LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

"Business people and politicians report less emphasis on nature experiences in early childhood than do artists."

"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 of this writing only seven states even require elementary schools to hire certified physical education instructors. This has occurred in a country where 40 percent of five-to-eight-year-olds suffer cardiac risk factors such as obesity"

"Now for some good news. Studies suggest that nature may be useful as a therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), used with or, when appropriate, even replacing medications or behavioral therapies."

"Some researchers now recommend that parents and educators make available more nature experiences - especially green places - to children with ADHD, and thereby support their attentional functioning and minimize their symptoms."

LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

After many years of research, Edith Cobb published her influential book, "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood".  She based much of her analysis on a collection of some three hundred volumes of autobiographical recollections of childhood by creative thinkers from diverse cultures and eras. She concluded that inventiveness and imagination of nearly all of the creative people she studied was rooted in early experiences in nature. 

Cobb wrote, "Creative thinkers return in memory to renew the power and impulse to create at its very source, a source which they describe as the experience of emerging  not only into the light of consciousness, but into a living sense of kinship with the outer world.  These experiences take place primarily in the middle years of childhood. Memories of awakening to the existence of some potential, aroused by early experiences of self and world, are scattered through the literature of scientific and aesthetic invention. Autobiographies repeatedly refer to the cause of this awakening as an acute sensory response to the natural world."