Date Added: 08-03-2007

Summer camp re-connects kids cut off from nature.  Read the excerpt below.

Arizona Republic - Phoenix,AZ,USA

Emily Seftel
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 8, 2007

On the surface, summer camp is about campfires, trail hikes and goofy skits. It's a chance to meet kids from different cities, and to learn to sleep through the snores of cabinmates.

Summer camp also ensures that the kids will interact with nature, an interaction that is no longer a given in a world where the indoors holds so many options. A 2005 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that children between 8 and 18 years old devote more than six hours a day to media use. Although the study didn't mention the connection between media usage and staying indoors, it seems unlikely kids are bringing their laptops along on nature hikes.

During the past few decades, the relationship between children and nature has changed dramatically, says Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2005, $13.95). Although kids may be aware of nature in a general sense - they know what rain forests are; they're familiar with the threats to the global environment - they have been cut off from experiencing nature at a personal level.

You can blame that disconnect on a number of factors. In an October article for American Camping magazine, Louv posits that society teaches young people to avoid direct experience with nature, that our urban and suburban designs and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom. That association then supplants the perception of nature as a place to experience joy and solitude. Louv notes that "most housing tracts constructed in the past two to three decades are controlled by strict covenants that discourage or ban the kind of outdoor play many of us enjoyed as children."

Read the entire article:

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0308camp0308.html