A Conversation with Richard Louv, author of “Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World”

Richard Louv’s influential book, Last Child in the Woods, launched a grassroots movement to connect children and nature. Coining the lack of experience in the outdoors as “nature-deficit disorder,” Last Child in the Woods is the first book to bring together a growing body of research reporting that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children – as well as adults.

Noticing

Richard Louv’s latest book, Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World, is about discovering who you are by exploring the natural world. Louv shows how by tapping deeply into human senses readers can develop the sensory, scientific, artistic, and spiritual skills to see and experience the beauty of nature. Drawing on wisdom from influences as far-reaching as neuroscience, nature photography, Indigenous traditions, and mindfulness, to foster what he calls “bioenchantment,” he offers a new, deeper understanding of what it means to see a tree, to know a fox, and to become fully human.

Silent Sports

The first line in the book is “Noticing is the beginning of wonder.” With our overscheduled, tech-driven lifestyles, have we lost our sense of curiosity about wild places?

Richard Louv

No, I don’t think we’ve lost it, but it’s covered over layers and layers of noise and politics.

Silent Sports

What benefits can people get from spending meaningful time outside?

Richard Louv

When I wrote “Last Child,” I could find only about 60 studies in the world that focused on either the disconnect between children, adults, and nature, or, more importantly, the benefits of nature to health—to physical health, mental health, cognitive functioning, community health, and social health. Only 60 studies on something so primal and so important to us that we’ve experienced since the very beginning. How could that be? How could that have been ignored, essentially?

Since 2005, that number of studies has risen to about 1,500. It’s almost become a growth industry. We know a lot more about the benefits of nature, and those studies point in the same direction. There’s just a long list of benefits that touch almost every area of mental health.

Silent Sports

We live in a 24/7 connected world with smartphones, iPads, and constant social media attention. Without these technologies, earlier generations spent more time outside. Today, is there a reluctance to go into a local state park and follow a trail? In earlier generations kids spent summer vacations outside and unsupervised. Twenty-four-hour news coverage wasn’t filled with breaking news of lost children. Is there fear and hesitancy we must overcome?

Richard Louv

The world we live in now is not the way it was when we were kids, and it’s unrealistic to think, let alone shame people because they’re afraid. They’re terrified by the media, movies, social networks, each other, and reality.

All you have to do is read the paper. Now, that has all blown up far beyond its reality, but it’s still there. I suggest to parents: don’t assume it’s going to be like it was when you were a kid. Don’t wait for your kid to go outside; take your kid outside.

Take your kid hiking, fishing, or into the backyard. And in noticing, you can find a lot on your own property if you look closely enough. What kids remember is not what parents often think they remember. They know a parent who shows that look of wonder in their eyes when the parent and child discover something new they haven’t noticed before in the grass, and the child looks up and sees that look of wonder in the parent’s eyes. That’s what they remember years later. They don’t necessarily remember the name of the bug they’re looking at, and that should be the focus.

Silent Sports

Social media posts are filled with spectacular mountains, sunsets, trailheads, and waterways. The natural world is rarely as perfect as these posts suggest. Is social media giving people an artificial, unrealistic view of wild places?

Richard Louv

Nature is always novel, and it’s always real. When you sit and look at a tree, that tree is real – and that’s going to be worth more in the future than it has been – and it’s also new in effect because we’ve gone through such a long period where humans have become disconnected from nature. If you want something new, go outside.

Silent Sports

At the end of the book, you give readers tangible examples of how to notice. Whether it’s photography, drawing, or journaling, can you speak to that a bit?

Richard Louv

Photography is obvious. A lot of times, people who like nature put down cameras. They think that’s cheating somehow when you focus on the camera instead of nature itself. And sometimes that’s true.

At times, a camera can be distracting. On the other hand, one of the great things about iPhones and other small cameras is that there’s not that much to distract you about the technology. With photography, you see things twice, at least. You see them when you take the picture, or when you’re approaching, you see that bark on the tree, and you take a picture of it because you like the way it looks. Then you take it home, you put it on your screen, and you see it again. Only this time, you see a few different things. I took a photo of tree bark and later noticed there was an eye looking out at me. I posted the photo and asked people what they saw. One commenter said, ‘It’s simple. It’s a dragon.’

Silent Sports

Journaling is also mentioned as a way to embrace noticing.

Richard Louv

I’m too impatient to keep a nature journal, but the people who do get a lot out of it, and the artists that I profiled – the painter who goes and finds a fit spot and waits for the wildlife to show up, and then she watches them, and she thinks, ‘What are their stories?’ I love that, you know, thinking of the foxes moving along the trail. What’s their story?

Silent Sports

How can outdoor enthusiasts remind friends and family to take more time to notice what’s going on around them in the natural world?

Richard Louv

When I’m at book signing events I always say, ‘take your parents outside.’ It’s not just about kids, and you know, I don’t pretend to know everything about how to do this. It’s a new frontier to begin to think about, and people like you are in a real service by learning about it, and so the first step is to know that there’s something to notice.

People will come to decide that what’s on the screen isn’t new anymore; it’s the same old stuff. There are always new experiences outside. When you see a praying mantis, when you have never seen a praying mantis before. Now that’s something!

Silent Sports

Noticing requires changing mindsets to make time outside a priority. With so many competing elements of life, is that possible?

Richard Louv

It’s a budgeting issue. The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need. It’s a budgeting issue for families, schools, employers, and society. We have to have more nature. If we start noticing what we’re losing, we may spend more time looking for nature.

Schools should have a course called ‘Noticing 101,’ and they’re skipping that step. How are we going to get kids to do hard science if we miss the first step of just noticing nature? The first step is taking the kids down to the pond to watch the frogs that have jumped to come back up and pop up to the surface. Ask the kids to be very still and imagine what it must be like to be a frog. If you skip that step, you know you’re going to miss a lot.

Silent Sports

If we spend more time noticing nature, one takeaway is the importance of protecting, supporting, and nurturing accessible wild places.

Richard Louv

Conservation alone is not enough. Even if we conserve every biodiverse piece of land or water right now, it won’t be enough to support the biodiversity that the planet needs.

We have to create nature where people live, learn, work, and play. It can’t be something you take a bus two hours to reach. It has to be all around us, and with the rise of biophilic architecture and biophilic urban design, it’s possible. Biophilic design is nature in and around the workplace. Studies show that in buildings that embrace nature, sick time goes down and turnover improves. What if whole cities could be that way?
Footer.