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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In Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, author Ken Auletta quotes Google co-founder Larry Page breezily declaring that the company has become “part of people’s lives, like brushing their teeth.”

As Auletta’s exhaustive narrative of the company shows, that’s not an empty boast. With an unbending faith in algorithms and a sincere user-first philosophy, the company has shrewdly inserted itself into every nook of the media technology landscape and earned an astonishing level of trust from its customers. Yet its pervasiveness has also irked both public advocates and business competitors, who claim Google is overstepping its bounds, eroding privacy and threatening to wantonly devastate entire industries.

Here’s a look at five Google products that have shaken up the media landscape and stirred controversy in the process.

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New York City is the greenest community in the United States, according to David Owen, whose recent book Green Metropolis entertainingly explains the straightforward logic behind what seems an outlandish claim. In short, he argues–quite convincingly–New York is a model of sustainable development because New Yorkers…

Live Smaller

• High population density also necessitates smaller living spaces, which consume less electricity than larger houses in non-urban areas.

Live Closer

• Moving people closer together (as in cities) allows for more open, unadulterated nature. Conversely, suburban sprawl leads to lower population densities and less untouched land.
• Tall, multi-story buildings that share walls with adjacent structures save heat. Less wall and rood area is exposed to the sun, which reduces summer air-conditioning loads.
• High population density means that city dwellers live in closer proximity to each other and to other destinations, which makes it less likely that residents will choose a car as a means of transportation.

Drive Less

• Traffic congestion in highly dense, geographically compact cities provides a further enticement for residents to use public transportation instead of opting for a car or a taxi.
• The extensive cultural and social establishments of cities—including museums, movie theaters, and other artistic organizations—allow for urban residents to enjoy entertainment without driving long distances.
• Extensive public transportation provides for a lighter carbon footprint than that of an area where most people drive cars.

Since the 1970s the productivity of the American worker has increased steadily and the U.S. economy has grown at an impressive rate. Yet while the already-wealthy have grown considerably wealthier in this period, most Americans are no better off than they were four decades ago. Jonathan Tasini, in his new book The Audacity of Greed, calls this phenomenon “the emptying of the wage cupboard,” and he lays out the numbers underlying what is now essentially “a two-tiered earnings system made up of the very rich and the rest of us.” Here’s a sampling:

• The top earners’ share of wages, which was stable from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, nearly doubled from 1979 through 2006, from 7.3 percent to 13.6 percent. This is the result of earnings growth of 144.4 percent for the top 1 percent of earners over the past thirty years, compared to just 15.6 percent growth for the bottom 90 percent.
• Those in the upper 0.1 percent of wage earners have hit the jackpot, as their annual earnings have grown 324 percent since 1979, to over $2.2 million in 2006. As a result, the earnings of the top 0.1 percent of Americans are now 77 times greater than the earnings of the bottom 90 percent, whereas in 1979 it was just 21 times as much.
• The share of our national income hoarded by the top one percent was, as of 2006, 22.1 percent (a rise of three percentage points from 2004.) The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9 percent)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.

New Yorker writer David Owen argues in his book The Green Metropolis that New York City, where people live smaller and closer and drive less than in other places, has lessons in sustainable development for the rest of the country. But how might those lessons be applied? Not easily, he admits. “New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others (or even itself) to imitate,” he writes. Why? Because the key to New York’s green profile is “the result not of conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical accidents.” Consider:

1. New York arose on a small island rather than on the mainland edge of a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical barrier to outward expansion.
2. Manhattan’s street plan was created by merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks or empty spaces between buildings.
3. Residential and commercial development were more thoroughly mixed in New York than they would later become in most other parts of the United States.
4. Most of Manhattan’s lines had been filled in before the advent of the automobile and couldn’t be substantially redrawn to accommodate cars.

How did we go from being a country where the broad majority of American workers shared in the rewards of economic growth to one in which, starting in the late 1970s, the gains went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest and the average American worker’s income stagnated? According to Jonathan Tasini, author of The Audacity of Greed, part of the answer lies in the broad embrace by policy makers of “market fundamentalism,” which he defines, following the Longview Institute, as comprising seven key myths.

1. The market is the only source of innovation and it must be left alone if we want to accelerate technological change.
2. Government will always spend money less productively than private citizens; this is why tax cuts are almost always a good idea.
3. Regulation of business is wasteful, unproductive and usually unnecessary.
4. Financial markets thrive when regulation is kept to a minimum.
5. Private firms will always produce a good or a service more efficiently than the government.
6. It is wrong to regulate wages or executive compensation because markets always get prices right.
7. Government assistance always ends up hurting the people it is supposed to help.

1. United States
2. Venezuela
3. Australia
4. Austria
5. South Africa
6. Canada
7. Chile
8. New Zealand
9. The Philippines
10. Israel

Source: National Opinion Research Center. National Pride in Cross-national and Temporal Perspective, 2006

Thanks to the generosity of the American taxpayer, Wall Street is back, bonuses and all. Main Street, not so much. How can that be?

In The Audacity of Greed, labor activist and New York senatorial contender Jonathan Tasini examines the reasons and exposes the people responsible for the looting of America, from the bankers who funded their lavish lifestyles at the public’s expense to the politicians who stood by and watched it happen. Tasini argues that we need a cultural and philosophical revolution that punctures the fable of market fundamentalism and values the contributions made by ordinary Americans throughout the economy. On the policy side, he lays out seven proposals for a fairer economy. Here’s a the short version:

1. Raise the Minimum Wage
Increase it immediately to $10 an hour, with additional increases over the next five years until it reaches $20 an hour, which would begin to return some level of justice to working

2. Enact Medicare For All
Pass H.R. 676, the so-called “Medicare for All Now” bill, in order to enact single-payer health care. Aside from the moral issue of covering every single American and making health care a right, not a privilege, the passage of H.R. 676 would also save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and immediately make American-based businesses competitive around the world with companies that operate out of countries that provide national health care to their citizens.

3. Ensure a Stable and Secure Retirement for American Workers
Create a national guaranteed universal pension plan, backed by the government, so that people can be sure that their retirement years will not be threatened by the wild swings of Wall Street.

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In “The Pleasures of Eating,” included in Bringing it to the Table, a new collection of his essays, Wendell Berry writes that that we can only escape the trap of industrialism “by restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating, by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy.”

He outlines what “city people” can do by eating more responsibly: “Eaters…must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive:”

1. “Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.”
2. “Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.”
3. “Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.”
4. “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.”
5. “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?”
6. “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.”
7. “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”