In his important and influential book Last Child in the Woods, child advocacy expert Richard Louv argues that today’s kids are increasingly disconnected from nature, a rift he explicitly connects to such alarming trends as the rise in obesity, attention disorders, and depression.

Among the findings:

- Children today spend much less time playing outdoors than they did a generation ago
- Children at eight years old can identify 25 percent more Pokemon characters than wildlife species
- Children between the ages of six months and six years spend an average of 1.5 hours a day with electronic media, and youths between the ages of 8 and 18 an average of 6.5 hours a day

Last Child brings together research and indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children — and adults. His solution, essentially: get kids — and yourself — out into nature!  Louv suggests plenty activities and games to get kids engaged once they’re out of the house, And for adults he offers an extensive list of books designed to inspire, inform, and generally open our eyes to the wonders of nature — and prod us to go enjoy it with the kids in our lives. Here’s a small sampling.

1. Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder
2. Cornell, Joseph. Sharing Nature with Children.
3. Lovejoy, Sharon. Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots: Gardening Together with Children.
4. Pretor-Pinney, Gavin. The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds.
5. Pyle, Robert Michael. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland.
6. Reed, Edward S. The Necessity of Experience.
7. Rezendes, Paul. Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign.
8. Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild.
9. Wilson, Edward O. The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.
10. Yankielun, Norbert. How to Build an Igloo: And Other Snow Shelters.

We want to hear from you: What books would you recommend to reawaken a sense of wonder in nature?

Any sincere effort to tackle global warming will require a change in the very way we use our brains. So argues Al Gore in In Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the worthy and beautifully produced sequel to his seminal An Inconvenient Truth.

Part of the reason humans don’t have a sense of urgency about global warming, he writes, is because we don’t by instinct react to distant and intangible threats, such as, say, a gradual shift in the earth’s atmosphere. If we are to seriously confront the environmental crisis in front of us, however, we need to incorporate  into our values system a far-sighted concern for the environment.

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“The world has been Googled,” is how Ken Auletta begins his book about the company whose motto is the very uncorporate “Don’t be evil,” but which in 11 years has grown from a rented garage in Silicon Valley to a juggernaut that other companies, even entire industries have grown to fear and in some cases loathe.  Auletta’s book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, charts Google’s inexorable rise to dominance over the new media landscape and considers the broader ramifications–some benign, others decidedly not, still others uncertain–of its success. In the company’s self-description, “We began as a technology company, and have evolved into a software, technology, internet, advertising and media company all rolled into one.”  Whether that’s a good thing, a bad thing, or something in between is up for debate. What’s not in question is the sheer scale and scope of Google’s achievement. Consider these numbers, taken from the book.

Google’s advertising revenues account for 40 percent of all the advertising dollars spent online.

Google aggregates 25,000 news sites daily.

Google’s YouTube attracted 90 million unique visitors in March 2009–two-thirds of all web video traffic.

Google in early 2008 was receiving 1 million job applications per year, adding 150 employees per week, and employing nearly 20,000.

Google’s had revenues of $3.2 billion in 2004; in 2008, $21.8 billion.

Google’s net profits in 2004 were $399 billion; in 2008, $4.2 billion.

97 percent of Google’s revenue in 2008 came from advertising.

By 2008 Google produced two-thirds of all Internet searches in the United States and nearly 70 percent worldwide.

Google’s index contained 1 trillion web pages by 2008, and, according to co-founder Sergey Brin, every four hours it indexed the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress.

Google’s ad revenues in 2008 matched the combined advertising revenues of the five broadcast networks.

It would be nice to think that gaining broad recognition of the reality of human-induced global warming was yesterday’s exercise, and that today’s challenge is figuring out how to combat it.

Yet, as Al Gore makes clear in Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the global warming denial movement–in Gore’s words “a massive political campaign of intentional deception”–is not only alive but active and well-financed, and still effective at clouding the issue.

And so, even as scientists and activists make major advances in developing tools to address climate change, on the political side the campaign of deception remains a major obstacle to action.

Below are some startling figures collected by Gore that reveal the battle against misinformation on climate change is far from over. Read More

Update: Thanks to everyone who attended the event - in person or online. We’ve taken down the live-stream player. A full video archive of the event will be available soon.

Welcome Street Prophets Viewers! Remember to head back over to Street Prophets with your comments before the Q&A starts. We will ask your questions here at the live event.

Is the Religious Right really on the decline? Is Christianity undergoing a third period of transformation marked by a disregard of dogma in favor of a more open “spirituality,” and a collapse of barriers between different religions? What are the consequences of these shifts as we debate health care - particularly the controversial Stupak Amendment?

Join us tonight, at 6pm Eastern, as Harvard divinity professor Harvey Cox, and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne discuss Cox’s new book, The Future of Faith.

If you are in New York City, join us at the WNYC Greene Space for this important - and FREE - event.

If you are not in New York, watch the live stream here on the PBC blog, or join our partners at Street Prophets, an online community for progressives of faith, who will also be hosting a live stream of the event.

Google is a different kind of company. True or false, that’s certainly a widespread perception.

