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

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

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

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.

Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees.

If we desire a kinder nation, seeing it through the eyes of children is an eminently sensible endeavor: A city that is pro-child,for example, is also a more humane place for adults.

How can our kids really understand the moral complexities of being alive if they are not allowed to engage in those complexities outdoors?