Aaron Perry
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Dr. Oakleigh “Oak” Thorne, II, PhD, is the founder of the Thorne Nature Experience, where youth are connected with the outdoors, taught ecological stewardship skills such as bird banding, and encouraged to listen to the wisdom of nature. In this special episode, recorded in 2019, Oak shares his passion for birds, for mentoring, and for the wide open spaces of the Rocky Mountain West.
He is an emphatic proponent of “Biophilia,” of “Wild Play,” and of the “Leave No Child Inside” movement. Among the many words of wisdom imparted by Oak in this discussion are: “Be willing to take risks (for we learn always and only by taking risks); there is no such thing as failure, just learning experiences; be optimistic (if you become a pessimist, you have given up); one person can make a huge difference; get to nature, open space, and parks – just get out there!” Oak also discusses the vital importance of education and of being a good mentor to younger generations, citing H. G. Wells: “Civilization is a race between catastrophe and education.”
Oakleigh Thorne, II (“Oak”) was born in 1928 in New York City and grew up on the South Shore of Long Island as a “nature boy” on 60 acres of woods, meadows, streams, and a lake. He attended Millbrook School in Millbrook, NY, then Yale University, earning a B.S. in Biology (1951) and M.S. in Conservation (1953), and he received a Ph.D. in Zoology (Animal Behavior) from the University of Colorado (1958). He was the first representative of The Nature Conservancy in Colorado (1954) and helped found their Colorado Chapter; and he founded Thorne Ecological Institute (1954), now known as Thorne Nature Experience, which today continues to connect kids to nature through hands-on Environmental Education programs. In 1990, Oak helped establish the Environmental Studies Program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder (now Naropa University), where he taught Field Ecology and Deep Ecology. Oak is also a jazz pianist, does composing and vocal arranging, and for 28 years, sang second tenor with a Boulder/Denver men’s a cappella singing group, the New Wizard Oil Combination (or the “Wizards”). He is a member of the External Board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS). Each summer, Oak teaches Bird Banding to students ages 12 to 15 in Thorne’s Summer Camp program.
More information: thornenature.org
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Hey friends, so we recorded this podcast episode with Oak Thorne last year actually well
before COVID broke out and are really excited to be able to share it with you now just want
you to understand that this is pre-COVID in case you’re wondering about the context.
Enjoy.
Welcome to the YonEarth communities stewardship and sustainability podcast series.
And today we are in the beautiful outdoor setting of Thorne Nature experience with its
founder, Dr. Oakleigh Oak Thorne the second, Hi Oak.
Hi, hi.
So great to have this opportunity to talk with you today.
Thanks Aaron.
Appreciate it.
Oakleigh Thorne Oak the second was born in 1928 in New York City and grew up on the south
shore of Long Island as a nature boy those are his quotes on 60 acres of woods, meadows,
streams and a lake.
He attended Milbrook School in Milbrook, New York then Yale University earning a bachelor
of science and biology in 1951 and a master of science and conservation in 1953.
And he received his PhD in Zoology animal behavior from the University of Colorado in 1958.
He was the first representative of the Nature Conservancy in Colorado in 1954 and helped
found their Colorado chapter.
He founded Thorne Ecological Institute in 1954 which is now doing business as the Thorne
Nature Experience which today continues to connect kids to nature through hands-on environmental
education programs.
In 1990, Oak helped establish the Environmental Studies Program at the Naropa Institute in
Boulder which is now called Naropa University where he taught field ecology and deep ecology.
Oak is also a jazz pianist I’ve heard him play its fabulous and does composing and
vocal arranging and for 28 years saying second tenor with a Boulder Denver men’s acapella
singing group, the New Wizard Oil Combination or the Wizards.
He is a member of the External Board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.
And each summer, Oak teaches bird banding to students ages 12 to 15 something we’re
going to be able to see in a few minutes at the Thorne’s summer camp program.
And Oak, it’s just remarkable reflecting back on all that you’ve been able to accomplish
during your career.
And such a joy that we have this opportunity to visit with you today.
So thanks for taking the time to visit with us.
I love the way you say career because I learned from a very wise woman years ago, Anna Miller
Tiedemann, when I attended the World Wilderness Congress.
She had an organization called the Life Career Foundation and she stressed the fact that
your life is your career.
When you run into young people that just graduated from college and, oh, we don’t know what
our career is going to be, I always say to them, relax, your life is your career.