And as the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta tells it in Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, that perception explains, in part,  the tremendous success the company has in attracting top talent. Though its salaries are relatively modest for both executives and engineers ($450,000 at the very top), it consistently attracts the top talent and is routinely ranked by business magazines as one of the best companies in the world to work for.

The secret lies in Google’s unconventional corporate culture. Though it has been sneered at by more old-school corporate executives, the company has thrived on a system lax on formalities where hierarchy is intentionally devalued. It is loosely rooted, Aluetta observes, in the spirit of the annual “Burning Man” music festival, at which cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are regulars. The company’s raw ambition, which places products ahead of profits, gives employees a feeling of social purpose. Read More

When you watch Barack Obama give a speech or meet with voters, it’s easy to believe that the political process comes naturally to him. He is poised, conversational, on message – the kind of candidate a campaign strategist could only dream of.

Yet those who know the president more personally have often painted a more nuanced picture of Obama – sometimes distant, even sulky, and candid about his distaste for the frivolity of modern politics. It’s a side of Obama that former campaign manager David Plouffe sheds some more light on in The Audacity to Win, his insider account of the 2008 campaign. Read More

Biomass fuels – defined as fuels made from plant life – have long been a focal point of the green energy movement. In the United States, the spotlight has largely been on corn-based ethanol, which accounts for 140 billion gallons of the gasoline used domestically each year.

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Obama Close to a Decision on Afghanistan

“I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost.”

- President Obama said Wednesday he was “very close to a decision” on a troop increase for the war in Afghanistan and would make his case to the American people for his Afghan strategy in the next “several weeks.” (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich

Obama Admits Guantanamo Won’t Close by January

“We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year. I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress.”

- President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time today that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility will not close by the January deadline he set. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

Visit to China Yields Few Concrete Results

“I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues. What is important is to respect and accommodate each other’s core interests and major concerns.”

- Chinese premier Hu Jintao, speaking at a press conference after a candid three-hour discussion with President Obama in Beijing. (Financial Times)

* Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Inherits and the Challenges to American Power by David E. Sanger

Sarah Palin’s book hit the shelves just hours ago, yet unless you’ve been in the Alaskan wilderness hunting elk these past seven days, you can be forgiven if you’re already feeling some Palin fatigue. Going Rogue, Palin’s already bestselling political memoir, is dominating our media circus, even as the dollar sinks to new lows, health care reform faces a battle in the Senate, and President Obama literally has his “going to China” moment.

Some level of coverage is legitimate; Palin is a major political player, after all, and clearly a large chunk of the public is interested in what she has to say. But media organizations, if they’re doing their jobs, will point out that Going Rogue is riddled from cover to cover with falsehoods, errors, and willful distortions. Some have. Most have simply provided a platform that lends credibility to her claims and ideas–and those of the millions of Americans who will believe her lies no matter how often they are debunked.

For all that she complains about the media’s double standards, Palin is a direct beneficiary of the false “balance” that has deformed American political debate. And with the publication of Going Rogue she benefits for good measure from the notion, as widespread as it is wrong, that if a claim or an idea is contained between the two covers of a book, there must be something to it.

It’s to debunk that notion, and to pick up some of the slack from the mainstream media, that Progressive Book Club is taking part in a new partnership, launched today, with Media Matters for America: Right Wing Book Watch. Each month, Right Wing Book Watch will feature a thorough fact check of a prominent conservative book, and rebuttals by leading progressive thinkers, authors, and experts.

Right Wing Book Watch debuts with — you guessed it — Going Rogue by Sarah Palin. Visit the project’s home page here, where you’ll find the exhaustively documented list of the book’s distortions. Below, Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, supplies the definitive review below, drawing heavily on that research.

Palin Goes Rogue on the Facts

By Max Blumenthal

In August 2008, when then-senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the media had held her under a “sharper microscope” because she was a woman, Sarah Palin rose to condemn her, accusing Clinton of a “perceived whine” that would harm other female political candidates. “I mean, work harder, prove yourself to an even greater degree that you’re capable, that you’re going to be the best candidate,” Palin instructed Clinton.

Almost a year later, Palin quit her job as Governor of Alaska without any advance warning, blaming her snap decision on “Washington and the media,” along with a nebulous band of political operatives who had filed “all sorts of frivolous ethics violations.” She added, with no sense of irony, that media double standards had cast a dark cloud over her career.  “Though it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term,” Palin claimed in a July press conference, “of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.”

By the following month, Palin had revealed the nature of her “higher calling:” a multi-million dollar book deal and a bus tour of midsize cities throughout “Real America.” Palin’s book, “Going Rogue: An American Story,” is an autobiographical account of her political life that culminates with a revisionist history of the 2008 campaign. According to Palin, her most embarrassing moments on the campaign trail, from her disastrous interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric to her expensive shopping sprees, were really the fault of her running mate, Senator John McCain, his staffers, and her favorite whipping post, the national press corps. Having filled her book with complaints about all the people who lifted her from obscurity and brought her into the national spotlight, Palin nonetheless writes, “I don’t like to hear people complain.”

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