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We'll talk nature and kids this week.

You'll meet a local camp director from Australia, and you'll see a new plan for Randolph County's Purgatory Mountain. But today, in this first of three installments, you'll hear how a former newspaper columnist who loves to fish has become nature's new evangelist.

That's Richard Louv .

He'll be in town next month to visit Greensboro Montessori School. With the help of a handful of sponsors, the school shelled out $10,000 for Louv to spend two days talking about his book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder."

His book is an intriguing read. Really, who knew all the benefits of collecting stones, raising butterflies, building treehouses or simply watching the setting sun slip through the hardwoods at Haw River State Park?

Louv does. He's 59 , a father of two grown sons who grew up nature diving in Missouri. Ask him about that, and he'll go on about building treehouses and fetching crawdads while busting through the woods with Banner , his collie.

Louv knows what those Huck Finn experiences did for him.

But a few years back, during his research for another book, he came across a fourth-grader named Paul in San Diego.

"I like to play indoors better," Paul told him, "'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

Louv discovered many kids just like Paul.

So he wrote "Last Child in the Woods," published three years ago by Chapel Hill's Algonquin Books . Since then, his book has prompted an avalanche of interest - so much that last spring Algonquin published an expanded version, with 100 tips for what families can do to plug into nature.

"You know, I'm going to get a T-shirt that says, 'Who Knew?' " Louv said last week from his home in San Diego. "I knew it would touch a button, but I didn't know it would be this big.

"It's one thing for people to say, 'How true,' or 'Isn't this awful!' but it's another thing for people across the country and internationally ... to work toward reconnecting with nature.

"Think of all the things we complain about and do nothing about."

Louv calls it a "nature-deficit disorder." It's made our country's next generation depressed, distracted and overweight.

Louv found that children - and adults - who dove into nature were in better shape physically, emotionally and spiritually.

It all sounds like a Homer moment. You know, "D'oh ." Of course, you think, nature would do that. But study after study, scholar after scholar showed the detrimental effects of nature taking a back seat to technology.

Louv did what he does best: He used the writing skills he honed in 23 years as a columnist in San Diego and penned sentences like this: "That which cannot be Googled does not count."

It is a great line. But it is so true.

In his travels nationwide, Louv has seen how our need for nature isn't hemmed in by the artificial boundaries created by politics or religion, color or ethnicity, age or gender.

So, Louv has hope. No matter how depressing the information he has shared, he runs into people who leave him saying, "We can do this."

They see the need. So does Louv. But not in statistics. In people, like a little girl he met in Missouri.

She likes to write poems after lying in a big hole, under a tree, with her blanket, and looking at the leaves moving with the wind. But one day, she found her tree - and blanket - gone.

"She said, 'I felt as if they had cut down a part of me,' and I don't think that little girl was speaking metaphorically," he said. "She was speaking about a part of her humanity, of who we are.

"So when we take nature away, it's no small thing. It's cutting away children and ourselves.

"It's part of the best of our humanity."

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com