Even in solidly urban landscapes, there is nature to be found, and enjoyed. goandgo/Flickr

Some teachers at my son Willie’s elementary school started planting crops at a local farm this year. A few days ago, Willie and I joined a work party there. It was quite instructive.

The farm is a 20-minute walk from school. It’s next to a busy road. The earth is more rock than dirt. The farm is not, in other words, perfect. And yet, after about 20 minutes of digging in a row of potatoes, my son looked at me and said simply, "This is the best." I agreed.

If Richard Louv’s new book is to be believed, Willie and I had just stumbled upon an important truth: the nature we need is the nature that is nearby. The green spaces right here in our neighborhoods and in our cities are absolutely necessary to our well-being. We just have to learn to see what’s in front of us.

In The Nature Principle, Louv asks us to give up the notion that nature is some ideal place that’s out there somewhere, something to be visited annually at the nearest national park. Instead, he wants us to experience the good-enough nature that surrounds us. Only then, he says, can we save ourselves and our communities from the spiritual disconnection and emotional poverty that plague modern life.

Louv first traversed this territory in Last Child in the Woods, a book with a killer title and an urgent message: kids need nature. Parents and educators readily took up Louv’s newly coined phrase "nature-deficit disorder," which he used to describe the host of ills that grow from "the broken bond between our young and nature."

Now Louv has followed up with The Nature Principle. A kind of Last Child in the Woods for not-so-small people, the new book presents a comprehensive vision of how all humans need closer contact with nature and how we can go about making it happen. Louv’s Nature Principle holds that "a reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival." And he goes on: "The twenty-first century will be the century of human restoration in the natural world."

This may sound grandiose and overwhelming, but Louv has, it seems, thousands of notions about how it might be done. He pours forth ideas both familiar and frankly outlandish, some his own, but mostly gathered from thinkers all over the world: park rangers as health paraprofessionals, helping connect the sick and infirm with nature; a citizen-naturalist brigade, providing bird counts and tree counts and fish counts to support scientists; the eco-village movement, which builds environmentally sensitive housing developments; home gardens as the crucibles of a resurgent biodiversity; button parks, which take advantage of whatever tiny pockets of open space might be found in cities.

Louv’s enthusiasm is infectious. He comes across as a delighted curator, unable to help himself from bringing us all the news he can find of this growing international movement to connect people with nature. He gives us a million reasons to go outside and removes every excuse for staying in. If Louv had his way, the woods -- and parks and farms and Willie’s vegetable garden -- would be filled with grown-ups and children alike.