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?

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.

Fortunately, concerns of the kind we need to bring into our thinking in order to tackle climate change are already ingrained into the world’s dominant faiths. Gore draws on several spiritual texts to convey what he calls a tradition of environmental stewardship. Here’s a sampling:

“Do not dump waste in any place from which it could be scattered by the wind or spread by the flooding.” – Judaism (Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah)

“Do not cut trees, because they remove pollution.” – Hinduism (Rig Veda, 6:48:17)

“The world is beautiful and verdant, and verily God, be He exalted, has made you His stewards in it, and He sees how you acquit yourselves.” – Islam (Hadith of sound authority, related by Muslim on the authority of Abu Sa’id al-Khudri)

“This is what should be done by those who are skilled in goodness, and who know the path of peace: let them be able and upright, straightforward and gentle in speech, humble and not conceited, contented and easily satisfied, unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways, peaceful and calm, wise and skillful, not proud and demanding in nature. Let them not do the slightest thing that the wise would later reprove.” – Buddhism (The Metta Sutta, The Buddha’s Teaching on Loving-kindness)

“You should not burn [the vegetation of] uncultivated or cultivated fields, nor of mountains and forests. You should not wantonly fell trees. You should not throw poisonous substances into lakes, rivers, and seas. You should not wantonly dig holes in the ground and thereby destroy the earth.” – Taoism (180 Precepts of the Lord Lao)

“Do not disturb the sky and do not pollute the atmosphere.” – Hinduism (Yajur Veda, 5:43)

“Then the lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it.” – Christianity (Genesis 2:15, New King James Version)

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.

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.

• Amount donated by corporations and interest groups to influence climate change policy during Obama’s first three months in office: $200 million
• Amount spent in 2008 on direct lobbying efforts against climate change legislation: $90 million
• Ratio of climate policy lobbyists to members of both chambers of Congress: 4 to 1
• Ratio of lobbyists who oppose climate change legislation to those who support it: 8 to 1
• Number of think tanks funded by Exxon Mobil to produce guided studies on global warming: 40
• Amount one of those groups offered in 2007 for each paper casting doubt on the existence of or causes for global warming: $10,000
• Percentage of stories in 2004 in the four largest U.S. daily newspapers that gave equal billing to consensus opinion on global warming and climate change deniers: 52.65
• Percentage of college-educated Democrats who believe global warming is caused by human activity: 75
• Percentage of college-educated Republicans who think so: 19

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.

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.

Even top employees typically work in shared offices to create a team atmosphere; there are no executive dining rooms; engineers are told they are both scientists and artists; and employees are allotted 20 percent of their work time to pursue whatever they please. It’s what Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig, calls “a cross between a start-up and graduate school.” Or in the words of executive Laszlo Brock: “There is a sense of intellectual freedom here.”

Oh, and the perks!

“The current Googleplex in Mountain View is a collection of two- and three-story buildings with outdoor tables and park benches shaded by trees, a vegetable garden, and walkways pulsing with people and bicycles. Employees enjoy free meals and luxurious snacks (at a cost to Google of about seventy million dollars per year), and are offered bicycles to travel between buildings containing massage rooms and gyms staffed with trainers. Employees eat at large cafeteria tables, take breaks in lounges with pool tables and espresso machines. No need to leave campus for a car wash or oil change; they‚Äôre available on Thursdays. Also available are barbers, dry cleaners, day care, dog care, dentists, and five physicians to dispense free physicals and medical care. Comfortable, Wi-Fi-equipped, biodiesel commuter buses transport employees to and from campus as far away as San Francisco, and they run from early morning to late night. No need to buy laptop computers; employees choose their own for free. Maternity leave consists of five months off at full salary, and new dads can take seven weeks off at full pay.”

Perception, of course, does not always match reality. As with all things, Google’s unique culture has been tested by its growth. Economic woes have prompted the company to raise the price of its childcare services, cut back on meals and close one of its campuses in Phoenix, leading some employees to grumble that the was losing its sense of itself.

