I can't tell people to love mountains. They have to find their own way.
This is the Wilderness School. 'Where the Kids are animals
The outdoors, the beautiful environment, both in fresh and salt water. And the thing that concerns me is the amount of kids that stand on street corners, or go into pinball parlours, and call it recreation.
I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
What I want to do with my filmmaking is help kids experience the truth and wisdom of nature no matter where they are, whether or not they have the opportunity to go to a national park.
I think it would be worth the while to introduce a school of children to such [an oak grove], that they may get an idea of the primitive oaks before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it is too late.
If children have an interest in nature, they will understand. I want them to become people who appreciate the consequences the next generation will suffer if we destroy our natural surroundings. So without a doubt, they need to learn that nature is vital to us by experiencing it. I want them to like nature and to climb mountains and so on.
The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
Our kids are actually doing what we told them to do when they sit in front of that TV all day or in front of that computer game all day. The society is telling kids unconsciously that nature's in the past. It really doesn't count anymore, that the future is in electronics, and besides, the bogeyman is in the woods.
It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young.
I actually like snakes! When I was young, I was a boy scout nature camp counselor, and one of our projects was collecting snakes and creating an environment for them, so I'm quite familiar with snakes and think they're fantastic creatures.
I don't spend a lot of time in nature. Probably less than most people that live in urban Texas.
Nature was my kindergarten.
I learned from my parents to revere nature. Their way of teaching my siblings and I to respect the environment was to be in it, and so we spent a great deal of time outdoors.
There is no part of the country where in the summer you cannot get a sufficient supply of the best specimens. Teach your children to bring them in for themselves. Take your text from the brooks, not from the booksellers.
I'm a huge fan of the Nature Channel programs.
For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival. I was convinced that the woods were calling me. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by myself by the time I'm 25, I have failed.
Put the park rangers to work. Lazy scheming loafers, they've wasted too many years selling tickets at toll booths and sitting behind desks filling out charts and tables
Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.
See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
I try to avoid giving advice. The only advice I will give is to pay attention. I don't mean to the screen in your hand. I'm talking about the natural world. I spent a lot of time educating my children about nature by putting them in nature. I said, "I want you to listen; I want you to look." There's so much technology coming into our lives that takes us away from the natural stuff, so I'm pushing the other way.
I think being raised spending so much time outdoors was really important - while you're in it, you might not know, but now I think of the things I was thankful for.
How can our kids really understand the moral complexities of being alive if they are not allowed to engage in those complexities outdoors?
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
