There's nothing that I love more than predawn. I'm with the dogs, I make coffee, and there's no one up.
Kids are absolutely starved for positive adult contact.
The children and nature movement is fueled by this fundamental idea: the child in nature is an endangered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.
Time in nature is not leisure time; it's an essential investment in our chidlren's health (and also, by the way, in our own).
We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.
The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
Children need nature for the healthy development of their senses, and therefore, for learning and creativity.
I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.
Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
We are special in the sense that we can know our place in the cosmos. We can know our place in space. We are at least one of the cosmos's ways of knowing itself. That fills me with reverence and joy. Another insight I really want people to consider is this: everyone has gotten this far. Everyone you meet has made it this far. Nobody is superior to anyone else from an evolutionary standpoint.
I'm very loyal in a relationship. Any relationship. When I go out with my mom, I don't look at other moms and go, "I wonder what her macaroni and cheese tastes like. "