Richard Louv famous quotes

The children and nature movement is fueled by this fundamental idea: the child in nature is an endangered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.
-- Richard Louv

#Children #Ideas #Fundamentals

By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.
-- Richard Louv

#Humility

What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology?
-- Richard Louv

#Technology #Night #Life Is Like

Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Hands #Sky

The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
-- Richard Louv

#Real #Smart #Leader

An indoor (or backseat) childhood does reduce some dangers to children; but other risks are heightened, including risks to physical and psychological health, risk to children's concept and perception of community, risk to self-confidence and the ability to discern true danger
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Children #Self Confidence

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

#Children #Moving #Self Confidence

The future will belong to the nature-smart...Th e more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
-- Richard Louv

#Smart #Needs

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

#Children #Class #Appreciate

An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #School #Parent

The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Parenting #Woods

Nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.
-- Richard Louv

#Amplify #Doe #Stealing

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

#Kids #Alive #Moral

Green exercise improves psychological health.
-- Richard Louv

#Exercise #Green #Psychological

Kids and adults pay a price for too much tech, and it's not wholesale.
-- Richard Louv

#Kids #Pay #Too Much

Kids are absolutely starved for positive adult contact.
-- Richard Louv

#Kids #Adults #Contact

Kids are plugged into some sort of electronic medium 44 hours per week.
-- Richard Louv

#Kids #Hours #Week

Nature-the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful-offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.
-- Richard Louv

#Beautiful #Nature #Games

All spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and nature is a window into that wonder.
-- Richard Louv

#Spiritual #Nature #Wonder

Quite simply, when we deny our children nature, we deny them beauty.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Children #Deny

A natural environment is far more complex than any playing field.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Fields #Environment

The dugout in the weeds or leaves beneath a backyard willow, the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between the front yard and the road-all of these places are entire universes to a young child.
-- Richard Louv

#Weed #Nature #Children

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

#Nature #Children #Flower

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Children #Fun

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

#Nature #Children #Oxygen

Being close to nature, in general, helps boost a child's attention span.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #Children #Attention

Numerous studies document the benefits to students from school grounds that are ecologically diverse and include free play areas, habitats for wildlife, walking trails, and gardens.
-- Richard Louv

#Nature #School #Garden

Mothers tend to be more direct. Fathers talk to other fathers about their kids more metaphorically. It's a different way of communication.
-- Richard Louv

#Mother #Father #Communication

No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus.
-- Richard Louv

#Organization #Leader #Focus

Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.
-- Richard Louv

#Needs #Agents

Something else was different when we were young: our parents were outdoors. I’m not saying they were joining health clubs and things of that sort, but they were out of the house, out on the porch, talking to neighbors. As far as physical fitness goes, today’s kids are the sorriest generation in the history of the United States. Their parents may be out jogging, but the kids just aren’t outside.
-- Richard Louv

#Kids #Talking #House

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

#Children #Sleep #Needs

Reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival.
-- Richard Louv

#Survival #Fundamentals #World

In a famous Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, mothers were asked to rank the qualities they most desire in their children. At the top of the list were conformity and strict obedience. More than fifty years later, when the Middletown survey was replicated, mothers placed autonomy and independence first. The healthiest parenting probably promotes a balance of these qualities in children.
-- Richard Louv

#Mother #Children #Years

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.
-- Richard Louv

#Change #Dream #Mean

If we desire a kinder nation, seeing it through the eyes of children is an eminently sensible endeavor: A city that is pro-child,for example, is also a more humane place for adults.
-- Richard Louv

#Children #Eye #Cities

Here is the beginning of understanding: most parents are doing their best, and most children are doing their best, and they're doing pretty well, all things considered.
-- Richard Louv

#Children #Parent #Understanding

Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.
-- Richard Louv

#Change #Growing Up #Children

We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past--the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest.
-- Richard Louv

#Family #Father #Real

When you're sitting in front of a screen, you're not using all of your senses at the same time. Nowhere than in nature do kids use their senses in such a stimulated way.
-- Richard Louv

#Kids #Way #Sitting

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

#Kids #Past #Electronics

Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.
-- Richard Louv

#Powerful #Way #Cost

These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find.
-- Richard Louv

#These Days

A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.
-- Richard Louv

#Giving Up #Thinking #People

As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.
-- Richard Louv

#Art #Falling In Love #Children

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

#Mean #Kids #Technology

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

#War #Kids #Emotional

It's easy to blame the nature-deficit disorder on the kids' or the parents' back, but they also need the help of urban planners, schools, libraries and other community agents to find nature that's accessible.
-- Richard Louv

#School #Kids #Community

Leave part of the yard rough. Don't manicure everything. Small children in particular love to turn over rocks and find bugs, and give them some space to do that. Take your child fishing. Take your child on hikes.
-- Richard Louv

#Children #Rocks #Fishing

Our kids are actually doing what we told them to do when they sit in front of that TV all day or in front of that computer game all day. The society is telling kids unconsciously that nature's in the past. It really doesn't count anymore, that the future is in electronics, and besides, the bogeyman is in the woods.
-- Richard Louv

#Kids #Past #Games

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

#Growing Up #Kids #Parent

Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.
-- Richard Louv

#Grandparent #Interesting #Needs