Green exercise improves psychological health.

To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen.

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.

Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.

Nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.

Most people are either awakened to or are strengthened in their spiritual journey by experiences in the natural world.

If a child never sees the stars, never has meaningful encounters with other species, never experiences the richness of nature, what happens to that child?