Richard Louv on Nature-Deficit Disorder

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a Worthy podcast. I'm your host Lukas Ritzen. Thanks so much for joining me. I talk a lot about play. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favorite people who are advocates of children and nature and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated and I think we all need a little more play in our lives. In my opinion there is no one who has brought more attention to the problem we face with children spending so little time outdoors. My next guest is a journalist and author of many books including one of my personal favorites. You've heard me reference it probably about a thousand times on this podcast. It's The Last Child in the Woods, also Vitamin N and Our Wild Calling. His books have helped launch an international movement to connect children, families, communities to nature. Today we're talking about connecting to environment, the nature deficit, physiology, what gives him hope, and a whole bunch more. He's inspired me from the beginning of not only my playground design career but as an early childhood teacher and most importantly impacted me as a father for my children. And my wife actually calls him the father of nature play. A big warm welcome to one of my heroes, Richard Louv. Thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Louv: Well that was very kind of you and your wife.

Lukas: No, it's such an impact. We positioned our house so we can have nature at the back. We're talking about how we get children there more. And when I was an early childhood educator a mentor of mine sent me like a screenshot of The Last Child in the Woods and he went, "You're into this stuff, you've got to read this." And that just ignited my little brain to a whole new realm of the urgency. And it kind of articulated what I saw as an early childhood educator. And my role was as an outdoor educator so it was working with everyone from babies to kindy and my classroom was the outdoors. And I couldn't quite put my hand on the disconnect between the childhood I had and the experiences and the level of engagement children were having in my care that I was trying to teach. And then to read your book just went "This is what you want to think." So thank you so much.

Richard Louv: Thank you.

Lukas: As we start with all guests, where did you like to play as a child?

Richard Louv: Well early childhood, grade school, we lived on the edge of Kansas City, the suburban edge, and behind us was a big corn field and then woods. It seemed to go on forever and I spent much of my boyhood in those woods with my dog that you can see behind me there, Banner, who was an extraordinary dog. I write about him in the new book. And my parents often did not know where I was but Banner always did. And he would go home when I was up to no good and my mother knew it when Banner would show up. So those woods, as I write, entered my heart and I go there to those woods sometimes when I need them. And even though the bulldozers did take almost got them away eventually.

Lukas: Yeah, it's the phrase you I've heard you refer to, it's the forgetting of the normal. And the bulldozers come in and it's another step towards the forgetting of the normal that we experience.

Richard Louv: I think I should credit somebody else, I can't remember who said that. I'm trying to remember but it's environmental amnesia. Environmental amnesia is that you become used to what you have and that wasn't what your parents had and so you considered that normal. Your parents considered something else normal. And it changes over time and we've gotten way too accustomed to the destruction of nature and that's unfortunately normal to us.

Lukas: Yeah and I asked you to reflect then and it does get that nostalgic feeling back and you reflect and you think oh these better times before. But I've heard you say it's moving beyond nostalgia and the importance of it. So do you want to elaborate on that thought? Because it's something I try to convey all the time. It's like no this isn't just a nostalgia thing, this is a necessity.

Richard Louv: Yeah. Well not only that but I never use the phrase back to nature or I try not to. I say forward to nature because actually nature is where we can find the solution to many of our problems in the natural world. And the new technologies can come out of the natural world that are kind of earth-based technologies rather than just electronics that can help us deal with climate change and biodiversity collapse and even creating better social lives for ourselves, better cities by designing them with biophilic principles. In other words, nature everywhere even on top of high-rise buildings and in office buildings and all that. All of that is looking forward to nature. And in terms of our health, looking forward not looking back to nature, not going back to nature but going forward in nature.

Lukas: And to touch on your evolution in your ecological growth, what took you from playing with your dog in nature exploring corn fields to being involved in writing The Last Child in the Woods?

Richard Louv: Well first the cornfield in those woods, you know that really is where Last Child started. And I like to point out that I had such a sense of ownership of those woods and those fields that I think I pulled out hundreds, it may have been dozens but it felt like hundreds of survey stakes. I don't know Australia, you know those wooden stakes for future development. And I pulled out a lot of them from my woods and my fields and I made a stack. They made good sword spears too. And because I really wanted, I thought I could keep the bulldozers away that were developing all around me. And I had a housing developer tell me in LA when I was speaking there once, told me that I would have been a lot more effective if I simply moved the stakes around. So don't do that at home kids, or maybe. So that sense of it entering my heart, that sense of ownership of finding something bigger there than my parents and their problems or even what I saw on television. I couldn't stand the idea that my kids or future kids would not have that, wouldn't even have a chance for it. And obviously there's a lot of kids that don't have a chance for it right now who live in cities with very little nature, even though I've made the case since you can find nature everywhere even in the densest neighborhoods. But I couldn't stand that idea and I noticed that over, I've written 10 books and all the books that came before the last four, but somehow I ended up talking about the role of nature in the cities, the role of nature in our formative years and our lives as adults. And so that's, it's a long answer but that's where they came from.

