Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Louv

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Richard Louv.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Richard Louv is an American non-fiction author and journalist. He is best known for his seventh book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, which investigates the relationship of children and the natural world in current and historical contexts. Louv created the term "nature-deficit disorder" to describe possible negative consequences to individual health and the social fabric as children move indoors and away from physical contact with the natural world – particularly unstructured, solitary experience. Louv cites research pointing to attention disorders, obesity, a dampening of creativity and depression as problems associated with a nature-deficient childhood. He amassed information on the subject from practitioners of many disciplines to make his case, and is commonly credited with helping to inspire an international movement to reintroduce children to nature.

American - Author | Born: 1949

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

We tend to block off many of our senses when we're staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.

Richard Louv

Kids are absolutely starved for positive adult contact.

Richard Louv

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

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

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

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

Green exercise improves psychological health.

Richard Louv

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

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

These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find.

Richard Louv

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

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

Richard Louv

By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.

Richard Louv

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

Natural playgrounds may decrease bullying.

Richard Louv

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

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

Richard Louv

Other species help children develop empathy.

Richard Louv

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

Richard Louv

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

Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

Richard Louv

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child's life. You'll likely never see a slick commercial for nature therapy, as you do for the latest antidepressant pharmaceuticals. But parents, educators, and health workers need to know what a useful antidote to emotional and physical stress nature can be. Especially now.

Richard Louv

Research suggests that exposure to the natural world - including nearby nature in cities - helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.

Richard Louv

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

Richard Louv

As the nature deficit grows, another emerging body of scientific evidence indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for physical and emotional health. For example, new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children's cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.

Richard Louv

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

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

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

Richard Louv

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

Children need nature for the healthy development of their senses, and therefore, for learning and creativity.

Richard Louv

We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children's memories, the adventures we've had together in nature will always exist.

Richard Louv

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

Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

Richard Louv

Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

Richard Louv

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

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.

Richard Louv

We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.

Richard Louv

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

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

Environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making.

Richard Louv

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

Some kids don't want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.

Richard Louv

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

Richard Louv

Most people are either awakened to or are strengthened in their spiritual journey by experiences in the natural world.

Richard Louv

Nature introduces children to the idea—to the knowing—that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist alongside their own.

Richard Louv

This seems clear enough: When truly present in nature, we do use all our senses at the same time, which is the optimum state of learning.

Richard Louv

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

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

Time in nature is not leisure time; it's an essential investment in our chidlren's health (and also, by the way, in our own).

Richard Louv

Stress reduction, greater physical health, a deeper sense of spirit, more creativity, a sense of play, even a safer life-these are the rewards that await a family then it invites more nature into children's lives.

Richard Louv

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

Richard Louv

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

Richard Louv

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

Richard Louv

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

Richard Louv

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

Richard Louv

Nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.

Richard Louv