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."