Last Child in the Woods - Nature Deficit Disorder

Today's Guardian has an article about the importance of reconnecting children with nature.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/20/reconnect-children-with-nature?newsfeed=true 
I remember growing up in the 1960s and playing with friends in the local fields and woods, and our mothers would say "make sure you are home in time for tea"... and so we would roam, sometimes for hours, in the local woods.  In his groundbreaking 2005 book "Last Child in the Woods" Richard Louv directly linked the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation—he called it nature deficit—to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as rises in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and depression.

Richard Louv

Some startling facts: By the 1990s the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970. Today, average eight-year-olds are better able to identify cartoon characters than native species, such as beetles and oak trees, in their own community. The rate at which doctors prescribe antidepressants to children has doubled and recent studies show that too much computer use spells trouble for the developing mind.