One day a few years ago, Lisa Donahue鈥檚 then six-year-old son was lying next to the family鈥檚 retriever, Jack. The boy was stroking the dog鈥檚 fur. He said, matter-of-factly, 鈥淢ommy, I don鈥檛 have a heart anymore.鈥�

His startled mother asked him what he meant.

He answered, 鈥淢y heart is in Jack.鈥�

This permeability of the heart (or soul or spirit or neurological connection鈥攚hatever we wish to call it) occurs naturally when we鈥檙e very young. Some people continue to experience it throughout life, though they may lack the words to describe it. They experience it with their companion animals and, if they have a chance, with wild animals. This essential connection with other creatures can be a fragile thing. It needs nourishment to survive.

In recent months, a wave of alarming research has suggested the emergence of what some health officials are calling an epidemic of loneliness. That may be an exaggeration (solitude does have its charms, and creativity often depends on it), but social isolation鈥攁 lack of meaningful interaction with others鈥攊s on the rise. The results of one study are particularly disturbing: by Cigna, the global insurance company, evaluated 20,000 U.S. adults on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, an academic measure of social isolation determined by a questionnaire. What it found was that, moving forward in age from the Greatest Generation to Generation Z, each age bracket feels progressively more isolated.

What does it say about the direction of society when the younger people are, the lonelier they feel? A study led by psychologist at San Diego State University found that U.S. adolescents who spend more time in front of screens and less time in face-to-face socializing are more vulnerable to depression and suicide.

In my own reporting, I鈥檝e found that overscheduling, economic insecurity, fear of strangers, and bad urban design may also play a role in separating us from one another. Not coincidentally, these are some of the same barriers that keep us removed from the natural world, at a younger and younger age. In addition to our social separation, I believe we suffer from species loneliness鈥攁 desperate hunger for connection with other life, a gnawing fear that we are alone in the universe. Humans, in fact, are more alone than we鈥檝e ever been. We comprise 0.01 percent of all life on earth, yet we have destroyed 83 percent of wild mammals. Though bacteria and fungi are doing just fine, we鈥檙e unlikely to take comfort in their company.

Sure, many of us live with dogs and cats. But to assume that pets alone can fill the void is like saying that the only human contact we need is within our own nuclear family鈥攖hat we just don鈥檛 need our uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors. A nuclear family (even one that includes a dog) cut off from other social contact is more vulnerable to alcoholism, depression, and abuse. The same is true for the larger human family.

In an ideal world, deep animal connection would be taught and experienced in the course of family life or through public schools, places of worship, and nature centers. John Peden, a quiet, down-to-earth professor at Georgia Southern University鈥檚 College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, shepherds groups of college students into the wilderness. Often they return humbled, more open to awe and wonder, and feeling less alone. Like many of us, Peden believes that all young people deserve a relationship with what the author Henry Beston called the 鈥渙ther nations, … fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.鈥�

Jon Young, author of the 2012 book , agrees. He teaches bird language and nature connection around the world. Students often tell him that when they use the skills they have learned from bird language with their spouses and children, their home life improves.

Young also notes the importance of what he calls the initiatory moment, when a student鈥檚 sensory understanding of animal communication snaps into place. He likens this to the sudden flash of awareness that an artist feels at the outset of creation.

John Peden recalls his own initiatory moment, the first time he recognized sentience in another animal. He was 12 years old, hiking with his father to a lake in Yellowstone National Park. They passed a rockslide, and Peden lifted his camera to take a photo of a pika, a high-altitude mammal that looks like a cross between a rabbit and a guinea pig. As he clicked the shutter, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye.

There, stepping into his field of vision, was a bull elk.

The elk stopped and looked at the boy. Two more bulls, then a group of cows and calves, stepped out of the forest. 鈥淭he first bull elk seemed to be thinking about what he would do,鈥� Peden recalls. 鈥淎fter the elk watched us for a while, they began to relax.鈥� Either they thought as a group, or one of the elk sent an invisible signal. The elk moved forward and split into two groups. The females with calves went below Peden and his father, while the three bulls, majestic and powerful, moved along the rim above.

