I spent the last couple of days with Rich at the opening meetings of The Conservation Fund's National Forum on Children and Nature. This is a dynamic and diverse group of folks from a cross section of society who are interested in doing something about this issue, the vision being let's reconnect every kid to nature. Here's some recent background pieces, including this front page Washington Post article from earlier this week. This article has been picked up by papers across the country.
The great website New West also covers Rich's talk at last weekend's Outdoor Writers Association in Roanoke.
“Nowadays,” Louv laments, “kids know more about the Amazon rainforest than they do about the woods behind their house.”
Connecticut has been a leader in this issue as well with its No Child Left Inside Campaign. The Hartford Courant recently gave editorial space to the issue.
Nau is a new outdoor clothing retailer with a cool website and a cooler business plan that includes giving one percent of revenue to environmental causes. Their blog, The Thought Kitchen had a recent thread on keeping the wild in wilderness. I posted a comment on this, getting the Children and Nature theme going, and asking if we need to accomplish the reconnect within the famework of the new generations and their technology. Personally, I prefer to shun electronics in the wild (except for the digital camera), and others on this blog feel the same, but can we really be effective if we rely on our paradigm?
