In his 1993 memoir The Thunder Tree, ecologist Robert Pyle coined the term “extinction of experience,” and since then many researchers have jumped into the fray. There are bodies of work on the demonstrable decline of kids’ contact with nature, as well as the negative impacts of this trend—most alarmingly captured in Richard Louv’s 2005 Last Child

Any national approach to rebuilding the imagination must take access to nature seriously, and must also recognise the power of bringing more nature to where people live, to a ‘rewilding’ of our towns, cities and neighbourhoods.