Lukas: And an overarching theme that I love about the way you convey this message is it's not very singular. You're not saying we need to get back to nature so everything else outside nature is bad. And also it's embracing that yes this is, there's a feeling of sadness and longing and grief around not being connected with nature but there's a necessity and an underlying feeling of optimism and coming from an optimistic place in supporting children and taking action towards children. Is that something you've been very conscious of balancing that sadness and grief with optimism?

Richard Louv: You know I've become more conscious of it when people like you pointed out. I don't think I set out to do that. But you know the sadness is real and there's a great eco-philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, he's an Australian eco-philosopher who writes about what he calls solastalgia. And solastalgia is a kind of deep hurting nostalgia for the place that is being destroyed around you. It's not necessarily just for the past, it's a sense that you know our home is leaving us right now. And he looked at mining areas where strip mining was destroying land and the effect on people. And he looked at, he continues to look at climate change and how that is affecting people. And it's part of the whole idea of eco-anxiety. But he's a remarkable figure that I often refer to. But in terms of the optimism, I like to, you know Ray Bradbury the great science fiction writer had a great phrase. I interviewed him once and I asked him if he was an optimist and he said no, I'm an optimalist, which I thought was great. I'm an optimalist. I'm not anti-tech and I say that often. Even our language is very difficult when we talk about a disconnect from nature. We're part of nature too.

Lukas: Yeah that's the big thing.

Richard Louv: And our language constricts us in that way and it's difficult to talk about these things because immediately when you say nature deficit disorder that means we're lacking nature, we're disconnected from it. I think that's true but I've come to understand I think that what I'm really saying is that we are disconnected from our natural selves, the nature within us. We are in fact disconnected from ourselves the more we're disconnected from the rest of nature. But in terms of being anti-tech or being anti-everything else, you know that's nature too in a way. And I'm not anti-tech for a couple reasons. One is practical. Anytime you tell kids you can't do something they want to do more of it. So I don't say take the iPhone away from the kid or whatever.

Lukas: I can relate as an adult to that one still.

Richard Louv: But the second reason is that some of the technology can be used to connect to nature. I'm a big fan of digital photography. I take a lot of my own pictures when I go for walks and I see things better when I stop and notice them to take a picture. And increasingly I realize that photographs and something I post on Facebook that I tend to take, some of them are landscapes but more and more they're a bark, they're a moss on a rock, they're things that are close up that you have to stop to notice. That's one of the reasons I think that digital photography is great for kids because they can stop and notice and then show somebody else and take it home with them, put it on their screen and maybe they'll see

Richard Louv: Something they missed. One of the pictures I took in Arizona, it was a pine bark and I looked at it very closely on the screen. I saw an eye looking out at me. I said what's that? I didn't see that. It was a little eye right between nothing and I put it up on the internet. I asked people on my blog to identify what is that, what kind of critter is that? And I got a lot of answers and some of them said it's nothing, it's an optical illusion. But one pre-teenager wrote "well it's obvious, it's a dragon." So I wrote I'm with the kid. Yeah, I agree with him. It's a dragon, definitely.

Lukas: Yeah, and it offers this. I've used digital photography and just leaving cameras out in a natural environment for children to pick up and explore. And then similar but back the other way, I've picked up the camera to investigate and kind of remove myself from their nature experience. I could have a sneak peek later on. But then one day I picked up the camera and there were like 300 photos of the ground. I was like "what, that's pointless." And then I went and had a conversation with the children and they looked at me like I was an idiot and they said "it's our shadows." I didn't even pick it up and it was all the different shadows on the ground that they were actually taking pictures of. And then from there they went and investigated shadows and went off. But as an adult I didn't see that, but that was their representation.

Richard Louv: Yeah, and I met a guy the other day who takes kids out on nature hikes with cameras. He's a photographer. He took them into the town here in Julian one day while the other teachers took the kids out to the mountains and all that. And the kids were all over Julian taking pictures of grass and the cracks in sidewalks and the mysterious ants going up the side of the building and all that. And that showed him again that there is nature everywhere, but we have to notice. We have to pay attention.

