Nature: Feeling Ownership of the Outdoors
Children enjoying the outdoors
This is Passport to Texas
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle is coming to Texas in April for the Children in Nature Network Conference. As a child, he says he felt ownership of the woods near his home, the kind of ownership that often eludes today’s youth.
As an 8 year old, 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. I think I held ‘em off for a while. In any case, I was telling the story about pulling out stakes [at a conference]. And afterwards in the discussion period a rancher stood up, and he was sunburned, he was in his sixties, white handlebar moustache…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 about the Children and Nature Network Conference April 7 – 9 at passportotexas.org.
For Texas parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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