Richard Louv is in his seventies, but when he's hiking…
"I'm kind of like walking with a two-year-old," Louv quipped. "It's really stopping and looking at the detail."
Louv is the author of the 2005 book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder." His latest book, "Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World," came out earlier this summer.
I met Louv and his wife, Kathy, at the trailhead to Volcan Mountain in Julian, where they live. Louv's early writing helped shape my own parenting and reinforced the importance of getting kids outdoors as often as possible.
On a hot morning, countless bees hummed among California buckwheat and flowering sagebrush flanking the trail. Flies swarmed around a fresh twist of scat in the middle of the trail, and Louv suggested it could belong to a mountain lion.
We moved slowly, and for Louv, that's the point.
With his new book, Louv wants everyone to notice more deeply. To do that, he recommends spending time outside.
"Deep noticing basically is complete awareness of where you're at, and looking for things in nature and then being mindful about where you are," Louv said.
Louv has dedicated his life to writing about the importance of connecting with nature at any age. Twenty years ago, when he was researching "Last Child in the Woods," Louv said he could find only a few dozen studies on the importance of nature in childhood and beyond. Today, that number has grown into the thousands, and he said the research suggests nature is universally good for our health.
"They found — in every culture, in every country they looked at — the same thing: is that people feel better when they go outside."
They found — in every culture, in every country they looked at — the same thing: is that people feel better when they go outside.Richard Louv, author
One 2023 study found that for young people, a brief walk outside produced greater cognitive benefits than taking the same walk on a treadmill. Researchers saw improvements in neural responses involved in memory, attention, reaction times and impulse control.
Louv also said scientists are evolving the way they think about human senses and sensory input.
"We have far more than nine senses. We've got 30, 50, some scientists say as many as 100 senses that we don't even know we're using most of them most of the time. But we're far more sensitized to what's around us in the natural world than we usually think we are," he said.
Louv said screens limit our sensory experience, relying mostly on sight and sound.
What are we doing? We're putting kids in school sitting in front of computer screens ... so they can limit it down to a couple senses. That, to me, is the definition of being less alive.Richard Louv
"What are we doing? We're putting kids in school sitting in front of computer screens — and we do this to ourselves. I do it to myself — sitting in front of computer screens and basically asking them to push away as many of those 30 or 40 senses as they can so they can limit it down to a couple senses," he said. "That, to me, is the definition of being less alive."
Louv sees deep, practiced noticing as an alternative, especially outdoors.
Want to notice better?
One suggestion he offers is finding what he calls a "sit spot."
"You find a place and you return to it."
Or, he says, go back to your roots. Way back.
"I think pretend you're a four-year-old, and when you go for a walk, stop as much as a four-year-old does. Drives parents nuts. But if you stop, you'll see something in that grass. You'll see something crawling in the dirt. You'll see mountain lion scat you wouldn't have seen if you hadn't stopped," Louv said.
If Louv's earlier work was a warning that children's relationships with nature could disappear, his new book is about what happens when adults — even 70-somethings — let themselves play in the dirt again.
"You know, as kids, we notice. Many of us, not all of us, but some of us. This is rediscovering the joy that you had when you were a kid out in the field or in the woods or climbing a tree, as I did, often. And looking at the life in the grooves of the bark. The transparent little spiders or aphids. Looking at the wind, at the way the wind moved the tree you were in and moved the field you were looking at," Louv said. "All of that stuff, a child takes in much more easily than adults. But the child really starts out that way, and then we lose that, many of us. But it's not gone. It's still in us."
For Louv, this work is personal.
"Part of the reason I wanted to write this book is to focus on that. I remembered the joy that I felt as a kid doing what I just described. I wanted to feel that joy again," he said.