You’re always in your career.
I’m in my career now talking to you, you’re in your career talking to me.
Are you never leave it?
That’s so true.
It’s a great concept.
That’s so true.
Well, Oak, I imagine as you’re interacting with all of these students, these young people
over the years, you’ve had the opportunity to impart all kinds of wisdom that you’ve
picked up along the way.
And I imagine it’s got to be an incredibly vitalizing and enriching thing for you to have
that interaction with all these young folks on a regular basis.
Can you tell us a bit what that looks like?
Yeah, absolutely.
It’s what we call mentoring.
And it’s a great pleasure to be able to mentor young people and theoretically pass on wisdom.
Sometimes you learn from them that they have better wisdom than you have.
But usually through life experience, you do gather a lot of wisdom and I love to share
what I think is my wisdom with them and also encourage them.
They love to have somebody that will listen to them and encourage them in whatever they’re
interested in.
And after all, the young people coming along are our future leaders and that’s important
to remember.
I’ve been struck.
I’ve had the opportunity to know you over the last several years in the Boulder community.
And I’ve been struck, Oak, how you have such an emphasis on leadership and on the cultivation
of leadership skills and the ethos of leadership.
But I think your take is not what I would call the mainstream flashy power-broke, earring,
power-suit-wearing form of leadership.
You’re doing something different that seems from my perspective to be more enduring and
actually more grounded in many ways more solid.
Yeah, I certainly agree.
It very often requires listening and really understanding the other person’s point of view.
And when you’ve got what how many dozen kids can you have here at one time, imagine the
listening can be quite a skill to develop.
Yeah, we have what entire second grade class sometimes will have 60 kids out here at once.
But they love coming out and they love the freedom of being out in nature.
And connecting kids to nature is so important.
There’s so much research that shows that if kids are allowed to just play, they call it
wild play, just when they’re really little, just be able to go out and discover what’s
out there in nature.
As a little kid, I remember on rainy days I’d go out and make dams and see how the water
would flow.
There’s a lot about the physics of water just by playing in it when I was a little kid.
And of course, I was lucky to grow up on 60 acres with woods, meadows, streams and even
a lake.
And I was just nature boy.
I was out there all the time discovering critters, finding turtles, finding a bird’s nest,
learning what kind of bird it was.
So that contact with nature is very important.
And they call it biofelia, which is a concept that you’re not really normal psychologically
unless you have contact with nature.
And I certainly believe in that.
I think that contact with nature is so important and there’s so many kids that are growing
up with computer games and iPods and so forth and all this techno stuff and they’re divorced
from nature.
So what we do here at Thorne Nature Experiences is that get the kids connected back to nature.
And that’s very important.
Yeah, it seems, okay, I think that you and I probably share something in common in our
childhood experiences and that when I was a kid, my early years I spent in the forests
of the Pacific Northwest.
And often was just out there for hours with my dog, whom I call my first best friend.
And that’s what I did for hours and hours and days and days and I think it developed
a very different view of the world than many of my friends and peers have perhaps growing
up in urban environments where they’re not having that direct nature experience and it
seems to me that one of the most important things we can be doing in our society is exactly
what you’ve been doing for decades, which is helping to reestablish that connection
with nature and to heal that great divorce that has emerged.
Exactly.
Yeah, that’s so important.
Rachel Carson recognized that.
She said if she had an influence with the good fairy that brought children up was that
every child should have an adult that could take them by the hand and show them the wonders
of nature.
The sense of wonder is what she called it.
It was so important.
And that’s what you, when you get out into nature and discover all the variety of animals
and plants and just all the exciting things that are going on in nature, you really realize
how true it was that Miss Carson was right on when she said it was important for kids to
have that sense of wonder and you certainly develop it when you’re out in nature.
Yeah, I think a conversation you and I had probably about five years ago, Oak on the
topic of wonder actually was part of the influence that led me to have a full chapter
called wonder in the book YonEarth and that especially these days as many of us in
our professional lives are so consumed by technology, by data, by numbers, doing our
things in this inside of the boxes of office buildings and so forth.
We end up potentially missing out an incredible wealth of knowledge and even of wisdom that
comes only from nature.
Right.
And I think that if we had more of us cultivating that sense of wonder in our lives, Oak,
it would probably be better off in terms of where our society is currently.
Yeah.
I think also, I think a great teacher will develop a sense of wonder.
Education is so important.
