The New Nature Movement Isn’t About Going Back to Nature, but Forward to a Nature-Rich Civilization
RICHARD LOUV
THE NEW NATURE MOVEMENT
SEPTEMBER 2012

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Despite undeniable successes, environmentalism is in trouble: recent polls (many, not all) describe a public with diminishing regard for environmental concerns. What we need now is a new nature movement, one that includes but goes beyond the good practices of traditional environmentalism and sustainability, one that paints a compelling, inspiring portrait of a society that is better than the one we presently live in. Not just a survivable world, but a nature-rich world in which our children and grandchildren thrive.

Inchoate, self-organizing, this new nature movement is already beginning to emerge.

It revives old concepts in health and urban planning (Frederick Law Olmsted, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Muir come to mind) and adds new ones, based on recent research that shows the power of nearby nature and wilderness to improve our psychological and physical health, our cognitive functioning, and our economic and social well-being.

Colorado University professor Louise Chawla describes the basis of the movement as “the idea that as humans we cannot only make our ecological footprints as light as possible, but we can actually leave places better than when we came to them, making them places of delight.”

Among the movement’s tenets, which I suggested in The Nature Principle: The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need.