Though Brin and Page played cool in public, Aluetta reports that they were privately annoyed by what they saw as employees sense of entitlement: “This was a company, not a socialist paradise, and the Phoenix question – like the grumbling when Google pared cafeteria hours and no longer allowed employees to cart home dinners for the entire family – troubled them.”

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.

In the months approaching the Iowa caucuses, the Obama campaign was on surprisingly good footing, quickly gaining ground on its more seasoned opponents with outreach and fundraising. The problem was with the candidate himself, who was having trouble adjusting to the rigors of the campaign.

Plouffe recalls Obama lamenting the toll the campaign was taking on his family life, which he knew would only get tougher as the months wore on. He deplored the media’s shallow coverage of the race and regretted that so much of his time had to be devoted to fundraising. A policy wonk at heart, he thought there was too little emphasis on tangible issues and few opportunities for what he called “think time.”

This side of Obama was visible in private settings, marked by shortness with words and sullen facial expressions unfamiliar to those who only saw him on television. On the campaign trail, his weariness was evident in mediocre debate performances and lukewarm exchanges with voters. Though he would eventually recognize and work on those flaws, his advisors were for a period quite worried. Plouffe writes of Obama in Iowa:

Obama still didn’t flash a smile. He hadn’t embraced campaign life, and it was beginning to cause concern. The early-state staff in particular thought he was not locked in on the trail, either in his remarks or in his solicitations of political support. We weren’t sure if Obama would turn out to be Secretariat, but we suspected he had some thoroughbred political talent; it just wasn’t on daily display. During his 2004 Senate race and in flashes on the presidential campaign trail, [David] Ax[elrod], [Robert] Gibbs, and I had seen his ability to move a room, to hold a crowd in thrall. He was never a fire-and-brimstone style; he quieted a room, until everyone was listening so intently that all else fell away. This command was on full display during his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, and it had catapulted him onto the national stage. He was also strong when working one-on-one or in small groups, where he could be more focused and convey a sense of urgency. But the reports from Iowa were that he was mostly going through the motions. After one event, [Iowa campaign director Paul] Tewes called me and laid it on the line. “Unless he gets better, we may as well just not have him meet with people,” he said. “They tell us afterward, ‘He really never put the squeeze on me. It was a nice enough conversation but he doesn’t seem like he really wants it.’”

“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.”

Palin’s accusations have prompted dismissive responses from former top McCain aides including Steve Schmidt, who slammed her account of the campaign as “total fiction.” Though Schmidt was referring specifically to Palin’s criticisms of his behavior, like her allegation that he used profane language in the presence of her youngest daughter, he appears to be onto something. (Schmidt should be grateful Palin did not characterize him as harshly as she did Alakan state Senator Bert Stedman, a rock-ribbed Republican, who she wrongly labeled in “Going Rogue” as a “Democratic lawmaker.”)

Indeed, scoring a kill in an aerial wolf hunt with a helicopter full of cluster munitions would be more challenging than finding the errors, baseless accusations and paranoid statements that riddle the pages of “Going Rogue.” While politicians routinely resort to spin when the truth becomes inconvenient, Palin has taken misleading to new heights, crafting an autobiography that reads like the literary version of the Balloon Boy hoax. But unlike the boy’s publicity starved parents, who momentarily duped America, Palin can’t fool anyone. Beginning with her  specious claim that Alaskans “don’t do” hunts by helicopter, Palin’s deceptions were instantly debunked by the crack researchers of Media Matters for America’s Right-Wing Book Watch a joint project with the Progressive Book Club.

In the 2008 presidential campaign Palin sought to convince voters through a scattershot of accusations that Democratic candidate Barack Obama was a leftist radical who did not share their values. In one instance, during her October 2008 interview with Couric, Palin alleged that Obama believed children born alive after botched abortions should “not receive medical help to save that child’s life.” The claim, which referred to Obama’s vote in the Illinois State Senate against a bill to amend the state’s Abortion Law of 1975, was, as Palin likes to say, bogus.

