Richard Louv: Owning the Land
Thursday, September 10th, 2009Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, spoke to a group of educators in San Antonio this summer. He told them, as a child, he felt ownership of the woods near his home. But today’s kids may lack connection to the land.
I owned those woods to the extent that as an 8 year old—I’m sorry to tell you—I pulled out, I think, hundreds of survey stakes that I knew had something to do with the bulldozers that were taking out other woods. A developer told me a couple years ago I would have been a lot more effective if I’d simply moved the stakes around.
In any case, I was telling the story about pulling out stakes at the Cuevera Coalition. And afterward in the discussion period a rancher stood up, and he was sunburned, he was in his sixties, white handlebar mustache…And he said, you know that story you told about pulling out survey stakes? And he said, I did that when I was a boy.
And then he began to cry in front of five hundred people. And despite his deep sense of embarrassment, he continued to speak about his sense of grief that his might be one of the last generations to have that kind of sense of ownership of land that has nothing to do with money—it goes deeper than that.
Help children connect with the land. Learn more at passportotexas.org.
For Texas parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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