One Man's Woods

We recently had a chance to meet with and talk to one of our favorite people. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, attended and spoke at a national meeting at the National Conservation Training Center on the future of the conservation education. The meeting was hosted by the Paul F. Brandwein Institute and Richard made a plenary address.
Photo from RichardLouv.com

His highly-regarded book has brought national attention and focus to the fact that, in the past five to eight years, the impossible has happened -- especially if you grew up more than ten years ago. Today, American Children have pretty much stopped playing outside!

In his address, Richard spoke of his own childhood and how, through endless time in a small neighborhood woods in Kansas, his love affair with nature and the outdoors took hold. His local woods gave him an affection for the natural world that ultimately produced a life of writing about family and nature and then the Last Child book with its accompanying sense of urgency and loss. His work is helping the National Wildlife Federation and many like-minded conservation organizations and public agencies to have to face up to the idea that without more Green Hours, a generation will emerge with no real affection for nature or wildlife and little notion of why young Richard would have spent all that time in his Kansas woods.