Lukas: Yeah, 100%. And in my ideal world, I want children to be so connected and engaged with nature that they have an outcome of identifying as environment, not the environment. Time and time again it's like "what's in the environment?" It's trees and rocks and sand and dirt and animals and all this. And you even ask adults that question and right at the bottom after you keep pushing and pushing and pushing they go "oh, us people." That's the bottom of the list. It's just such a framing of that indication of where we've got to and where we are. And everything environment's out there and we're in here. For the people, we've jumped ahead and that's awesome. There might be people listening that don't know about this nature deficit disorder or nature deficit physiology that you keyed the phrase of in "The Last Child in the Woods," which a lot of content and a lot of work's been shared around. So could you unpack for our listeners? Because I'd rather get the pro to articulate it instead of me trying to fumble through it like I always do.

Richard Louv: Well, the genesis of that phrase - my wife and I were driving, she was driving, we were going down the highway and I was telling her about some of the research that I was discovering. That was new research that showed just one example of the effect on cognitive development, health, mental health, physical health, all of that. And it was attention deficit disorder, which is really considered an epidemic, even though there's questions about what gets diagnosed as attention deficit disorder. But this research was showing that just a walk through trees in an urban park in Chicago, the symptoms of attention deficit disorder in the kids went down considerably. And more and more of the studies were showing that nature experience could really help kids with attention deficit disorder. And when I was telling her about that she says "well that sounds like nature deficit disorder." So she actually, I have to credit her, she actually came up with that. And I used that in the book in one of the chapters. And my editors and publishers were wiser than I was and they said "you got to put that on the cover, that phrase." I said no, no, I'm a lady journalist, I'm not going to stoop to bumper stickers. They said no, you got to do that. So I thought about it and finally realized they were right. And I went back into the book and I made that the core theme. And it needed that in the book. And then when I was out on the road and starting to promote it, I realized that the term, as corny as it seemed to me, has some power. When I listened to the call-ins on radio shows and all that, suddenly people had a way to talk about this thing that they felt was happening, they knew was happening, but they didn't have a language to describe it or to have a conversation about it. So the reason my publisher was right is because without that phrase there would be no conversation. Yeah, I don't think there'd be some but not to the degree there is now. And that's been one of the great surprises of that book is that term has entered the language. In fact, it's entered some over 20 languages now. Yeah, and so that was a long answer to your question.

Lukas: No, it's perfect. It summarizes it perfectly. And it reminds me of a saying a friend of mine harps on about. He says resonance is the moment in which the brain realizes what the heart's always known to be true. And I think that phrase alone goes "that makes sense." And it puts into words what you know. We have the awards for TV and these two TV presenters were up against for their golden award. And one's the gardening show guy and one's the comedian host of TV shows. So they're doing these skits about battling it out and the gardening guy goes "I don't know what's wrong with Peter, I think he had nature deficit disorder as a child." And I was like yes, that's awesome.

Richard Louv: That's good. His name's Costa? He's got like a big beard, looks like a giant gardener. But he knew about nature deficit disorder and put it out there.

Lukas: Another one. Well, by the way, James Cameron, you know Avatar. When that first came out, a reporter was asking "what's it about?" He said "well ultimately what it's about is nature deficit disorder." And he said it the other day about the sequel to Avatar. When I first realized he said that, I wrote a blog that said "well that's great, I really loved your movie, really did. It would be great if you helped this movement which is emerging." And one has emerged. Certainly in Queensland in Australia, four of your states have nature play campaigns statewide. And it's all over in the United States, it's in China, it's around the world. And I wrote that kind of teasing, I don't know if you ever read it, but I'd like him to put some money where his mouth is. Maybe help the Children & Nature Network and help some of the other organizations, some of the other efforts with some of the millions of dollars he's making from the Avatar movie.

Lukas: Yeah, 100%. And to go into that, it's obviously been years since you wrote that book. What's the changes you've seen in this time?