I think it was HG Wells that said civilization was a race between catastrophe and education.
Let’s hope that education wins.
But my whole life, if I bought it down to one word, it would be education.
I just have always felt that that’s so important and I think that worldwide the more we can
educate people, the more chance we have of the world surviving.
And we’re talking about education.
Are there certain subjects or certain approaches to education, Oak, that you think are most
needed and most effective?
Well, certainly using nature, getting out into nature is a very important part of education.
I sometimes use the phrase serendipity of nature.
I love the word serendipity.
It was coined by Horace Walpole, I believe, in about 1854 or something like that.
And it was based on the two or three brothers, the brothers of serendip, who went out into
the world.
And just by being in the right place at the right time, good things happened to them.
So Walpole coined the word serendipity, which was based on the brothers of serendip.
But I can think many times when I’m out in nature and something happens, I’m watching
some dragonflies buzzing by right now.
But I remember one time in the rope of field ecology class, we went out on the bubbling
trail and along south pole to creek.
And as we started along the trail, there was a raptor sitting in a tree in the distance.
We literally walked right under that tree and the raptor didn’t fly away.
It turned out to be a prairie falcon.
And it kind of looked down at us, but it was more concentrating on something else.
And while we were standing there, it took off and dove into the meadow and caught a
vol, which is not like a big mouse, right there in front of us.
And I jokingly turned to the class and said, boy, I had to pay him a lot to put on that
show for us.
But what the point was that we could have gone out there for 100 days in a row and not
seen that particular scene of a raptor catching of old, that’s serendipity.
We were just there, the right place, at the right time.
Nature is full of serendipities.
I get it.
So I guess there’s an opportunity for serendipity in nature.
We probably don’t find in the classroom in the city quite the same way.
That’s true.
That’s very true.
Although, again, it’s up to the teacher.
The teacher can make things even in the classroom in the city that can create a sense of wonder.
It just depends.
But the more that kids are allowed to explore nature, and particularly before they even
go to school, that sense of wild play is so important.
We’re starting a nature preschool at Thorne Nature this year.
We have to jump through all kinds of hoops with the state to get permission to do this.
But we just feel it’s so important, and there’s so much research.
People like David Sobel and so forth who have written about the importance of wild play
for little kids, so they get connected at an early age with nature.
I love it.
Well, and there’s also a fair bit of research indicating that many of the psychological
and emotional issues that more and more of us modern humans are dealing with are actually
connected to this thing called nature deficit disorder.
And I know that’s a big part of your work is helping to heal and remedy that specific
phenomenon as well.
Absolutely.
Richard Louvre, a wonderful book last child in the woods, and this subtitle was saving
our children from nature deficit disorder, and he really stressed how important it was
to get kids outdoors.
Leave no child inside, is what is his slogan, and it is really important.
So obviously here in the Boulder area, and by the way, we are sitting in the sun.
It’s quite warm, and okay, I hope you’re still doing okay.
I’m surviving.
It’s toasty out here.
We wanted to share with our audience this beautiful view right behind us, and we’ve
got in the near distance, can’t quite tell, but there’s a wonderful, large water feature,
pond, kind of, sombrero marsh.
Sombrero marsh here, and then behind are the beginning of the Rocky Mountains heading
right up to the continental divide of the main rocky chain there.
And Oak, maybe you can tell us a bit about what’s going on here on this landscape and
why we’re sitting outside.
Well, yeah, this is an amazing partnership between the City of Boulder Open Space, the
Boulder Valley School District, and Thorne Nature Experience.
For years, the Open Space Department tried to buy sombrero marsh, and the school district
refused to sell it unless there was environmental education, and we got wind of this, and we
said, hey, guys, Thorne can do environmental education.
So we had many meetings, pure crafts love to meet, and we hammered out the partnership,
and the marsh and all that rest that land was sold to the city by the school district,
except for one acre that is fenced in, one acre were attached to the school district.
This is school district property, and they purposely kept this one acre on which to build
the sombrero marsh environmental education building, which is really our home, the Thorne
home.
And it’s a wonderful partnership.
We have entire second grade classes that come out for the day and other groups of kids,
and in the summer we have our own field trips that come out here and go to other open spaces,
and again, to get kids out of doors and connected to nature.
So how many kids are coming through the program each year?