鈥淚 realized that these animals were thinking and making decisions in much the same way that people do,鈥� Peden says. 鈥淚t was clear that the elk were intentionally moving in two streams around us. They came together and disappeared into the forest. The sun was going down, the sky was a vivid red-orange. My father and I were surrounded by this herd of elk, and then they passed.鈥�

For Peden, this was more than a learning moment, more than an intellectual acknowledgment of the intelligence of another creature. It was a doorway into another world.

Richard Louv () is a cofounder of the 颅 and the 颅author of .

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The other day, I received a note from a good friend, photojournalist Anne Pearse Hocker. In the 1970s, she snuck across a no-man鈥檚-land into the Wounded Knee encampment and spent weeks photographing the protest. Those . A widow, Anne now lives in a cabin with two dogs, two cats, and two hunting falcons.

Anne loves the wild landscape of the West. She is dismayed by new threats to it and surprised by a change in her internal landscape.

鈥淗ere in deep red Montana, over 10,000 people marched in [the Women鈥檚 March in Helena], smashing all records and expectations. Meanwhile, the state鈥檚 Central Democratic Committee virtually ignored it. As if it never happened.鈥� Anne does not believe her own party understands the growing anger and sense of urgency that she and others like her feel. 鈥淪omeone or something needs to ride that wind before it gets away.鈥�

It鈥檚 time to build an NRA for nature, an environmental conservation force comparable to the nation鈥檚 powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association. A force capable of striking fear into the heart of, say, any 鈥擱epublican, Democrat, or Independent.

However you feel about聽the NRA, you have to admit that the organization, like the Tea Party, knows how to get its way.

A handful of green groups aspire to that political power, and many have done a good job influencing regulatory policies, but I can鈥檛 recall the last time I read about an environmental or conservation group mounting a successful campaign to boot multiple members of Congress from office. Maybe it鈥檚 happened, but not often enough. And now the ante is upped. If political candidates aren鈥檛 afraid of , what good is environmental activism?

Have we reached a point where environmentalism is less about political power than about moral preening? Or lifestyle choices?

鈥淭he last few weeks have rocked the environmental movement,鈥� writes , founder of the . 鈥淚n the wake of the November elections, environmentalists are deeply concerned about the future of the , the rollback of federal environmental protections, and even the 颈迟蝉别濒蹿.鈥�

Stinnett points to an inconvenient truth: as a group, . Approximately 20.1 million self-identified environmentalists are registered to vote, he says, but only 4.2 million of them voted in the 2014 midterm elections. In the 2012 presidential election, 10 million environmentalists voted.

Meanwhile, in 2014, NRA-backed candidates won more than 91 percent of congressional races in which they endorsed a candidate鈥攅ven though 90 percent of Americans supported background checks for gun owners, even following the killing of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Why is it that the NRA can have its way with Congress, but environmentalists and conservationists are so often on the defensive?

One explanation is that, for many Americans, the environment鈥攅specially when it comes to climate change鈥攊s an abstraction.

This is true in part because so many indoor kids or their parents never have the chance to fall in love with nature. It鈥檚 also true because the most common language of environmentalism is oddly both opaque and apocalyptic. By contrast, the NRA鈥檚 focus is as hard and tangible as gunmetal. Guns and gun ownership are more deeply embedded in the national character than environmentalism, which is newer on the scene. Gun owners are more focused on individual self-defense than on a generalized threat of gun violence. And gun ownership is protected as a constitutional right (interpretations will vary).

Consequently, to many Americans, gun ownership is not only tangible, but also a deeply personal and emotional issue鈥攁nd that is the way the NRA frames it.

The NRA doesn鈥檛 have a lock on emotion; the organization is just better at making use of it. Most Americans, of all political persuasions, were deeply upset by Sandy Hook and other massacres. Yet, after Sandy Hook, legislation requiring background checks once again failed to pass the Senate. Marketing, campaign spending, overwhelming lobbying power, a powerful industry, and political fear ruled the day.

