Nature is grand both in big spaces, such as mountain cliffs and ocean horizons, and in small patches, as in one leaf, a square foot of roadside, or a plant curled around a building column. Nature rewards the attentive. From the time he was a boy, Richard Louv has known this as much as anyone on the planet. For years, Louv has been saying that, individually and collectively, too many of us are tuning out nature and teaching our children to grow up with this deprivation as well.

On an evening in late October, Louv brought his message about “nature-deficit disorder” and the solutions to it to a packed lecture hall at SUNY New Paltz. The author of eight books, Louv coined this term to capture the malady and the consequences of living with no direct connection to nature. In myriad ways, too many adults have forged the kind of world where children learn about saving the rainforest in their online lessons, but they do not play outside in the schoolyard. Too often, children and adults have their eyes glued to screens, but they fail to look out windows. “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” Paul, then a fourth-grader in San Diego, told Louv, according to a passage in his book Last Child in the Woods, which examines the lack of nature in children’s lives, its link to illnesses and societal problems, and the ways to address this harmful trend.

Freeing Kids, Not Scaring Them

The consequences of living a life unconnected to nature are toxic to children and destructive to society and the Earth. However, Louv’s voice is not one of pessimism, and he has formed a social movement out of his concerns. “We have to remind ourselves that we can be hopeful,” he told the SUNY audience on Oct. 21. In fact, he said, the emphasis on climate change and environmental degradation has left too many children overwhelmed by a sense that they can do little to change the fates and heal the world from the ill effects. Instead, Louv exhorted, “we need to go to a place of irrationality” and believe we can solve these problems.

How? Louv has identified the ways humans can tap into nature’s restorative power and fashion nature-rich homes, schools, and communities, in a back-to-nature campaign he has spearheaded. His books tell of the ways that a nature-child reunion is occurring. In the book and in his presentations, he advises dozens of possible actions that parents, grandparents, teachers, urban designers, policy-makers, businesspeople, and others can take. They range from individual actions such as reviving traditions from childhood, being a cloud spotter, reading outdoors, and learning animal tracks to collective ones such as greening your schoolyard, examining and changing zoning barriers to the outdoors, and organizing a local Leave No Child Inside campaign.

The powerful connection to nature and the outdoors begins in our earliest days. In his presentation, Louv talked with joy of tramping through and playing in the woods and on the farmland during his childhood outside of Kansas City. Like Louv, in our circle of family and friends we grew up playing in the woods, hills, and backyards and on the ballfields and playgrounds in Western Pennsylvania, for many, many hours. The images remain of linking puddles in the yard outside my home, connecting them in streams that I thought were like the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, or looking at the gigantic icicles on the side of a quarry as we ice-skated. Those were and are, as Louv related so well, places that instill a deep sense of wonder and fun. As he observed, “All intuitive life begins in wonder.”

Louv’s talk was well-timed during a Northeast autumn in which the radiant, varied colors of the leaves, roadsides, and bushes have lingered. Some force in nature creates a grand show of ever-changing colors, rich and varied, and it’s up to us to notice, to play in it, sketch, take photographs, paint, hike, or do whatever we enjoy. In the small spaces and tall ridges, the fall’s color palette is captivating.

Louv is absolutely correct that nature’s gifts have a power to create healthy, vibrant children. Look and celebrate the colors around you, before they complete the change to the winter palette, which has its own beauty and variation. Take in the colors. Share time outdoors and show them to the child within you and to the children around you.

Notice the colors on a roadside patch in late September.

November’s roadside patch is quite different.

A fall day near Majestic View Farm in Gardiner, N.Y.

View the slide show larger in Flickr.