Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Paperback – Bargain Price Author: Visit Amazon's Richard Louv Page | Language: English | ISBN:
B006TQV116 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Review
"This book is an absolute must-read for parents." - The Boston Globe (
Boston Globe )
"[The] national movement to 'leave no child inside'…has been the focus of Capitol Hill hearings, state legislative action, grass-roots projects, a U.S. Forest Service initiative to get more children into the woods and a national effort to promote a 'green hour' in each day…The increased activism has been partly inspired by a best-selling book,
Last Child in the Woods, and its author, Richard Louv." - The Washington Post (
The Washington Post )
"
Last Child in the Woods, which describes a generation so plugged into electronic diversions that it has lost its connection to the natural world, is helping drive a movement quickly flourishing across the nation." - The Nation's Health (
The Nation's Health )
Review
“The simplest, most profound, and most helpful of any book I have read on the personal and historical situation of our children, and ourselves, as we move into the twenty-first century.” -Thomas Berry, author of
The Dream of the Earth --This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
Direct download links available for Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Paperback – Bargain Price Free PDF
- Paperback: 390 pages
- Publisher: Algonquin Books; Updated and Expanded edition (April 10, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 156512605X
- ASIN: B006TQV116
- Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
When I was growing up in Boise Idaho, I thought nothing of spending an afternoon away from my parents fishing ponds along the Boise River. As I graduated to fly fishing, I spent time on the river itself. Closer to home, the canal which ran below South Federal Way offered a miniature green belt where my friends and I built forts and rode bikes. Urban as Boise was, even then, this tiny greenbelt was still sufficiently wild that I would occasionally find a porcupine in our front yard. Our cats were fairly adept at finding quail (and bringing their still quivering bodies to us) and in general I found it easy to retreat to a relatively tame and yet exciting out of doors. Children today have no such privileges. Indeed, as Richard Louv points out, they are literally suffering from nature deficit disorder and its effects are far more pervasive than most of us would be willing to acknowledge. Increasing urbanization is part of the problem, but only a small part. A larger portion of the blame lies with the unintentional effects of our best intentions: legislation and regulations to protect and educate children.
Louv's hypothesis, in brief, is that we have entered a third frontier. Following the argument of America's first great historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, Louv suggests that America's frontier did indeed close in the 1890s, but it was replaced almost immediately by a second great frontier: life on farms, institutions such as scouting, and outdoor activities were, he argues, commonplace until the 1980s. But, just as Turner's thesis begins with the 1890 census, Louv finds the 1990 census an equally useful demarcation point, for beginning with this census, separate farm records are no longer kept, due to the decline in the rural population.
"For the young, food is from Venus, farming is from Mars," says Louv. But the not-so-young, that is, the parents of our present young, are often just as alienated from reality. Food comes from the refrigerator-- well, okay, it really comes from the grocery or convenience store-- but then it ultimately comes from truckers and the Oscar Meyer factory, or General Mills maybe. No? It comes from Papa John's Pizza, delivered by driver to our doors, ready to eat. What more is worth knowing? Western culture, certainly US culture, accelerates in this noetic disconnection from its natural sustenance. However, this is but a sub-thesis for Louv, one quickly passed.
Where the topic is a personal knowledge of nature, the word `nature' is itself problematic. Within current theory, all material we can experience-- whether a polyethylene terephthalate water bottle or an oak tree-- is reducible to quarks and gluons, and is thus "natural." The reader must bare in mind what the author means by `nature': something like, those aspects of the geophysical and biological world somehow minimally altered by man (or something like that). Not that I have a more economical definition for Louv's purposes, but often his usage of `nature' is ambiguous. Avoiding this seems difficult.
Louv's book contains many important discussions, but it's repetitive and generally seems unfocused. He repeatedly introduces ideas (generally by citing/quoting various individuals) as if having more validity than they do, often then admitting that he might not assent to much of the citation he has just introduced. This dilutes and blurs the discourse; material is included that should not have been.
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