The kind of emotion the NRA taps into is different from the episodic mass tragedies of gun violence. Those tragedies are like thunderstorms: violent for a spell, and then a memory. But the NRA鈥檚 rain is slow, relentless, never ceasing. It鈥檚 time to learn from the NRA, even if the lessons are uncomfortable.

How to do it? Let鈥檚 start by expanding on a familiar concept. Most thinking people understand the NRA鈥檚 power. Consequently, they would get the idea of an NRA for nature. That frame is clear, concise, and potent. An NRA for nature (insert proper name and acronym here) could take form as a new membership organization, massive expansion of an existing organization, a tight network of multiple groups, or a shared campaign launched by all of the above.

Since 2014, green political action committees and super PACs, which supposedly aren鈥檛 as beholden to limits on fundraising or spending, are on the upswing. Billionaire Tom Steyer鈥檚 has spent millions on political races. Other players include the , the , the , , and , which uses crowdfunding.

Green super PACS may someday have superpowers, but not yet. They failed to make much of a dent in the 2016 elections.

Money will be an issue. Nonprofits tend to compete for support from the same funders, and therefore tend to see each other as competitors. Trump鈥檚 election will undoubtedly grow the number of individual donations, but government money for environmental causes will likely shrink. Also, 501(c)(3) nonprofits are limited in what they can do politically. Public education is allowed; lobbying for specific bills and campaigning for candidates is restricted. 鈥淪ocial welfare鈥� organizations like the NRA are classified as 501(c)(4) and allowed to lobby. The tradeoff: donations are not deductible. That doesn鈥檛 discourage loyal members from sending checks. To NRA members, it鈥檚 not about the deduction, it鈥檚 about the principle.

One can at least imagine a coordinated campaign for more philanthropy, more individual donors, a network of industries and deep-pocketed individuals鈥攅specially from the high-tech world鈥攖o support 501(c)(3) groups that educate and grow the social base and an even more aggressive effort to increase contributions to the 501(c)(4) organizations that lobby and work for the election of political candidates. Add to that a permanent, relentless voter-mobilization drive. If it reaches scale, that three-pronged campaign, while not identical in form, could be a green equivalent of the NRA.

Along with more political action, we need a broader constituency to support good candidates, one with greater diversity of religion, race, ethnicity, and economics.

Guns and the Second Amendment are powerful symbols to rally around. But so are urban gardens, natural schoolyards, parks, clean air and water, wilderness, and the human right that every child has to the psychological, physical, and spiritual gifts of nature. And, of course, the tenuousness of our tenure on the planet鈥攁 more abstract issue, but as real as rain.

Our greatest barrier is despair. For years, Americans have been trapped in a dystopian trance, a passive assumption of a postapocalyptic future. We need a balancing set of images depicting a future that is not only energy-efficient but also nature-rich, with cities and countryside that serve as engines of biodiversity and health.

Making that tangible to voters won鈥檛 happen overnight, but it鈥檚 possible, especially if we don鈥檛 write off Republicans or rural America (as some progressives have suggested) or big chunks of the population who do care about nature but prefer snowplows to skis and bird hunting to bird-watching.

鈥淎lthough I have guns and use them, I do not belong to the NRA,鈥� says Anne. 鈥淏ut I do respect their marketing and passion. I believe the usual models of the progressive movement are no longer working. Facts are only mildly interesting to someone who is emotionally on fire.鈥�

Richard Louv is the author of , , , and other books about the human-nature connection. Among his other roles, Louv is chairman emeritus of the and a board director of , a nonprofit building a broader base of support for climate-change action.

The post Op-Ed: We Need an NRA for Nature appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

PERHAPS YOU RECALL A TIME when you took in more of the world. You were new and the world was new. As a boy, I would go out in the woods and sit under a tree, then lick my thumb and wet each nostril. I had read somewhere that people鈥攑erhaps pioneers or American Indians, I don’t remember鈥攄id this in order to keen their sense of smell for approaching game or danger. I held perfectly still, my back against rough bark, all of my senses waiting. And slowly, animal life returned. A rabbit appeared under a bush, birds swooped low, an ant went on a walk颅-about over my knee. I felt intensely alive.

