When writing my last post, I struggled to find why camping, such a flawed activity, is so wonderful and satisfying.

Strangely, just after posting I started to read Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv, a fascinating book about what we are doing to our children in the name of safety and time management — that we think of nature as a leisure activity, not a necessity, and therefore our crucial connection to nature is one of the first activities to get cut in our hectic lives. I’m previewing the book as a possible selection for my teaching colleagues to read this summer and discuss when we return. Ironically, I was reading it whilst supervising our silent reading activity, and when the students asked if they could read outside for the last ten minutes, I immediately started to say “no”. Even as a self-professed nature-lover: hiker, camper, recycler and wanna-be environmentalist, I was reluctant because it seemed too hard, too hard to get off my comfy chair, computer handily nearby, to sit in a sunny spot and read for ten minutes.

The book doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already intuitively feel about our lives; we know we’re over-plugged in, we know we should get outside more, and we know we all watch screens too much. But usually that mild guilt is as far as it goes. In his book Louv articulates this feeling so well, and in his opening passage I found him articulating what I struggled to say about the contentment I felt camping last week:

Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood. It serves a blank state upon which a child draws and reinterprets the cultures’ fantasies…given the chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion. Nature can frighten a child, too, and this fright serves a purpose. In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.