This idea that the world is perpetually going to hell seems hard-wired into our psyche. There’s a thought, often misattributed to Socrates, that Garson O’Toole (aka the Quote Investigator) traced to the 1907 dissertation of an otherwise unknown Cambridge student named Kenneth John Friedman. It laments the intergenerational discord in ancient

I’m reminded of a conversation that I had on an airplane one time when I was flying solo with my two older kids, in Katie’s absence. As I struggled alone with snacks and diapers and keeping everyone buckled up, an elderly man behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Enjoy this. Right now, at their age, it’s all physical. Later, parenting

Part of our job, then, as parents, is to teach our kids to deal with the impermanence of these connections. When Katie and I got our kids their first pet, a brilliantly purple betta fish, we viewed it as being a lesson in death and loss (bettas only live a few years) as much as a lesson in caretaking.

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

The pandemic rubbed our noses in that reality by taking away so much that we’d taken for granted. Of course, impermanence has always been the norm. Friends move away. Family members die. Social media communities dissolve. We leave our hometowns for school or better jobs. As our communities repeatedly splinter, we’re forced to engage in a lifelong

When you commit to removing the barriers between your family and nature, it means that the whole lot of you, together, stay engaged with what arises around you. You stay engaged with the beauty of nature, the fear that it can inspire, the damage that it can bring, and everything in between. This mindset shift does not need to happen at a global or

The pandemic has reinforced our love of nature, and it has revealed our need for the knowledge, skill set, and equipment necessary to experience it in a safe and sustainable way. Another thing reinforced by the pandemic is that we place an enormous value on feeling connected. This was hardly a surprise.

Two hours a week of time spent in nature, in whatever increments are available, has been shown to radically improve people’s outlook, with adult participants in a large-scale study in England self-reporting improvements in both physical health and emotional well-being. Other studies have shown immune-boosting effects, improved cognitive and motor

What birds visit your home habitat? Buy a bird identification book and install a birding app on your phone. (The Sibley Guide to Birds is a phenomenal book; the region-specific Eastern and Western North America books are even better. For apps, try eBird, which was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)