Last Child in the Woods

“The remarkable collapse of children’s engagement with nature – which is even faster than the collapse of the natural world – is recorded in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, and in a report published recently by the National Trust. Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision has decreased by almost 90%. In one generation the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places in the UK has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten. In the US, in just six years (1997-2003) children with particular outdoor hobbies fell by half. Eleven to 15 year-olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen. The young people we might have expected to lead the defence of nature have less and less to do with it.” Read more.