This is sacred work connecting children to nature, and many of you in this room have been doing this work for years, proclaimed Richard Louv, local author of the book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” who spoke recently at a public lecture at Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU). Louv, a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist, has been a vocal advocate of weening children off their Playstations and i-Pods and encouraging adults to reintroduce and reacquaint children with nature and the world around them. During his lecture at PLNU, Louv acknowledged several San Diego environmental-education activists for the work they do in educating young people, including Eric Bowlby of San Diego Canyonlands, Shara Fisler of Aquatic Adventures and the San Diego Audubon Society. “I can’t thank you enough,” Louv said. “We need to support you with money and recognition.” As a child growing up on the edge of the suburbs in Missouri, Louv said he found a great deal of solace in nature and that this is the special place in his heart he remembers. “There were things I found in nature that helped me as a child,” Louv said. “I spent a lot of time adventuring alone there.” When Louv gave congressional testimony last year on behalf of connecting children with nature, he got the congressmen talking about “that place in their heart that they went to as kids,” Louv said. Even those who do not agree with all of Louv’s viewpoints, including ranchers and politicians, admit they have this place in their hearts. It is this memory that Louv uses to stir up lecturegoers, making bigger appearances at conferences around the country now than ever. He posed rhetorical questions to the audience of over 1,000 observers in PLNU’s Brown Chapel such as, “Will we be the last generation that finds it normal to have a natural place in your heart?” “If we’re not careful, we will have environmentalists who carry nature in their briefcases,” Louv said. He warned that even though many young people in colleges such as PLNU are working on global warming issues, he encourages them to also connect children to nature. “Connecting people to nature is not in the academic world,” Louv said. Louve said it is the exposure to nature through walks in the park and playing outdoors that lengthens a child’s attention span and promotes imagination and creativity — the very solutions to the phrase “nature deficit disorder” that he coined in his book. Louv proved in this 2005 book what many educators knew but did not have the words for — that children need nature in order to be healthy, active human beings. His book is full of researched statistics that show the extent of the problem that young people face in America of being disconnected from nature. The problem of attention deficit disorder (ADD) is also a main component of Louv’s analysis. He found that at some U.S. schools, 30 percent of the boys are on Ritalin to treat ADD. However, Louv suggests nature therapy be added to the treatment instead of more medication. “What proportion of the kids on Ritalin are due to the fact that we took nature away from them to begin with?” he asked of the crowd of parents and educators. Louv also attributes the loss of recess to increased violence and poor academics. “When children go on recess, it’s been proven that it improves their grades in school, yet 40 percent of schools in the U.S. have cancelled or reduced recess,” he said. “What are we thinking?” The violence at schools can also be correlated to the loss of nature, Louv said. “We need to green all the schoolyards if we want to stop bullying,” he said. The creation of outdoor classrooms is cheaper than building brick buildings and many schools are within walking distance of canyons in San Diego, Louv said. Utilizing these canyons is a growing part of San Diego education developed by San Diego Canyonlands. Louv said he continues to research studies linking greater neighborhood greening to fewer cases of obesity among residents and to higher test scoring in those schools that have natural daylight rather than indoor lighting. “Even in preschool, kids are sedentary over 80 percent of the time,” he said. Often, the modernization of technology and electronics are blamed for the disconnect between children and the outdoors. However, Louv warns parents and teachers not to demonize these distractions, as it just makes kids want to use them more. “We need to look at urban design and the overstructuring of childhood,” he said. “Play is intimately related to imagination and mental health,” Louv said. A big roadblock for many parents is that they fear letting their children play outside because of news reports about child abductions. However, Louv noted that stranger abductions have been going down for 20 years and abductions are usually by someone the child knows, not a stranger on the corner. Louv blames the instillation of this fear on the media, his own profession. “They (media) repeat these crimes against children over and over and over again,” Louv said. “That is the very definition of conditioning. We are being conditioned to fear.” He acknowledged that the much simpler, safer times of the 1950s are over, “but we need to stop being so afraid to let our kids go outdoors. It’s manageable danger,” he said. Bringing children out into nature is a main goal of the Children and Nature Network that Louv founded in San Diego. The network has grown to 50 regions around the U.S. as a result of his transformational book. Louv has appeared on the “Today Show” to talk about the family nature clubs that the Children and Nature Network encourages neighborhood families to form, with free toolkits available for families at www.childrenandnature.org. The network ties into a larger movement that is occurring around the U.S. called No Child Left Inside, which formed as a sort of backlash to the No Child Left Behind standardization of public schools in the past few years. “We need to visualize a different world and we just might get there,” Louv said.