It’s not just kids and their preoccupation with iPads and video games, or busy streets and “stranger danger” that is fueling the modern disinclination to get outdoors. It’s a widespread phenomenon. Grown-ups fare little better. Statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency suggest that adults, too, spend 93 percent of their lives inside buildings or vehicles, living under what nature writer Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, calls “protective house arrest.”

Are we as Americans actually losing our connection to the outdoors? Conservation ecologist Patricia Zaradic of the Environmental Leadership Program and conservation biologist Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois at Chicago have documented a disturbing trend of declining per-capita visits to national parks and forests, drops in hunting and fishing licenses, and other sliding indicators of nature recreation since the late 1980s. They see at work a fundamental cultural shift away from nature.

Other researchers and environmental psychologists say a growing number of Americans are suffering from “biophobia,” a “prejudice against nature,” or what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders categorizes as “natural environment phobia.”

Read the full article about biophobia by James Campbell at Children & Nature Network.