Well, several thousand, when you think of our in-school, after-school field trip, summer
camp programs, which we have here in Boulder, we have them in Littleton, we have them in
Longmont and Louisville and Lafayette, and it’s been an amazing growth, and we’re very
proud to have actually been able to accomplish what we’ve been able to accomplish.
It’s definitely beautiful, so I’m wondering with some of our audience who are in other places,
other communities who maybe don’t have these kinds of resources yet, Oak, what would
you suggest to folks in terms of steps that they can be taking to get those kids more
and more connected to nature?
Well, I’m sure that they can find a park.
New York City is a good example with Central Park, the Frederick Law, instead, senior designed.
What a wonderful resource that is.
So you can find nature, you can find an old deserted lot and have a community garden,
which is another way of connecting kids to the earth and to nature, just by learning
how to have a garden and learning where food comes from.
So AI encouraged all communities to think in that broad sense of what can we do to connect
kids to nature, and I’m sure there are good ways.
If you’re interested, you can check out ThorneNatureExperience at ThorneNature.org.
What I love here is that Oak, not only are we able to see all kinds of birds outside and
you’ve actually been identifying a bunch as we were setting up earlier, inside you’ve
got a beautiful collection of taxidermy, birds, raptors, owls, all sorts of even fox,
some other animals.
To help the kids identify and get a sense for how big some of the creatures are, it’s
a beautiful way to learn.
It certainly is.
And while we’ve been sitting here, I’m sure I just heard a goldfinch go over, you can hear
that tutu tutu, and you’ve heard redwing backwards, chirping as they’ve flown over.
So the sounds of nature are so important for kids to learn.
And you can learn a lot about birds by listening to the different sounds.
John Young has written a whole book on what the Robin knows, just whether they are sounding
off in a disturbed way or in what we might interpret as a relaxed, happy way.
There’s so many aspects of bird song besides just protecting their own territory.
They will express their emotions or their worries if there’s a predator nearby, they’ll
be a alarm sound that they’ll make.
Just get used to listening to nature.
One of the things I love to do with kids is to ask them to close their eyes and just listen
with their ears, because with your eyes closed, your ears become a lot more sensitive and
you start picking up noises that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
Those are redwing backwards flying over now, you can hear them.
You know, the sound of the robin always reminds me of my grandfather and he it
seems learned some of their language and could tell them they’re communicating
about different things and and the one thing that has stuck with me the most is
when they’re singing the it’s about to rain song and they seem to get so
excited when they’re anticipating imminent rain and boy it just reminds me of
my grandpa hanging out in his yard and his garden listening to those birds he
would do that for hours right that’s great yeah bird wisdom as we call it well
it makes me think you know he he led a very long full vital life and who knows
maybe listening to birds as part of the secret oh yeah is that right I’m sure
it is I love it well I know that one of the things you’re doing and you’re
able to demonstrate to the kids and to others is tagging birds no bird
banding bird banding you tag cattle and you band birds okay okay tag cattle band
birds okay I think I got it so your bird banding and we’re actually going to
have an opportunity to see you demonstrate this in a few minutes right but
tell us what what are you doing and it sounds like there’s a whole network of
people that are engaged in this in this effort yeah it’s a major program
under the department of interior so it’s a federal program the bird banding
laboratory is located in Laurel and on the production research refuge and has
been for many many years I banded my first bird when I was 13 years old in
1942 under my biology under my biology teacher at Millbrook school in Millbrook
New York and when I was a senior about ready to go to Yale he said oh you’ve been
banding for five years under me you deserve your own permit so he wrote to the
bird banding laboratory and I got my own master permit in 1947 that was 72
years ago so and I’ve been banding birds ever since and what I love doing is
teaching a bird banding class every June I teach four weeks of bird banding to
12 13 14 15 year olds I have to be 12 to be in the class to have have the
coordination to handle birds and band so it’s a wonderful way of connecting
kids to nature and they love it and they come back and take the course two or
three times and then they may end up by the time they’re 16 or 17 being one of
our TAs our teaching assistants and I have an example of one young man Cody
Limber who took my bird banding class for several years and then became a
T.A. and he went to college and at UC Berkeley University University of
California at Berkeley and he just graduated from there and he’s been accepted
as a graduate student and on mythology that’s a study of birds at Yale I was
under Rick prom who’s a acquaintance of mine so I’m very proud to have
mentored him along the way and others so bird banding is a wonderful way to
connect kids really connect them to nature handling wild birds and putting the
band on just really really connects them well I know we’re gonna in a couple
minutes we’re gonna see you demonstrate this oak and I just I love how delicately
