Part of the Exuberant Sustainability Symposium sponsored by the Office of Sustainability.

Richard Louv is a journalist and author of eight books about the connections between family, nature and community. His new book is The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (May 2011, Algonquin Books), which offers a new vision of the future, in which our lives are as immersed in nature as they are in technology. This future, Louv suggests, is available to all of us right now and offers better psychological, physical and spiritual health for people of every age.

Louv’s previous book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, translated into 10 languages and published in 15 countries, has stimulated an international conversation about the relationship between children and nature. Louv is also the founding chairman of the Children & Nature Network, an organization helping build the movement to connect today’s children and future generations to the natural world.