Richard Louv: Well, there's, you know, obviously some people believe and they have evidence for this that things are worse. Kids are being handed iPhones as infants, iPads as infants. That wasn't happening when I wrote "Last Child." Some of the barriers have gotten higher, more difficult. It's true. But we're seeing so much good stuff. You know, in 2010 I was asked to give the keynote to the American Academy of Pediatrics national meeting. And at first I thought "really, nature deficit disorder, you sure?" I always have a clarification - this is not a known medical diagnosis. Yeah, it should be, but it's not. I always clarify that. But I was their keynote and amazing reaction. They went back and changed their practices. There's a guy named Dr. Robert Zarr in Washington DC who went back to DC, began to literally write nature prescriptions. Then he talked the other pediatricians in DC into doing the same. And then they went the next step - they created a database of all the parks and open space in Washington DC so the doctor could not only write the prescription but look at his computer and say "there's a park a block and a half from your house, here's what you can do there." We've seen that happen. We've seen an explosion in the number going from, you know, a handful to hundreds - it's still not thousands but hundreds of nature-based preschools. We've seen a green schoolyard movement and you're part of that in Australia. In the United States and in other countries, there's just a lot more awareness. There was a study done I think four years ago and they repeated a big study that was done 15 years before about Americans' attitude about nature. And what they found is one of the things they found is that the awareness that nature experience has something to do with children's, particularly children's health, had skyrocketed. It had gone from, you know, 10 to a thousand very quickly. What had not changed is the barriers. They're still there. Even with tens of thousands of people now working to change those barriers. For a lot of kids it's gotten a lot better, but a lot of other kids it's not.

Lukas: Yeah. Do you think it's an accessibility challenge or culture?

Richard Louv: You know, one of the things I would probably do differently now with "Last Child" is I would pay more attention to inner city neighborhoods. You know, to the real economic difficulties that people have getting in nature. I mean, transportation is one of the big barriers. If you live in a neighborhood that doesn't have a lot of nature, how are you going to get to that regional park?

Lukas: Yeah, I was blown away when we were at the Children & Nature Network conference in San Francisco. The children around that Berkeley area, in so many schools, a frightening percentage had never been to the ocean. And you live on a bay, you cross the bridge, you're there.

Richard Louv: at the ocean but a majority of that whole school had never been to the ocean another school just within kilometers or what like a handful of kilometers away from golden gate park had never been to golden gate park right right it's true in san diego that there was an early study i quoted in last childhood kids 20 minutes from the pacific ocean had never seen the pacific ocean many of them never learned how to swim most of them in some of the the inner city schools so the inequity of access to nature is a huge thing it's one of the reasons that i've spent a lot of time recently right here recently actually since 2010 i first wrote about the human right to nature that we have to think about this as a human right and in the nature principle the the book that followed last child i'll go into that in more detail and still more in in the next two last year or 2019 i wrote a cover story for sierra magazine the sierra club calling for the recognition of the human right to nature

Lukas: yeah balanced with nature's right to be you know one doesn't exist without the other

Richard Louv: and but until we start thinking about both children's in particular but adults too right to nature connection it will be patronized it will be patted on the head and said well that's nice that's a nice to have yeah instead of necessity which watch is what the research shows yeah so and you've got this question i'm sorry now you go the the the rights of nature also have to be recognized in that and that's the dicey topic that is controversial but i think we need to begin to think that way much more one of the the thing one of the things that's happened that's very good is the international union for the conservation of nature the iucn that's the biggest network of nonprofits ngos in the world conservation ngos in the world tens of thousands of organizations in 2012 with the help a little bit of children extra network they passed a resolution saying this is a human right this connection for children to nature and there's been talks since about trying to get it included in the list of of human rights for children children's right in the u.n it ought to be there i think

Lukas: yeah 100 it's quite simply that the human right and you touched on it briefly there we are referencing children a lot within nature deficit disorder but i saw a price of yours recently saying it's an adult thing as well which we tend to forget

Richard Louv: yeah and in fact one of the early customer reviews on amazon it gets good reviews on amazon but one of i said i totally missed the point clearly i was a nice guy but i totally missed the point it's about adults as adults well yeah if you read the book carefully you would have seen that parents were involved and grandparents and all of that it does affect us that we get all of the same benefits of the natural world stress reduction physical health mental health all the things that studies are showing as our kids do when we take them outdoors in the nature and you know that's enormously important and in fact the nature principle the second you know these books i'm shamelessly promoting back here the the nature principle which is the second of the of the four books is more about adults and imagining what a society would be like if our lives all of our lives were as immersed in nature as they are every day as they are in technology imagine their impact and talking about generational impact and how this helps everyone

Lukas: the parents of the children that featured in the last child of the woods are now parents with children so have you followed up with and had contact with those children from the book and how that's impacted their life or where it's developed into at all

