Natural playgrounds may decrease bullying.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.