“When people connect with nature, it happens somewhere. Almost everyone who cares deeply about the outdoors can identify a particular place where contact occurred. This may have been a wilderness, a national park, or a stretch of unbounded countryside, but more often the place that makes a difference is unspectacular: a vacant lot, a scruffy patch of woods, a weedy field, a stream, a green ravine…

One of my students just raised her hand and said she wanted to go home.

I asked her why and she mumbled something that sounded like

"I want to go home and play on tree limbs."

I replied with, "That sounds great! I haven't climbed a tree in a long time."

One of her fellow classmates remarked, "Mr. Donahue, she didn't say tree limbs. She wants to play on Free Realms." This is some sort of online video game. My students are 7…