“Nature-deficit disorder”: it is a phrase that has become a part of our jargon. It is the issue that journalist and author Richard Louv addresses in his book, Last Child in the Woods, in which he asks, “If the kids are not going out and bonding with nature, who in the world will?”
The health and education implications, he says, are great.
Louv is on a mission to “connect kids to nature,” which he sees as a unifying theme across adults who remember their first experiences with the outdoors with warmth and nostalgia. He advocates children playing in their own space, a natural play space, because, he says, those kids are far more likely to be creative and inventive than those who play on a “flat playground.”
“That sense of wonder, that sense of awe,” that children get from nature Louv believes allows them to develop the full use of their senses. It is a moral issue, he says; “a fundamental part of our humanity.” Children need unsupervised play to develop self regulation and what he calls, “executive function,” which he says is “being cut away systematically from children today.”
“Everything in the next 40 years must change,” Louv states, from how we look at energy to urban design; “The future must be about producing human energy as well as saving it.” So, says Louv, the question we should ask is not, “How can things be as good as they were?” but “How can things be better than they ever were?”
