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10/25/2007: "Children detach from natural world to explore virtual ones"

“I’d rather be at the mall because you can enjoy yourself walking around looking at stuff as opposed to the woods,” Nguyen said from the comfort of the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall.

In Yosemite and other parks, he said, furrowing his brow to emphasize the absurdly lopsided comparison, “the only thing you look at is the trees, grass and sky.”

The notion of going on a hike, camping, fishing or backpacking is foreign to a growing number of young people in cities and suburbs around the nation, according to several polls and studies.

The lack of outdoor activity is more pronounced in California’s minority and lower-income communities. Latino parents, for example, were twice as likely as white parents to say their child never participated in an outdoor nature activity and three times more likely to say their child did not go to a park, playground or beach this past summer, according to the Public Policy Institute poll.

[ Without culture to bind us to nature, we become lost servants of technocrats and insane religiously-interpreted dogmas. ]

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/10/children_detach.php