you hold the bird in your hands and it seems that it also conveys directly how
precious these beautiful creatures are yeah they certainly are why don’t we do
that now great okay we’re going blackbird here that needs a band
and today is the third of August I believe she’s so calm yeah you’ve got the right
touch oak I’m the bird whisperer yeah oh 82 all the birds that oh bird bands
in North America have a three-digit or I’m sorry a four-digit prefix and a
five-digit suffix and you figure with four and five numbers in combination like
that you have billions of combinations yes because just with five digits
alone if you start with zero zero zero zero zero and end up with nine nine nine nine
you’ve got a hundred thousand combinations then you just change the
prefix by one digit and make another hundred thousand so every bird in North
America has its own license plate not something and yeah it’s the master
database we send all our information to master database in Laurel Maryland is
under it’s under the Department of Interior it used to be under Fish and Wildlife
Service Department of Interior now it’s under the biological division of the
US Geological Survey which is still Department of Interior so I’m getting a
size two band out here not a size two band forgot it’s a female so she need a
smaller size because the females are smaller than in the males yeah it takes
the one-day band let’s go take one takes back eight three thirteen three I put
the last three digits of band number band number is actually twenty seven thirty
one is the prefix and then the five digits suffix is zero three five zero three
but I so I just write five zero three the last three digits in how often do you
submit the records to the the central database we usually do it about once a
year sometimes twice a year but basically by the end of January after the band
year is over you see I just opened the band yeah with these special pliers
and then it goes into this notch here and I band her on the right foot like that squeeze it closed
now she’s got her license plate for life yeah and what’s the the main reason that we
are tracking the birds this way well since we are tracking individuals wherever she
sells up we know it’s this bird so we learn about migration we learn about
longevity how long she lives and also whether they come back here a lot of
the birds keep coming back here who was they they stay fairly local other birds just move on
we’ve had a lot of cliff swallows every year they nest under road covers and they they have to
be where they’re flying insects because they because they eat flying insects I have to be
with this perpetual summer so they fly all the way to southern Brazil and Argentina and our
wow you know our winter incredible most of the swallows go south because they’re eating flying insects have
to be where there’s warmer climate and flying insects seed now she’s ready to go she’s so calm
she’s got her bling now she goes off she goes there she goes so your kids ready to go basically
went wherever you are huh well in the summer yes in the winter we have a I have a desk in there
with this all set up and we’re banding just here but in the summer with the bird banding class as I
teach we’re all different places around Boulder County and then I go up to a bar a ranch in Wyoming to
band so I have to really make my car the banding station have all the equipment right in the car
beautiful the mobile banding station great well my car’s like a mobile bookstore sometimes
it’s interesting what we’re able to do with these vehicles great oak well thanks so this was a
live demo of banding a bird at at the center here so it’s great to be able to see that directly oak
and I love being able to teach young kids how to band birds I banded my first bird when I was
13 under my biology teacher Frank Trevor at Millbrook School in Millbrook New York and that was
in 1942 in 1947 when I was a senior he helped me get my own permit he said oh keep in banding
for five years and you could deserve your own permit so I got my own permit a master permit as I
call it in 1947 that was 72 years ago been banding birds ever since wow who I love doing teaching
12 13 14 year olds how to band birds yeah absolutely they get so good at it and it connects
some to nature that’s the main thing it’s a real connection to nature yeah yeah who issues
that permit just out of curiosity it comes from the bird banding office which is in moral Maryland
okay and that’s under department of interior it’s a federal permit so I have to have federal
permit and I have to have a state permit I have a Colorado and a Wyoming permit I even have a
Boulder County and Boulder City open space permits to yeah just to make sure yeah for banding
on open space beautiful well thank you for sharing that with us that was great to see that
it’s it’s a wonderful in a way it’s a wonderful hobby because I never get tired of doing it
well thanks for that demonstration oak that was just really fun to see it makes me think some
of these birds are wearing bling what’s bling what’s bling okay now you have to explain this is
bling is the like metallic bracelets jewelry oh even sometimes when folks will put all these
sparkling sticky things onto their the backs of their phones and so on they’ll call that bling
okay the way I guess that we’re decorating ourselves and our phones so the bird has one single
aluminum band and that’s their bling that’s their bling okay yeah well let me take this opportunity
to remind our audience that this is the YonEarth communities stewardship and sustainability
podcast series and today we are visiting with doctor Oakleigh Thorne the second known as Oak
