 When I was growing up, since as far back as I can remember, I had this tremendous opportunity right outside my back door, this big opportunity to explore the stream and the wetlands in the field right behind my house. The wetlands and everything there just had this timeless quality, the awe and the wonder of what I had as a little child growing up is still in my heart. My opportunities as a kid to explore nature and to explore the world around me have really been a strong driver in what I do today as a wetland scientist. Traditionally, children were able to go out their door and play in the streets and there would be an empty lot nearby and they would create their own games in nature, but it was almost at their doorstep and that's how humanity has grown up with nature nearby. While so many children now are growing up with almost no exposure to nature, especially we're thinking now of urban children who are deep in urban communities where there's not even a little pocket park nearby, let alone a lot that's been allowed to grow up while where the child can explore and imagine all sorts of things and they need that. That's the extinction of experience. It's the loss of common things leading to a lack of caring about what's out there, leading to a lack of action to protect what's left, leading to more losses. So it's a dire cycle of loss beginning loss. The extinction of experience is not only the loss of the opportunity to have such experiences, but it's the loss of the desire to have such experiences. Nature deficit disorder is not a known medical diagnosis. Perhaps it should be, but it's not. What it is is a kind of shorthand to describe what many of us have felt has been going on for a long time, which is the disengagement of children from nature and the implications of that in terms of health. When the diminished baseline goes to the extent that there's really nothing that piques your interest, nothing that catches your curiosity, that's when we become that much more vulnerable to the blandishments and the seduction of the strictly virtual. That's my real fear with the extinction of experience that would become satisfied with the virtual. People my age, my friends and my family, we can't live without technology. We're so connected all the time with our cell phones, with our iPods, with our internet connections and our laptops, and I find it really funny sometimes to think that we've traded our connection with nature and the time that we have to spend in nature with this need for connection with each other and with technology. And many people are deeply concerned that if children don't develop that relationship with nature when they're young, they will not have it when they're older, and they will not be on the front lines protecting nature. In the last 200 years we've lost about 50% of the wetlands in the continental United States. Historically a lot of this wetland loss that has occurred in this country has been due primarily to agriculture and agriculture development. In the last 10 years or so we've really seen a shift where the majority of the losses now are because of urban and rural development, so a lot of growth in these areas, a lot of building up and a lot of building out. Wetlands provide a lot of functions and benefits in the world that we live in. They're this interchange between the land community and the water community and because of that they have a tremendous biodiversity. They also provide flood control and reduce the amount of erosion that we have in our communities and they're good filters of pollutants from our environment. What if a child has never gotten their feet wet and their hands muddy? What if they've never stood in water and watched the life swirl around their legs? What if they've never experienced the wind above them in the trees in solitude? What if they've never really touched nature? Does nature then become a sea otter on a t-shirt? About which they will care. They will care about the sea otter abstractly. But in truth we need to be immersed in nature. We need to know it with all of our senses if we're to care about it. When I was a child I had my own secret space for play which many children have and it was a culvert that had just a trickle of water coming out of it. But to me it was a waterfall that was all I needed and I had this deep love for waterfalls ever since. We just give children little bits, little remnants, you know, things that an adult would just cast away and think nothing of but to a child it's a treasure and it's something that goes deep in their soul and lasts their whole lifetime. Dramatically altered, modified, diminished wetland can still provide wonder and excitement because even if it has just a few aquatic insects that are the ones that really hold on in polluted conditions it still has something. That clump of trees at the end of the cul-de-sac, the ravine behind the house, that can be considered nearby nature. In terms of biodiversity those places are insignificant, they're not connected, they're not part of wildlife corridors, etc., and yet to a child that can be the whole universe. When you watch children playing in nature I would say nothing thrills them as much as playing with water. They just love it, it's as if they just ingest that whole experience, goes all the way to their toes and calms them and stimulates their imagination wonderfully. The great thing about a lot of urban wetlands in concert with the basic resiliency of nature and a lot of the species that persists in them is that they are tough, they are resilient and they're able to take and to accommodate a good deal of the mild impact that kids bring to a site. Urban wetlands tend to be degraded or neglected and they exist in this big amount of development and all this stuff is developing, growing up, building around them and sometimes they get forgotten, sometimes they get neglected and they may not look the same way that a wetland that you see out in the wild will look. But these wetlands really provide us with a connection to nature, a connection with something wild that fuels our imagination, makes us want to explore, fills us with a sense of awe and wonder and the best thing about these little pockets of wetland is that they're right at home. Playgrounds are the kind of artificial substitute for what children have always had in their lives which are the opportunities to play with nature itself and that's what stimulates children's imagination so deeply. To create pockets of places in urban areas that invite children to play but are still full of nature that would be my ideal. Sometimes developers and others are encouraged or at least avowed to go ahead and fill this wetland. If you'll mitigate it by creating a wetland elsewhere and maybe there won't be any net loss, well on paper a pretty good idea and sometimes it probably works out well but we often don't look at the consequences, the unintended consequences and loss. This is about loss of experience and the unintended consequence of taking that little place away from the local community can be profound. Sure, you haven't lost net acres of wetland and some organisms will be able to adapt but will the people, with this particular organism, be able to adapt to the loss of their wetland in their community? In any urban area that I know, there are places, there are pockets, there are remnants of nature that can be cultivated and nurtured and again especially I would say pockets that have water in them. There is a way to kind of reimagine the kind of neighborhoods that families would grow up in in the future and not necessarily use that as an excuse to have more sprawl but rather to redevelop where we're living to create higher density and more nature at the same time. When I was a young boy, I spent a lot of time in the woods. There was an old pond down in those woods that the dam had been broken and it was basically a swamp and I spent a long time, you know, along the edges of that swamp and I can still smell it and it didn't smell great but it smelled wonderful. It was a wonderful place and I can still to this day remember walking along it and seeing at dusk a great blue heron lift up off the edge of that water and then fly off across the dark trees. You don't conserve what you don't care about, you don't care about what you don't know, you know, what's a condor to a kid who'd never even do a rent or a magpie. It's really important that they have access to order where they are if at all possible, nearby if there's pockets of wetlands in their neighborhood, they should be protected. My hopes with the recognition of nature deficit disorder in concert with some attention to the extension of experience are that we will recognize those dangers, we'll take steps as has been done in the urban wetland in which I'm currently perched to protect some of these places and the other thing that gives me hope is that the impulse remains in the children. The children will be there for the places if the places are there for them. Preserving and protecting the remaining wetlands that we have in our communities is really a matter of seeking out these places, finding out what wetlands exist near your home, near your work, or near your school, finding out who owns these parcels, who might be developing on them, what type of access there is, and what we can do as citizens to clean them up to make them more functional, more beautiful places to be and also to protect them from other development that's going on in the area.