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The State of America’s National Parks: Listen to Nation Public Radio’s recent segment on the Diane Rehm Show regarding children in nature and the history of the creation of the National Park System and the National Wildlife Refuge.

Guest host, Susan Page, speaks with historian, Douglas Brinkley, and Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, about President Theodore Roosevelt’s vision for preserving America’s wilderness and the future of our national parks and monuments.

Guests

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, former Democratic U.S. Senator from Colorado.

Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.

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Louv’s latest book bears the self-explanatory title Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. After tens of thousands of years of children playing and working primarily outdoors, the last few generations have seen such interaction with nature vanish almost entirely. The implications — for children’s physical and mental health, and for the future of environmentalism — are immense, Louv argues.

But he stresses that there is hope — indeed, that response to the book has him more hopeful than he was when he began writing it. After all, in a world of intractable problems and social malaise, his encouragement to parents is simple and easily achieved: Take your kids outside. (Read part two of this interview in Gristmill By David Roberts www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/03/03/louv/)

Michael Pollan has built a reputation as a sleuthing agro-journalist. In his latest book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he brings his investigative skills to bear on four meals. One is the typical American overprocessed fare; one is composed of what Pollan calls “industrial organic” — organic food grown on huge mega-farms alongside standard crops; one comes from a small organic farm that refuses to sell outside its neighboring community; and one is hunted and gathered entirely by Pollan himself. (His account of tracking and shooting a wild boar is bizarrely gripping.) Read the interview by David Roberts at www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/31/roberts/