Richard Louv: it's a great question that i'm not sure i have an answer to because i hear a lot from a lot of young parents and they're young so if they're if they're you know 20 years old or 24 years old the book came out 16 years ago so they were clearly little kids when i wrote the book so and i hear from them i get email from them saying it's affected their lives and how they raise their kids but one of the great gratifying things is to hear from you know people like your wife you know who and you who have said that often it was a an affirmation of what they already were doing and they needed that affirmation yeah even though they were already doing it so there's hope yeah the the last line in the nature principle is there is no practical alternative to hope i mean despair will get you only so far

Lukas: yeah absolutely and it is this like especially when it comes to sustainability and i think the basis for environmental sustainability is social connection identifying as environment and not it placed over there having fulfillment and accomplishment in a space but when we try to teach about environment we're flooding our children with these dire dire consequences and you talk in your book a lot about not protecting our children from physical harm and risk and expose him to risk which nature naturally does but then i love the other side of things and you convey the importance of protecting our children from the fire and brimstones if you will of environmental change and climate change

Richard Louv: yeah there's a another writer that your listeners should know about david sobel who is was at antioch university in new england and he's written about what he calls ecophobia and that's associating nature with disaster and the end of times essentially that you know by the time the kid is two even the kid is flooded with negative associations with nature with climate change and you know destruction and the end of things and you know i i would like to imagine the day when kids learn of the joy of nature before they hear about its destruction it's not to say that later at an age appropriate time they shouldn't hear about climate change and all these things but there should be the context of having fallen in love with it first yeah because if you haven't fallen in love with nature it's highly unlikely that you will really be dedicated to its preservation and to our own preservation

Lukas: yeah there will always be conservationists environmentalists but if we're not careful increasingly they'll be carrying nature in their briefcases not in their hearts and that's not our sustainable relationship no it's not real it's not a real life experience to have these monuments of nature not nature itself yeah and again to see ourselves as an intimate part of nature not as separate from it

Richard Louv: the the new book our wild calling which is about our relationship with other animals including pets but like my dog up there but also in the book it's more about wildlife than it is about domesticated life but it's about both of them you know one of the part of the some of the good news is that when i wrote last child i could find about 60 studies that i could cite with confidence the the impact of nature experience on child development on human development throughout life had essentially been ignored by the academic world except for a few very fine pioneers in that some of them are in australia in fact a high proportion of australia only 60 studies how could something this is literally the elephant in the room you know how could something that large how the how the natural world affects our development experience and everything but it had been there well today if you go to the children nature network website which is children in nature.org you'll see over a thousand studies that have been abstracted it's free for anybody to go there to learn about the research and yeah many of these abstracts which are independently done by the way yeah and peer reviewed as well to get on there it's not chucking everything up it's a great resource i call on it we're very conservative about making any claims and we don't make this is really carefully done and now there's over a thousand studies and they're still coming in many of them from australia 10 15 20 a month that this is now a growth industry to study the human relationship with nature on our health and our cognitive functioning and all that good news but when you look at those studies as i started do you realize that almost all of those studies they all tend to point in the same direction by the way which is this is fundamental to our humanity yeah but when you look at them almost all of them are about green space one way or another now many of them there's kind of an assumption that there are some animals in that green space in addition to us but pretty much it's on the effect of trees and all of that on us what about the animals what about the wild animals in particular and so the genesis of this latest book or wild calling is that is if there's a way to be intimate with nature it comes most naturally to us yes it's possible to get intimate with trees the more we find out about how trees communicate and their complexity the more we realize that they're having a conversation yet the animals we already kind of understand that genetically what about that what about the the coyote that walks in the u.s walks through our backyard and we have eye contact with that during the pandemic something interesting has happened i bet this is true in australia on when people had to be secluded when they had to go into their houses and stay home from work many of them started looking out the window and realized there were birds out there there was there's wildlife right there and there in their yard if they're lucky enough to have a yard or on the window ledge across an urban street where a raptor was making a nest and they started reporting this all over the world people started reporting including australia animals that had never been seen by most people walking down the middle of the street because there weren't any cars around but the cars were the best yeah and all there was this kind of awakening i think now our rock calling was written before that obviously but there was this kind of awakening that we're not alone on this earth we re recognized that at the precise moment when we felt the most alone yeah during the crisis yeah during the pandemic i wrot

Richard Louv: I wrote a piece about that for the LA Times and people have recognized that people flock to nature now they flock to the trail heads here people that have never done that now are doing it and it'll be interesting to see how long that lasts I suspect it'll last but sometimes you don't know what you got until it's gone or you're not allowed to go there but the animals kept us company and sort of the trees.

