By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.

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.

We do not raise our children alone.... Our children are also raised by every peer, institution, and family with which they come in contact. Yet parents today expect to be blamed for whatever results occur with their children, and they expect to do their parenting alone.

The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.

What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew it's biological name? Did it exist?

This seems clear enough: When truly present in nature, we do use all our senses at the same time, which is the optimum state of learning.

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.