Now, More Than Ever, We Need Nature

I Do Not Mean To Imply That The Good Old Days Were Perfect. But The Institutions And Structure--the Web--of Society Needed Reform,not Demolition. To Have Cut The Institutional And Community Strands Without Replacing Them With New Ones Proved To Be A Form Of Abuse To One Generation And To The Next. For So Many Americans, The Tragedy Was Not In Dreaming That Life Could Be Better; The Tragedy Was That The Dreaming Ended.

Increasingly The Evidence Suggests That People Benefit So Much From Contact With Nature That Land Conservation Can Now Be Viewed As A Public Health Strategy.

Kids Are Plugged Into Some Sort Of Electronic Medium 44 Hours Per Week.

Unlike Television, Reading Does Not Swallow The Senses Or Dictate Thought. Reading Stimulates The Ecology Of The Imagination. Can You Remember The Wonder You Felt When First Reading The Jungle Book Or Tom Sawyer Or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s World Within A World; Twain’s Slow River, The Feel Of Freedom And Sand On The Secret Island, And In The Depths Of The Cave?

Nature Introduces Children To The Idea—to The Knowing—that They Are Not Alone In This World, And That Realities And Dimensions Exist Alongside Their Own.