Notes on "Last Child in the Woods" Part III

Louv, Richard (2005, 2008).  Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. New York, NY: Workman Publishing Company.

Part III The Best of Intentions: Why Johnnie and Jeannie Don’t Play Outside Anymore

Time and Fear
p. 111 “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.”
p. 112 “It takes time--loose, unstructured dreamtime--to experience nature in a meaningful way.”
p. 120 “We can now look at at this way: Time in nature is not  leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health.”
p. 121 “By taking nature experience out of the leisure column and placing it in the health column, we are more likely to take our children on that hike--more likely to, well, have fun.”

The Bogeyman Syndrome Redux
p. 123 “Fear is the emotion that separates a developing child from the full, essential benefits of nature.  Fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger, and of nature itself.”
p. 124 “Stephen Kellert, professor of social ecology at Yale, and a leading thinker on biophilia, describes how experience in the surrounding home territory, especially in nearby nature, helps shape children's cognitive maturation, including the developed abilities of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.”

Don’t Know Much About Natural History: Education as a Barrier to Nature
p. 133 “Practitioners in the new fields of conservation psychology (focused on how people become environmentalists) and ecopsychology (the study of how ecology interacts with the human psyche) not that, as Americans become increasingly urbanized, their attitudes towards animals change in paradoxical ways.”
p. 133 “To urbanized people, the source of food and the reality of nature are becoming more abstract. At the same time, urban folks are more likely to feel protective of animals--or to fear them.”
p. 135 “If educators are to help heal the broken bond between the young and the natural world, they and the rest of us must confront the unintended educational consequences of an overly-abstract science education: ecophobia and the death of natural history studies.”
p. 137 “Public education is enamored of, even mesmerized by, what might be called silicon faith: a myopic focus on high technology as salvation.”

Where Will the Future Stewards of Nature Come From?
p. 148. “Pergams and Zaradic warn of what they call “videophilia”--a shift from loving streams (biophilia) to loving screens.”
p. 159 “”If children do not attach to the land, they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature, nor will they feel a long-term commitment to the environment, to the place.”
p. 159 “Passion does not arrive on a videotape or a CD; passion is personal.  Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along the 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.”