Last Child in the Woods

Richard Louv argues that young people in modern societies have become separated from the natural world, and that direct outdoor experience is necessary to healthy development. He gives the change a name, nature deficit disorder, using it as a way of describing a broad cultural shift rather than as a medical category, and he draws on research suggesting that reduced contact with natural settings is associated with behavioural and emotional difficulties in the young, and that time spent outdoors can be restorative. The book traces how unstructured outdoor play has been displaced by organised sport, electronic media and anxieties about safety, and argues that those anxieties are out of proportion to the actual risks and have been fed by the way danger is reported. Louv also points to rules and regulations that discourage roaming and building, and to classrooms in which outdoor learning and natural science have been reduced to make room for preparation for testing. The closing part of the book turns to remedies, setting out what parents, schools, planners and communities might do to restore the connection.

Written from the wikipedia article on the book.

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