Can we be new again? In 2005, when my book Last Child in the Woods was published, I wasn’t prepared for the movement that would follow, and for the reaction of adults when they considered their own lives.

In the book, I introduced the term nature-deficit disorder鈥攏ot as a medical diagnosis but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. By its broadest interpretation, nature-deficit disorder is an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book’s publication, I heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.

One day after a talk in Seattle, a woman literally grabbed my lapels and said, “Listen to me: adults have nature-deficit disorder, too.” She was right, of course. As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights are touched by the natural world. While individuals can find immeasurable joy in a great work of art, or by falling in love, all of life is rooted in nature, and a separation from it desensitizes and diminishes us.

That truth seems obvious to some of us, though it has yet to take root in the wider culture. However, in recent years an emerging body of research has begun to describe the restorative power of time spent in the natural world. Even in small doses, we are learning, exposure to nature can measurably improve our psychological and physical health.

While the study of the relationship between mental acuity, creativity, and time spent outdoors is still a frontier for science, new data suggests that exposure to the living world can even enhance intelligence. At least two factors are involved: first, our senses and sensibilities can be improved by spending time in nature; second, the natural environment seems to stimulate our ability to pay attention, think clearly, and be more creative.

In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in towns and cities. The traditional ways that humans have experienced nature are vanishing along with biodiversity. At the same time, our culture’s faith in technological immersion has no limits. We sink ever deeper into a sea of circuitry. We consume breathtaking accounts of the creation of synthetic life, combining bacteria with human DNA; of microscopic machines designed to enter our bodies to fight biological invaders; of computer-augmented reality. We even hear talk of a posthuman era in which people themselves are optimally enhanced by technology. Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves?

By contrast, I believe the future can be shaped by what I call the Nature Principle, which holds that in an age of environmental, economic, and social transformation, the future will belong to the nature-smart鈥攖hose individuals, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of nature and balance the virtual with the real.

The skeptic will say that this prescription is at best problematic, given the rate at which we’re destroying nature, and the skeptic will be right. This is why the Nature Principle is about conservation but also about restoring ourselves while we restore nature; about bringing back natural habitats where they once existed or creating them where they never were鈥攊n our homes, workplaces, cities, and suburbs. It’s about the power of living in nature鈥攏ot with it but in it.

The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.

MANY OF US DESIRE a fuller life of the senses. We city dwellers marvel at the seemingly super颅human or supernatural abilities of “primitive” peoples like the Australian Aborigines but consider those talents vestigial, like that remnant tailbone. Here’s another view: such senses are in fact latent in all of us, blanketed by noise and faulty assumptions.

Ever wonder why you have two nostrils? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did. They fitted undergraduates with taped-over goggles, earmuffs, and work gloves to block other senses, then set them loose in a field. Most of the students could follow a 30-foot-long trail of chocolate perfume and even changed direction precisely where the invisible path took a turn. The subjects were able to smell better with two functioning nostrils, which researchers likened to hearing in stereo. And they found themselves zigzagging, a technique employed by dogs as they track. “We found that not only are humans capable of scent tracking,” said study researcher Noam Sobel, “but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of [other] mammals.”

What else can we do that we’ve forgotten? Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including blood-sugar levels, empty stomach, thirst, and proprio颅ception (awareness of our body’s position in space). In 2009, researchers at Madrid’s University of Alcal谩 de Henares showed how people, like bats, could identify objects without needing to see them, through the echoes of human tongue clicks. According to the lead researcher, echoes are also perceived through vibrations in ears, tongue, and bones鈥攁 refined sense learned through trial and error by some blind people and even sighted individuals. It’s all about hearing a world that exists beyond what we normally mistake for silence.

