Teaching Ecophobia

From Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods:

 ...children [in schools] "will learn that by recycling their Weekly Readers and milk cartons, they can help save the planet," [says David Sobel] and grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth. Or maybe not. The opposite may be occuring, says Sobel. "If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation"...Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder...Children learn about the rain forest, but usually not about their own region's forests, or, as Sobel puts it, "even just the meadow outside the classroom door."

I've been reading Louv's book and it's hard to put down. A very important read for those concerned about health, nature and children. More excerpts later. -D