Numerous studies document the benefits to students from school grounds that are ecologically diverse and include free play areas, habitats for wildlife, walking trails, and gardens.

Time in nature is not leisure time; it's an essential investment in our chidlren's health (and also, by the way, in our own).

Quite simply, when we deny our children nature, we deny them beauty.

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.

Studies of children in playgrounds with both green areas and manufactured play areas found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas.

Nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.