Lukas: To share a moment I had in reflection and my place in nature when COVID first hit we're moving into lockdown being a business owner responsible for my employees and the uncertainty of the world I had a moment looking out my backyard and I'm fortunate enough to look onto bushland and I've got cockatoos and galahs and kookaburras all there and I was like there in my head just going what's going to happen it's so uncertain I look up and the birds are doing the exact same thing they've done every other day and I went this thing keeps moving if I'm stressed freaking out about it or not they keep existing they keep moving their thing on and it kind of gave me this peace of saying hey this world's designed to keep moving and develop and yes things change but there's always a future.

Richard Louv: I have a friend who's a comedian and he looked out his window one day during the shutdown he said he saw a squirrel he said that squirrel doesn't care about herd immunity what's going on with his life it's living I can too.

Lukas: Yes that's exactly right yep absolutely I relate 100%. What are your hopes like we're living in these unique times and this whole progression from years of being delved deep into this topic of connection nature environment what's your hopes for communities moving forward?

Richard Louv: Well there's the media community you live in but then there's also the world community the planetary community it's a community that extends beyond humans part of the idea of the last most recent book Our Wild Calling is that you know parallel to the pandemic that came after I wrote the book medical folks were talking about an epidemic a pandemic of human loneliness we really got a dose of that during the pandemic even more than normal although we found ways around it and they were reporting that this human isolation is now associated they found with many of the same diseases as alcoholism no I'm sorry smoking and obesity and it was taking a terrible toll on people not just suicide but because it's associated with these other terrible diseases and that gets blamed a lot on games gets blamed on Mark Zuckerberg and anti-social media you know there's only so much we can blame on Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of this is because the bad design of urban life it's because of fear of strangers it's interesting a lot of the very same barriers that are keeping kids out of nature are the same ones that are making us as a species lonelier and lonelier I make the case in Our Wild Calling that all of those things are true but that this loneliness is rooted in an even deeper loneliness which is species loneliness our whole species that we are desperate to not feel alone in the universe why else would we look for bigfoot why else would we look for intelligent life on other planets you know when Stephen Hawking has told us it may not be a good idea to find because we're desperate to not feel alone in the universe there's religious implications of that obviously but I make the case in Our Wild Calling that we're not alone we just don't realize it that in fact if we pay attention as many of us did during the pandemic we'll notice that we are surrounded by a great conversation it's going on all around us between species across species and the more that science understands about how other animals communicate the complexity of that as well as trees the more this is literal this isn't just figured that there is this conversation and that when we notice it when we recognize that and become more a part of it we don't feel so alone.

Lukas: Do you think we're currently in kind of the void of knowing that we're connected subconsciously through evolution and generationally and coming from the land and being a part of environment and we're currently in the void of moving from that we've lost the subconscious connection and now we actually have to move to a conscious realization that hey this is very tangible and we need to explain out what we've innately known previously but now we're having to move to a tangible message?

Richard Louv: I think that's well said and people who do your kind of work of play area design using nature and that are part of the great movement I think to move this from poetry to practice it doesn't happen accidentally we have to create this new civilization of nature connection and there's great opportunity in that we have to do that for ourselves and our children for obvious reasons but we also have to do it for other species too during the great fires of Australia many of us watched the images that came out of Australia and were stunned by them now I live in southern California we have the same kind of spirit but the images that stuck I think that people talk about even now are the fires in Australia and then those images of people getting on their bicycles and having lost their own homes you know going into that forest and taking water to wild animals to koalas and the koalas were climbing up the of the person on the bike to receive the water there is something profoundly moving about that it speaks well of our species and not a lot does lately Glenn Albrecht the Australian philosopher that I mentioned before I asked him about this and he said that he agreed with me something I've written about which is environmental movement relies way too much on data yes the science is absolutely important but it's not doing the trick it's not changing hearts and minds to the degree we have to it's not moving people from knowledge to action and he says I think wisely that he looks at the great social movements that have moved people from knowledge to action like a civil rights movement to an extent gay rights feminism he says that are all based on relationship on love ultimately what about the environmental movement we basing that on that essential love of nature or are we talking about that enough or are we just delivering the data and expecting change we've got to deliver the data but we have to do that now we also have to take the next step which I've argued for recently and that's gets to the issue of hope it's not blind hope I argue for what I call imaginative hope we've been stuck in a dystopian trance for a long time in which most of the images people carry around in their heads of what the far future will look like look like Blade Runner and Mad Max I mean literally that's what people think the future will be what happens to a culture that can no longer come up with beautiful images not just sustainable not just sustaining but beautiful images of a nature rich future what happens with that kind of civilization it'll get what it can imagine you know be careful what you wish for you might get it be careful what you imagine you just might get it so increasingly I've been arguing that we have to develop imaginative hope in our schools in our organizations in the way each of us approaches the world we have to imagine that world we want to go to Martin Luther King one of the lessons of his life is that as he taught no movement no culture will survive if it cannot imagine a future that we want to go to we have to take that step it's not just the data of what's going wrong.

