Trailblazer: Richard Louv
"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
Richard Louv is a journalist and author whose books have helped launch an international movement to connect children, families and communities to nature. He is co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Children & Nature Network, an organisation helping build the movement.
Louv is especially known for his international best seller Last Child in the Woods, in which he introduced the concept of nature deficit disorder, on the importance of children’s and adults’ exposure to nature for their health and happiness. His work has brought him to national radio and television programs in the United States and he has presented many keynote addresses to international conferences.
As a journalist, Richard Louv has contributed and written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Times of London as well as many others. He speaks internationally about the importance of exposure to nature and on the need for environmental protection and preservation for greater access to nature, as well as for the health of the Earth.
“The modern world says: “You're always supposed to be in control. And if you ever come to the end of your own resource it's because you didn't plan well enough, where you were disciplined in some way.”
What’s the Story?
Richard Louv spent much of his boyhood in the woods with his dog and his parents, cultivating a rich wonder for nature. He now knows he found something deeply impactful during this time of childhood, something that stayed with him his whole life and paved the way for his advocacy for the natural world: a deep love and reverence for the natural world and animals.
During his career as a journalist, Louv was covering environmental issues and trends in relation to this subject, one of them being the massive disconnect between children all over the world where there was an increase in urbanisation. Through this work he became more aware of the growing disconnect between children and nature. This observation inspired him to write the book now known as Last Child in the Woods, in which he addresses this trend and explores the effects of this disconnect.
When Louv started writing Last Child in the Woods around 2005, this topic had been virtually ignored by the academic world; he could only find about 60 scientific studies that he could cite in his book which showed the growing disconnect and also the psychological and physical health benefits of connecting to nature. Since then, after the book was published, a nonprofit organisation that grew out of The Last Child in the Woods, the Children and Nature Network, has been collecting abstracts of the majority of the studies that have been done on this question since and counts now over a thousand more in about 15 years.
Recent work, Challenges, Reasons for Hope
On his quest of understanding our relation to the natural world, Richard Louv has more recently been interested in what he calls the habitat of the heart. The idea of the habitat of the heart points to a sense of permeability we sometimes feel with a member of another species, an important feeling we have come to neglect. Louv believes the future of environmentalism must incorporate these experiences, because fighting climate change cannot just be scientific studies and data alone.
It is also about the love we can feel and share with the world that surrounds us, this love is what makes us take the next step once the data is in. For him, the fact that environmentalism is not as far along as a movement as it should be, is because we think data alone will change minds, when in reality love is the mover of great social change.
More recently, the coronavirus pandemic has proven to be interesting times for those like Richard Louv that have been working on issues of nature connection for a long time: as nature has suddenly been taken away from people, as we stay indoors and pull inwards because of the virus, a lot of people realise how important connection to nature is.
But with these new times comes a challenge for our generation: stepping out of what Louv calls our dystopian trance. Louv says we have become addicted to despair to the point that most people tend to imagine the future as very dystopian. This may seem for good reason considering the converging crises of the world, but he firmly believes we must start to imagine the future we collectively want to create.
The great work of our generation is to begin to paint, not with blind hope but with imaginative hope, pictures of a future we want to go towards. We have to start to imagine a nature rich future, nature rich schools and cities.
For Louv, nature is woven into those pictures, and will have to be at the center of them. In his mind, this picture is painted not just through achieving energy efficiency, but through cities that incubate life and become gardens and engines of biodiversity, that fill us and the children of all species with health. Perhaps if people begin to wake up in the morning with that future in their hearts and minds, people will want to make that future happen.
People often frame Richard Louv as having started a movement of going back to nature, but he would rather see it as a movement going forward to nature. A great future, if we can begin to imagine it.
How Can You Support Richard Louv and His Work?
Read and find more about his books here: [http://richardlouv.com/books/]
What can I do in 5 minutes:
Become a member of the Children and Nature Network: [https://www.childrenandnature.org/join/]
Donate to the Children and Nature Network: [https://www.childrenandnature.org/donate/
Learn more: Watch our EcoResolution interview with Richard Louv and read more about his work here [http://richardlouv.com/]
