The dugout in the weeds or leaves beneath a backyard willow, the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between the front yard and the road-all of these places are entire universes to a young child.
While outdoor activities in general help, settings with trees and grass are the most beneficial.
As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically.
The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime – especially.
Nature – the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful – offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot.
Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children’s sports in history.
I have a soft spot in my heart for tree houses, which have always imparted certain magic and practical knowledge.
Though we often see ourselves as separate from nature, humans are also part of that wildness.
These ecstatic moments of delight or fear, or both, “radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives,” as Chawla eloquently puts it, are most often experienced in nature during formative years.
Something else was different when we were young: our parents were outdoors. I’m not saying they were joining health clubs and things of that sort, but they were out of the house, out on the porch, talking to neighbors. As far as physical fitness goes, today’s kids are the sorriest generation in the history of the United States. Their parents may be out jogging, but the kids just aren’t outside.
On average, the greener a girl’s view from home, the better she concentrates, the less she acts impulsively, and the longer she can delay gratification.
Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive.
In an effort to value and structure time, some of us unintentionally may be killing dreamtime.
Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers.
Wilson defines biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.
Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law.
Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.
Too often, small towns invaded by urban expatriates lose their character and physical beauty to overdevelopment.
Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it.
Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses.
The more high tech we become the more nature we need.