and we are at the Thorne Nature Experience you can check that out at Thornenature.org
and I want to take the opportunity to be sure to thank our sponsors who are making this podcast
possible that they include the association of Waldorf schools of North America earth coast
productions equal exchange the international society of sustainability professionals
the Lidge Family Foundation Madera Outdoor Patagonia Purium and Waylay Waters so a huge thanks to
all the support those organizations are giving us and want to give a big shout out to
the growing number of people who have joined our monthly giving program you are providing
the foundation for all of our community mobilization work throughout the YonEarth community
network thank you so much for that if you haven’t yet joined the monthly giving program and
you would like to you can go to YonEarth.org slash support and when you sign up as a monthly
giver I will send you an email with a special code to download free copies of all our ebook and
audiobook resources you can use them yourselves you can share them with friends as a way to say thanks
for your support so thanks to everybody for for making this possible and uh and oak just again so
such a joy to be sitting here in this beautiful piece of uh natural setting and right smack in the
middle of a relatively developed urban corridor right and it seems that uh you’ve created a bit of
a sanctuary here probably for all kinds of people and uh other species and other critters other critters
yeah right so uh we’ve got a plane flying overhead this is the newest species of airborne critter
go ahead and call it a gas hawk gas hawk not to be confused with the gas hawk right that’s a
hilarious yeah rocking mountain airport yeah that’s also one of the scenes in this uh story I’m
working on flying in and out of there kind of a funny coincidence I’ve been talking about that um well
you know oak we’ve been we’ve been talking a lot about what you’re doing here at Thorne Nature
Experience what you’re doing with the education the the bird banding not tagging and I’m just
curious for our audience we’ve got folks and communities all over the country internationally
doing all sorts of different work and I’m wondering if from your perspective having witnessed many
decades of our modern cultures uh evolution if you have specific advice and wisdom that you might
share with us that we can use in all this work that we’re doing and uh carry with us as as we go
forward on our journeys well absolutely I think first of all you’ve got to be willing to take risks
in your life I had a very wise person that used to run in countergroups uh Phil Larson
this truth was that you learn only and always by the willingness to take to take a risk
uh if you if you do take a risk and it doesn’t work out it’s not failure it’s learning
yeah gene case wrote a book on fearlessness and really what what that’s all about is not being
afraid to take a risk because uh that’s when you when you push the boundaries forward uh I just
think of many times in my life where I took risks and sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn’t
but if you look at at it as a learning experience rather than failure we if you work if you take a
risk and something doesn’t work out learn from it and so with the next time you take a particular
risk you have more wisdom on how to handle a particular situation so anyway I I think it’s
very important to take a risk and it’s also important to to be optimistic I really stress that
when I’m mentor young people the importance of staying optimistic because if you become a pessimist
you give up if you always stay an optimist you can make a difference and one person can make
a lot of difference I know I’ve made a difference in my life and it’s a good feeling to know that
you’ve made a difference so taking risks and being optimistic or what I would suggest is two very
important tools for going forward in life I absolutely love that okay I really love that
advice it’s fabulous and uh and I’m wondering also as somebody who is so connected to nature
yourself to think about many of our audience members who might be living and working most of the
time in a very urban setting is there is there anything you would suggest to to those friends of
ours in terms of getting this deeper uh relationship and experience that you’re you’re so
familiar with sure get get out into nature get out to parks and open space and uh they’re there are
areas nearby that where you can take a bus or train or drive out in your car if you have one
maybe maybe it’ll be a self-driving car in the near future yeah and uh just get out there and
discover the it might be just down the block you might find an old vacant lot that has
that’s overgrown and has nature to study right there uh it’s important for schools for example
instead of the asphalt playground to also have a nature area where kids can go and discover
a dragonfly or a bird or a toad uh whatever just uh and then of course wildflowers
uh that’s where garden is really wonderful for connecting kids to nature just a neighborhood
abandoned lot can be suddenly become a neighborhood garden where a lot of people get together
and cooperate to have a community garden so there are lots lots of ways get out there you know
as Richard Lou says leave no child inside yeah i love that for good for kids of all ages
of all ages well this is so wonderful oh thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us
today well it’s been an honor to do it really appreciate it thanks again thanks so much
the YonEarth community stewardship and sustainability podcast series
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