Lukas: And that ties beautifully into you know that loneliness peace like you're not gonna there's not gonna be that depth of loneliness when there's a purpose beyond yourself when you do have that imaginative hope not just for you and your own outcomes but says something beyond yourself which that's going to be coming back to that subconscious motivation those intrinsic motivators that we know as our innate truth is to care is to love and that can't be debated I how many parts per million I could debate that all day from a million different angles what you can't debate is how much someone loves their children and how much love they intend for their children to move into to create the future where they can love on their children and not only just their children like you said the animals the environments around them as well we're talking about these things like love and these innate traits that we're blessed with what does that look like for in a day-to-day practice like where can people start if people are hearing this message for the first time and they're inspired as I sit here inspired what is your recommendation on their action to take?

Richard Louv: Well you know Our Wild Calling was the hardest book that I've done and it's based on stories that people told me about encounters with wild animals mainly but also their pets let me just briefly tell you a couple that are very cool it's on my list here I've got it put here and circled was in my notes is like octopus story because hearing that oh that octopus story blew my mind I'm kind of backing into answering your question good these stories that I solicited from people and hundreds of stories were sent to me obviously don't use them all in the book but they had common denominators as it turned out as they really looked at these stories and listened to some of them were interviews some of them were sent to me I'll tell you one story an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla California he's about 80 now I think and when he was a student at the University of Washington he would go out in the Pacific and scoop a gear and he would collect his samples for his schoolwork he was studying starfish but he was also a starving student so he collected lunch and he said one time he was doing that and was it was down on the bottom of the ocean he was scraping around the sand and and suddenly he felt something very large intuitive sense something very large come above him and stop that's usually not a good sign he looked up.

