No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus.

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.

Natural play strengthens children's self-confidence and arouses their senses-their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.

Nature has been taken over by thugs who care absolutely nothing about it. We need to take nature back.

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.

Some kids don't want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.

The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.