This brings us to the so-called sixth sense, which to some means intuition, to others ESP, and to still others the ability to unconsciously detect danger. In December 2004, as the devastating Asian tsunami approached, Jarawa tribespeople of India’s Andaman Islands reportedly sensed sounds from the approaching wave, or some other unusual activity, long before the water struck the shore. They fled to higher ground. The Jarawas used tribal knowledge of nature’s warning signs, explained V. R. Rao, director of the Anthro颅颅pological Survey of India, based in Calcutta. “They got wind of impending danger from biological warning signals, like the cry of birds and change in the behavioral patterns of marine animals.” In the Jarawas’ case, the sixth sense may be the sum of all the other senses combined with their everyday knowledge of nature.

In separate research, the U.S. military has studied how some soldiers seem to be able to use their latent senses to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The 18-month study of 800 military personnel found that the best bomb spotters were rural people鈥攖hose who’d grown up in the woods hunting turkey or deer鈥攁s well as those from tough urban neighborhoods, where it’s equally important to be alert. “They just seemed to pick up things much better,” reported Army Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, who worked on the study for the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. “They know how to look at the entire environment.” And the other enlistees, the ones who’d spent more time with Game Boys or at the mall? They didn’t do so well. As Burnett put it, they were focused on the proverbial “screen rather than the whole surrounding.”

The explanation may be partly physiological. Australian researchers suggest that the troubling increase in nearsightedness is linked to young people spending less time outdoors, where eyes must focus at longer distances. But more is probably going on here. Good vision, acute hearing, an attuned sense of smell, spatial awareness鈥攁ll of these abilities could be operating simultaneously. This natural advantage offers practical applications. One is an increased ability to learn; another is an enhanced capability to avoid danger. Still another, perhaps the most important, is the measurement-defying ability to more fully engage in life.

BUT LET’S BE REALISTIC. Even if we’re lucky enough to have bonded with nature when we were young, maintaining that bond is no easy thing. Information has infiltrated our every waking minute. Unctuous personalities squawk at us from flat-panel TVs on gas pumps. Billboard companies replace pasted paper with flashing digital displays. Screens pop up in airports, coffeehouses, banks, grocery-store checkout lines, even restrooms. Advertisers hawk DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians’ offices. This info-blitzkrieg has spawned a new field called interruption science and a newly minted condition: continuous partial attention.

There’s no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion without a force to balance it creates a hole in the boat, draining our ability to pay attention, think clearly, be productive and creative. To combat these losses, our society seems to look everywhere but the natural domain for the building of better brains, whether through supplements like ginkgo biloba or nootropics鈥攕o-called smart drugs鈥攍ike Ritalin, the amphetamine Adderall, and Provigil. Some people need such medication, of course, but overreliance on these substances remains a massive experiment with long-term side effects that have yet to be determined. And an immediately available, low-cost intelligence-enhancing supplement already exists.

Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature’s healing effect on the mind in the 1970s. Findings from their nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service and later research suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. It can also help reboot the brain’s ability to think. The Kaplans and their team followed participants in an Outward Bound鈥搇ike program, which took people into the wilderness for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterwards, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physical activities, like rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.

Over time the Kaplans developed their theory of directed-attention fatigue. Paying conscious attention to something demands voluntary effort, they found, which can erode mental effectiveness and get in the way of forming abstract long-term goals. “A number of symptoms are commonly attributed to this fatigue,” Stephen Kaplan and his colleague Raymond De Young wrote in 2002. “Irritability and impulsivity that results in regrettable choices, impatience that has us making ill-formed decisions, and distractibility that allows the immediate environment to have a magnified effect on our behavioral choices.”

The Kaplans hypothesize that the best antidote to such fatigue is involuntary attention, a kind of “fascination,” which occurs when we are in an environment that fulfills certain criteria: for instance, the setting must transport the person away from their day-to-day routine and allow the opportunity to explore. Furthermore, they found, the natural world is a particularly effective place for the human brain to overcome mental fatigue.