Richard Louv: and he saw a big tentacle coming down and then another one here and he said at the risk of anthropomorphizing it it was one of those giant pacific octopuses that you know wingspan of about 12 feet and it said it looked at me and it decided i was a clam and it came down and got me and it did wrapped him in its arms and he said people think those arms are soft or anything but you can't budget these arms are also peculiar because they have they're filled with photons those are the cells that we use to see now it's not that the octopus was seeing him with its arms but it was getting to know him a lot better and each of these arms has what amounts to its own brain that where they have worked together so he was in the clutches of this octopus and he realized he was running out of oxygen so he kicked off the bottom of the ocean with all the strength he had and he and the octopus went up and up and up in the water then as they went up in the spiral of water the octopus started moving around his body he could feel the razor sharp beak of the octopus coming around his neck until he was looking into the octopus's eye and he said i don't know what happened there but something happened this is a hardcore scientist he's one of the most respected oceanographers among oceanographers in the world and he said something changed and he said kind of making fun of himself i think we had we we found our non-aggression pact and the octopus began to release him just a little bit they were still having eye contact and they both hit the surface of the water and paul ripped off his mask gasping for air and he looks down and the octopus is settling under the water and he's still making eye contact with it and then it starts to disappear what does paul do then he puts his mask back on and he dives and he swims after the octopus down into the darkness and he told me this detail that he didn't tell me that didn't get into the book and i wish it had it's great detail he said as they went down they spiraled each other and then he ran out of breath again and headed to the surface that experience changed him in ways that he he again hardcore scientists he used so what happened there he used the phrase spiritual he kind of grimaced when he told that because you're not supposed to talk about that as a hardcore scientist and he doesn't know if the octopus felt spiritual who knows but but he did he something changed he felt it was between him and the octopus second story a mother in toronto walked in told me the story walked into the living room and her six-year-old son was stretched out on the carpet with their big dog named jack who was also stretched out next to him and her son had his arm around the dog and she heard her son say i don't have a heart anymore she said what are you saying and without looking up her son said my heart is in jack what is that you know we felt that with people we feel that with the animals too other animals but what is that that permeability that space that gets filled with something third story i was on a lake near my house in san diego i was in my little boat one morning i was alone nobody was on the lake big lake and i have a little electric motor very quiet and i noticed on the shore what i thought were to turkey vultures eating a big fish a dead carp and i wanted to look more closely so i ease up with my electric water i got within within about 20 feet of them you don't usually get within 20 feet of golden eagles that's what they were two big golden eagles and so for what seemed forever and i say that because it means something seemed forever we did this the eagles would go down take a bite and come back up and go down take a bite and come back up did that over and over and over again and i'm in my boat watching this feeling this and something changed just paul said and i don't know what the eagles were thinking maybe they were just trying to figure out if i was edible but the point was something i felt something there that i felt when i was a kid in those woods with other animals i went home and i told my son about it who was home from college and i said you know matthew whoever i say i am i'm not whoever i really am is who i was in those moments with those eagles and i don't have the words to explain it this is beyond human language that over and over again people would say that kind of thing in these stories again and again and they also talked about these altered states as i described them when i said it seems forever time either disappeared or stopped paul felt that with the octopus again and again people described that other altered states a sense of scale disappears or changes radically you know watching ants for a while on their level and your sense of scale in the world will change so the mystery of the book is what is that what is that there's a great philosopher named martin buber i always have to be careful not to say justin bieber and he wrote a great essay called i and thou and his thesis is about people was that you and i don't exist not really what exists is right here it's what's between us it's the relationship and he used that word in a different way than we use it day-to-day he meant it as a kind of electricity that some people call god that's what i felt that's what paul described that's what all these people are in the book one way or another that's what they described i to name things and there isn't a name for that now maybe in some indigenous culture i would expect i would find that word in their language but i call that the habitat of the heart what is between us and another animal and that i believe that there are two habitats one habitat is the physical natural habitat that we spend so much time working hard as we should to preserve and protect and teach our children about and the other habitat is the habitat of the heart and we spend very little time talking to our children about that or trying to protect it or nurture it if one of those habitats goes so does the other one that's why it's so important to begin to recognize this thing between us and other animals you ask what's the main thing that people can do on the book tour for our wild calling until it was truncated by the pandemic often i was asked well what's the main thing that you want people to take away they had a script for canadian interviews on radio and over and over again it got frustrating and finally i decided wait a minute the main thing i want people to do is notice notice what's there notice the animals around you notice that thing between you and i realized that i'd already written that it's in the introduction i've forgotten it i talked about meeting a fox on a path on kodiak island it stopped me in my tracks and i looked into its eyes and it was the foxes on kodiak are the biggest in the world i think and in his eyes i didn't know it looked a universe in his eyes it was a mystery and he stopped me and i got is he rabid is he gonna bite me he wasn't budging from that path and so i finally took a step and he stepped over to the side and we walked up the path together side by side until he veered off into the grass he was not being fed by the people there he was wild and in the end of the the introduction i say now i don't know if was that fox trying to tell me something i don't know maybe he was just trying to tell me to pay attention at the time i was going through my divorce and there's alaskan brown bears all over that island i should have been paying attention i had to when i confronted the fox so i finally figured out when people asked me what's the main message from this book i said pay attention notice stop notice

Lukas: i was having a discussion this last week about the importance of beauty and for me when i noticed beauty in the world that light in the trees in a certain way or the birds or the texture of bark i know i'm personally in a good place and you've just articulated maybe i'm coming from that heart habitat when i'm being aware of that beauty and allowing me to be present in my physical habitat so and it's kind of that true feeling of presence and something you've unpacked so many times so beautifully is that feeling of humility and being humbled within both habitats now that you put it that way i was always thinking of that physical habitat but being humbled in your heart to care being humble and vulnerable in your heart to love and then to take action in that physical habitat and you know what one of the other characteristics and perhaps the most important one of these stories that is shared across these stories for paul in the octopus for the little boy and his dog for me and the eagles on the shore during those moments of encounter there is absolutely no way to feel alone there's no way to be lonely in those moments

Richard Louv: i'm feeling humbled right now by the opportunity to have this beautiful conversation and feel the joint love for our environment and our place in it so thank you so much for all you've done for not just me and my development and being a father but for all the people i know so many children all your articles your books articulating these innate truths that we internally know and articulate in such a way so our brains can comprehend it i've just got so much gratitude and thanks and all you do for the children in nature network in america and by association nature play in australia and allowing me to be a better designer and contributed to children's play so thank you so much

Lukas: thanks for your you know the people who do your kind of work i didn't know when i wrote last child i get to spend many years with some of the nicest people on earth because there's something about this issue that draws good good people and i consider the work you're doing and so many teachers who are taking their kids outdoors and so many pediatricians who are prescribing nature and urban designers that are making sure that future cities have lots of nature in them i consider all of that sacred work in the broadest definition of that work so thank you for what you do

Richard Louv: thank you