Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

Kids and adults pay a price for too much tech, and it's not wholesale.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokemon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree.

What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family's garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by morning sun, like bumblees quivering on harp wires? What then?

If war occurs, that positive adult contact in every shape is needed more than ever. It will be a matter of emotional life and death. There's not a handy one-minute way of talking to your kid about war.

Nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.