One reason for this might be right beneath our feet. A study conducted by Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, found that a common soil bacterium given to mice helped them navigate a maze twice as fast. The natural bacterium in question, Mycobacterium vaccae, is usually ingested or inhaled when people spend time in nature. The effect wore off in a few weeks, but, Matthews said, the research suggests that the M. vaccae we come in contact with all the time in nature may “play a role” in learning in mammals. Smart pill, meet smart bug.

Taking this even further, can time in nature nurture genius itself? Creative genius is not the accumulation of knowledge; it’s the ability to see patterns in the universe, to detect hidden links between what is and what could be.

When public-radio commentator John Hockenberry reported in 2008 on research at the University of Michigan that indicated greater mental acuity after a nature walk, he pointed out that Albert Einstein and the mathematician and philosopher Kurt G枚del, “two of the most brilliant people who ever walked the face of the earth, used to famously, every single day, take walks in the woods on the Princeton campus.”

The science here is both incomplete and encouraging; we do know that, because of the brain’s plasticity, moments of growth can happen throughout life. And so can the creation of new neurons, the brain cells that process and transmit information. It’s reasonable to speculate, then, that time spent in the natural world, by both restoring and stimulating the brain, may lead to bursts of new neurons. Nature neurons.

SO DOES THIS MEAN that we should dispense with electronic media entirely? No, and for most of us that would be close to impossible. But we can cultivate a third way.

When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time outdoors, but they also played plenty of video games鈥攎ore than I was comfortable with. Occasionally, they’d try to convince me that members of their generation were making an evolutionary leap; because they spent so much time texting, video-gaming, and so on, they were wired differently. In response I pointed out that my generation said something like that about recre颅ational drugs. That didn’t work out so well.

Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the breakneck pace of technological change is creating what he calls a brain gap between the generations, and this gap is opening in a single generation.

Small and his colleagues used MRIs to study the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, which integrates complex information and short-term memory and is instrumental in decision-making. Two groups were tested: experienced, or “savvy,” computer users; and inexperienced, or “naive,” ones. While doing Web searches, savvy users had dorsolateral areas that were quite active, while in the naive users the dorsolateral area was quiet. As the Canadian magazine Maclean’s reported, “On day five, the savvy group’s brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts.”

Teenagers’ brains are particularly malleable, apt to be shaped by technological experience. Is this a good thing? One view is that people who experience too much technology in their formative years experience stunted development of the frontal lobe, “ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode,” as Maclean’s put it.

More optimistic researchers suggest that all this multitasking is creating the smartest generation yet, freed from limitations of geo颅graphy, weather, and distance鈥攑esky inconveniences of the physical world. This vision calls to mind the sci-fi speculation of the 1950s and ’60s that people would someday be freed from physical limitations and that, as they evolved, their brains鈥攊n fact, their heads鈥攚ould grow larger and larger, until members of our species or what it becomes (Homo google?) just float around in space. We’re not floaters yet. In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein, a professor at Emory University, reels out studies comparing this generation of students with prior generations, finding that “they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events”鈥� despite all that available information.

But here is a third possibility, and the one I prefer: the hybrid mind. The ultimate multitasking is to live simultaneously in both the digital and physical worlds, using computers to maximize our powers to process intellectual data and natural environments to ignite our senses and accelerate our ability to learn and feel鈥攃ombining the resurfaced “primitive” powers of our ancestors with the digital speed of our teenagers.

Putting the Nature Principle to use in our lives won’t, of course, be just about neurons and intelligence. A whole river is gathering force, its headwaters fed by science. New branches reach outward, producing exciting career possibilities: biophilic design, reconciliation ecology, green exercise, ecopsychology, place-based learning, slow food, and organic gardening. Generous future historians may someday write that those of us alive today did more than survive or sustain鈥攖hat we brought nature back to our workplaces, our neighborhoods, and our families.

Few today would question the notion that every person, especially every young person, has a right to access the Internet, whether through a school district, a library, or a city’s public Wi-Fi program. We accept the idea that the divide between the digital haves and have-nots must be closed.

But recently I’ve been asking another question of people: Do we have a right to walk in the woods?

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