Originally uploaded by cpeppler

On a recent camping trip, not too far from our home, my wife found a tiny frog in the showers. (No, I won’t name the campsite…) My older son, Zachary, had a bughouse ready for just such a find.

The boys stared at that thing for a long time, watching it climb the mesh and generally freak out at its unexpected capture. But they were enthralled by it.

It impressed me that this was enough to entertain them. And the question that burned into me as I become more surrounded by technology and the questions it engenders is this: how do I keep this alive? How do I keep them from saying, like the fourth-grader in Richard Louv’s _The Last Child in the Woods_, “I like to be inside because that’s where all the outlets are.”?

Of course I want them to be comfortable with all the technologies available to them in their lifetime, and I want them to be skilled enough to leverage those tools to maximize their own learning.

But I also want them to comfortable sitting around a campsite, appreciating the delicacy of life wrapped up in a tiny amphibian.

(I probably didn’t write about this because I wasn’t sure if it “fit” my blog or not.  Now that I have done away with those silly parameters…)

As I feel headlong into the rabbit-hole of Web 2.0 last year, I had this nagging suspicion (seem to get a lot of those) that I was sacrificing something else.  It was at that time that I picked up Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods. He writes about what he calls the Nature-Deficit Disorder.  Of course, one of the symptoms is a preference for all things indoors, electronic, and sedentary.  Said one 4th-grader that he interviewed: “I like to play indoors because that’s where all the outlets are.”

I grew up in the woods, practically.  Boy Scout camping, hiking, hunting, building dangerously unstable treehouses, slopping through shallow rivers for crawfish.  As a family, we still camp as often as possible and I’ve fallen in love with backcountry backpacking again.  But am I also becoming too much like that 4th-grader?  Do I panic a little when I will be out of wi-fi range on an outdoor excursion?

Will’s narrative about taking his iPhone hiking made me wonder if the two have to be mutually exclusive.  I still refuse to wear my headphones while I’m hiking, but I’ll take my iPod for listening to a book or music while trying to fall asleep in my tent.

The bigger, less personal question: Is all the social networking, network gaming, chatting, etc. creating a generation that has forgotten the outdoors?  As a parent, what should I be doing to foster in my boys both a love and appreciation for the woods and the social capital to leverage the latest web technologies to their advantage?

Once again, more questions than answers.