Sounder Sleep System

"Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyze processes which we would otherwise know nothing about. A man who falls straight into bed every night, and ceases to live until the moment he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, not necessarily great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without is value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness."—Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Lydia Davis, trans.

Grist, an on-line magazine of environmental news and commentary, features a provocative interview with Richard Louv, author of 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 the interview with Richard Louv in Grist.
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