As Obama and other opponents of the bill pointed out at the time, Illinois law already unequivocally prohibited the killing of children. However, Palin repeats the discredited charge in “Going Rogue,” flatly asserting that “Obama opposed laws that would protect babies born alive after botched abortions.” By supposedly allowing babies to die slowly on cold slabs, Obama revealed his “real extremism,” Palin declares. Even after Time Magazine and the Washington Post debunked her claim, Palin saw no need to retract or even modify it. The press holds her to “a different standard,” after all, so why bother?

While Palin heaped resentment on Obama, who she accused misleadingly of “palling around with terrorists” like the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, she apparently brimmed with frustration at McCain and his campaign staff for failing to orchestrate more negative attacks. Her anger boiled over in the pages of “Going Rogue,” as she accused the McCain camp of a failure to go after Obama for his “close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists.”

“We did not elaborate on any of that [Obama’s ACORN connections] during the campaign,” Palin claimed in her memoir.

In fact, McCain leveled conspiracy theories about Acorn against Obama for extended periods of a nationally televised October 15, 2008 presidential debate. Two days later, McCain’s then-campaign manager Rick Davis hosted a conference call with reporters about Obama’s supposed ties to ACORN. Davis arranged another call on October 30 to allege an “ongoing scandal … related to ACORN and the Obama campaign.” Where was Palin while McCain and Davis lashed the Democratic nominee on his ACORN ties? Unless she had entered an Iditarod race that took her across the frozen tundra during the last month of the campaign, Palin has no excuse.

Palin’s interest in helping the McCain campaign paled in comparison to her concern for her own image. In “Going Rogue,” Palin bristles at the media’s scrutiny of the Republican National Committee’s spending of $150,000 to “clothe and accessorize” her and her family – including hundreds of dollars for a single pair of Naughty Monkey heels. Alleging once again an unfair double standard, Palin makes the remarkable claim that “no other candidates or their spouses were being asked a thing about their hair, makeup, or clothes.”

So what about candidate John Edwards, who was scrutinized almost obsessively by the national press corps, ridiculed by late night talk show hosts and interrogated by debate moderators for paying $400 for hair cuts? What about candidate Hillary Clinton, whose neckline, “bright colors” and choice of jewelry were the source of intense debate among cable news pundits? And what of the photograph planted on the Drudge Report depicting Obama in traditional Somali garb, an image that prompted Rush Limbaugh to compare the candidate to Al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri? Candidates’ looks have figured centrally in campaigns since the days when Richard Nixon pointed to his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” in his 1952 Checkers Speech. Is Palin oblivious to the historical trend, or was she too busy looking north-to-the-future north to the future?

The factual errors larding “Going Rogue” do not end with Palin’s recollection of the 2008 campaign. Instead, they extend into her critique of the Obama presidency, as she claims that those who will be “hit hardest” by the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill will be “those who are already struggling to make ends meet.” Palin makes no mention, however, of a non-partisan Congressional Budget Office study that shows the cap and trade bill that passed the House with the support of the Obama administration would result in over $100 in benefits to low income households by 2020.

The media’s intense scrutiny of Palin’s autobiography is already beginning to rankle her. On her Facebook page, Palin took aim at the Associated Press reporters assigned to fact-check her book before its publication. “Imagine that,” she declared, “11 AP reporters dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to ‘fact check’ what’s going on with Sheik Mohammed’s [sic] trial, Pelosi’s health care takeover costs, [accused Ft. Hood shooter Nidal] Hasan’s associations, etc. Amazing.”

Nevermind the AP’s coverage of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad’s trial arrangements or the organization’s reporting on Hasan’s alleged sympathy for radical Islamist causes. In Palin’s world, the terrorists win every time her claims are discredited.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and blogger whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and a writing fellow for the Nation Institute. He is the author of recently released Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party.