventure-therapy programs made gains in self-esteem, leadership, academics, personality, and interpersonal relations. "These changes were shown to be more stable over time than the changes generated in more traditional education programs," according to Dene S. Berman and Jennifer Davids-Berman, in a review of such programs for the Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools. 

To be spiritual is to be constantly amazed. Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Heschel would encourage his students to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.