Children and Nature

A recent study of indigenous people in southern Chile challenges some Western assumptions about children’s emotional capabilities and highlights the potential…

"We tend to value nature only when it is distant and picturesque. This causes huge problems. It makes nature an abstract of perfection, rather than…

The other day, I received a note from a good friend, photojournalist Anne Pearse Hocker. In the 1970s, she snuck across a no man’s land into the Wounded Knee…

Photo: Kathy Frederick Louv, Nick Raven, Matthew Louv, Isabel Raven, Jason Louv People like to talk about traditional fatherhood. Which tradition? I first…

Outside Atlanta, after returning from a class hike through the woods, an excited six-year-old grabbed his head and said, “There’s so much nature and I only…

What if we created a wildlife corridor that stretched around the world, beginning in our own backyards? As I wrote in this space a few years ago, every…

Touch could properly be regarded as a form of nutrition. We mistakenly think that touch occurs on the periphery of our self, a skin thing. But truthfully…

This essay originally appeared as “A Walk in the Woods” in the March/April 2009 issue of Orion magazine. In 2011, it was adapted and expanded in Richard Louv’s…

Children are designed, by nature, to spend huge amounts of time playing freely. That's how they develop social, emotional, and physical skills, and it's how…

Image Shutterstock/Flashinmirror On our way to see the latest installment ofThe Hobbit, I asked my 10-year-old Philip and his two friends, “Don’t you wish…