Richard Louv Quotes

This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache...Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.

The real cultural war is between the culture of narcissism and what might be called the culture of renewal.

Research suggests that exposure to the natural world - including nearby nature in cities - helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.

Children who played outside every day, regrdless of weather, had better motor coordination and more ability to concentrate.

Kids are plugged into some sort of electronic medium 44 hours per week.

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.

American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.

Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.

Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

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

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.

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.

A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.

Environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making.

By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.

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

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?

Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.

Use all of your senses.

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?

An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

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.

Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

Each of us-adult or child-must earn nature's gift by knowing nature directly, however difficult it may be to glean that knowledge in an urban environment.

In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.

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

If we desire a kinder nation, seeing it through the eyes of children is an eminently sensible endeavor: A city that is pro-child,for example, is also a more humane place for adults.

It's easy to blame the nature-deficit disorder on the kids' or the parents' back, but they also need the help of urban planners, schools, libraries and other community agents to find nature that's accessible.

A natural environment is far more complex than any playing field.

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.

There's a generation now that didn't grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don't know where to start.

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child's life. You'll likely never see a slick commercial for nature therapy, as you do for the latest antidepressant pharmaceuticals. But parents, educators, and health workers need to know what a useful antidote to emotional and physical stress nature can be. Especially now.

As the young spend less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically and this reduces the richness of human experience we need contact with nature.

Green exercise improves psychological health.

Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the Earth while we expand our culture's capacity for joy.

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

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.

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

Nature-the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful-offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.

As the nature deficit grows, another emerging body of scientific evidence indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for physical and emotional health. For example, new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children's cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.

Natural playgrounds may decrease bullying.

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 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that the number of overweight adult Americans increased over 60 percent between 1991 and 2000. According to CDC data, the U.S. population of overweight children between ages two and five increased by almost 36 percent from 1989 to 1999.

An indoor (or backseat) childhood does reduce some dangers to children; but other risks are heightened, including risks to physical and psychological health, risk to children's concept and perception of community, risk to self-confidence and the ability to discern true danger

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.