I came upon Richard Louv​’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder while trying to read up on alternative, nature-based pedagogies. In it, I found a deep and lyrical meditation on the role nature plays in our formative years. Louv gently walks us through the ways in which interaction and intimacy with natural spaces, life forms and events have not only made us human(e) but also kept us sane. He writes of ​‘cultural autism’: ​‘tunnelled senses, feelings of isolation and containment’ brought on by nature-deprivation in children. The remedy he suggests is to return children back to the woods where all their senses may be awakened and honed through direct experience. 

In making a case for nature’s role in nurturing creativity, the book delves into the lives of pathbreaking personalities such as Arthur C. Clarke, John Muir, Mark Twain, Jane Goodall, Eleanor Roosevelt and Beatrix Potter, who all had in common a childhood spent seeing, touching, collecting, playing, experimenting with the ​‘loose-parts’ of nature. 

As an educator, this book reaffirmed my instinct that any kind of learning intended to produce a generation of children who are truly empathetic can only happen within and through nature. It confirms what most right-thinking adults intuit – that nature is the ultimate transdisciplinary learning entity. 

Most importantly, Louv writes as a father and that touched a chord for me, reading as a parent. Returning our children to the nature-mediated encounters of our own childhoods is less about nostalgia and more about connecting them to the same umbilical cord that sharpened our senses, and made us hale, hearty, hardy and humble. For me, this book is a poignant exploration of how to raise our children to be stewards of nature in this era of concrete jungles and digital labyrinths.