“Exercise is key to health, and studies have shown that people are much more likely to exercise if parks and opportunities for recreation are nearby,” writes the Trust for Public Land (TPL) in their latest issue of Land & People. For TPL and many other community-focused organizations, the interconnected issues of physical health, getting outdoors and connecting kids to the outdoors, are becoming paramount to their work. These issues are relevant for the land conservation-focused TPL, health organizations like Kaiser Permanente and funders like the Stewardship Council in California. TPL in fact received funding from Kaiser Permanente to build what they call “Fitness Zones” in Los Angeles, particularly in densely populated low income East Los Angeles neighborhoods where obesity is high.

Another organization focused on getting youth outside believes “[c]hildren are smarter, cooperative, happier and healthier when they have frequent and varied opportunities for free and unstructured play in the out-of-doors.” As such, the Children & Nature Network, chaired by Last Child in the Woods author Richard Louv, compiled two annotated bibliographies to research that will tell you just how much kids are not getting outdoors, the consequences and the most promising solutions.

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After Richard Louv, chairman of the Children & Nature Network, published Last Child in the Woods in 2005, several organizations requested that he speak and write articles on the compelling topic of “Nature-Deficit Disorder,” which led to national media attention. I first heard Louv speak to a packed conference hall at the 2006 Bay Area Open Space Council conference in San Francisco. Since then, a movement to reconnect children to nature has been gaining momentum from environmentalists and youth development organizations to mental health care advocates.

In a recent article on the subject published in Orion magazine called Leave No Child Inside, Louv writes about the campaigns to reconnect children to nature, sometimes called “Leave No Child Inside,” forming across the country. “The activity has attracted a diverse assortment of people who might otherwise never work together,” writes Louv.

Before Louv’s book, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted an evaluation in 2004 to measure the impacts of week-long residential outdoor education programs for at-risk sixth graders in California as called for by California Assembly Bill (AB) 1330, Chapter 663.

They found that children who attended outdoor school significantly raised their science scores by 27 percent, retained new science knowledge for six to ten weeks, showed gains in cooperation and conflict resolution and other positive social gains. More than half of the students in the study were English learners and first-timers to a nature setting.

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