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To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen.

Richard Louv

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Richard Louv
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Writer
Nature
May
Play
Take
Tantamount
Children
Withholding
Oxygen
Natural
Away

More quotes by Richard Louv

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Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
Richard Louv
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Every child needs nature. Not just the ones with parents who appreciate nature. Not only those of a certain economic class or culture or set of abilities. Every child.
Richard Louv
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The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
Richard Louv
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What if more and more parents, grandparents and kids around the country band together to create outdoor adventure clubs, family nature networks, family outdoor clubs, or green gyms? What if this approach becomes the norm in every community?
Richard Louv
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American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.
Richard Louv
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As the young spend less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically and this reduces the richness of human experience we need contact with nature.
Richard Louv
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We tend to block off many of our senses when we're staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.
Richard Louv
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There's a generation now that didn't grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don't know where to start.
Richard Louv
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If war occurs, that positive adult contact in every shape is needed more than ever. It will be a matter of emotional life and death. There's not a handy one-minute way of talking to your kid about war.
Richard Louv
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The future will belong to the nature-smart...Th e more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
Richard Louv
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As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.
Richard Louv
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Some kids don't want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run they want to see where a stream of water takes them.
Richard Louv
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We are telling our kids that nature is in the past and it probably doesn't count anymore, the future is in electronics, the boogeyman is in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.
Richard Louv
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Natural play strengthens children's self-confidence and arouses their senses-their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.
Richard Louv
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Time in nature is not leisure time it's an essential investment in our chidlren's health (and also, by the way, in our own).
Richard Louv
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In medieval times, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called acedia, a 'dangerous form of spiritual alienation' -- a devaluing of the world and its creator.
Richard Louv
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All spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and nature is a window into that wonder.
Richard Louv
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How can our kids really understand the moral complexities of being alive if they are not allowed to engage in those complexities outdoors?
Richard Louv
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Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?
Richard Louv
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I do not trust technology. I mean, I don't think we're in any danger of kids, you know, doing without video games in the future, but I am saying that their lives are largely out of balance.
Richard Louv