Month: March 2014

“An emerging body of scientific evidence suggests not spending much time outdoors connected to the natural world can be connected to rising rates of depression, attention deficit disorder, Vitamin D deficiency (an epidemic in the world), and child obesity.” Being in nature is connected to cognitive development, the ability to learn, and the ability to control ourselves,” Richard Louv says.
Exposure to nature is so beneficial.
Humans are hard-wired genetically for an affiliation with the natural world and suffer when they’re deprived of it. (“biophilia” theory)
The brain relaxes in nature, entering a state of contemplative attention that is restorative or refreshing. Attention Restoration Theory (ART)
Louv says there’s enough evidence of the physical and mental health benefits of time in nature that schools should be mandated to include it in the standard curriculum.
Richard Louv is the author of Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle, says spending time in nature has a wide range of benefits for physical and mental health.
By Pauline Dakin, extract from CBC News
Toms’s footnote: If you can’t afford three or four hours to take a bushwalk, just take a walk. Taking a walk has been found to be the closest thing to a “cure all”. While you are walking, make sure to put your attention on your surroundings. Look at whatever is around you. If you can, do it in a park or by the sea.

According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Government was responsible for killing 60 million of its citizens. He wrote:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Read more of this great man’s quotes here http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10420.Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn