Lost Arts of Experience in the Age of Virtual Reality

First, via neatorama comes

Conn and Hal Iggulden’s The Dangerous Book for Boys is the one book that I wish I had when I was a young boy. In today’s age of computer and video games, this book reminds you that there is still a place for knots, go-karts, treehouses, as well as stories of adventure and courage.

The Dangerous Book for Boys is more than just a book -it’s a manual on how to recapture Sunday afternoons and long summer days. It covers things that belong in the quintessential boyhood, like the five knots every boy should know, how to navigate using a compass (or a
watch or a stick if you don’t have a compass - yes, it can be done), and how to make invisible ink (how? With urine, of course!) ...

[There's more here, including a contest to win a copy.]

Next, we have this nice piece from Orion Magazine

As a boy, I pulled out dozens —perhaps hundreds— of survey stakes in a vain effort to slow the bulldozers that were taking out my woods to make way for a new subdivision. Had I known then what I’ve since learned from a developer, that I should have simply moved the stakes around to be more effective, I would surely have done that too. So you might imagine my dubiousness when, a few weeks after the publication of my 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, I received an e-mail from Derek Thomas, who introduced himself as vice chairman and chief investment officer of Newland Communities, one of the nation’s largest privately owned residential development companies. “I have been reading your new book,” he wrote, “and am profoundly disturbed by some of the information you present.”

Thomas said he wanted to do something positive. He invited me to an envisioning session in Phoenix to “explore how Newland can improve or redefine our approach to open space preservation and the interaction between our homebuyers and nature.” A few weeks later, in a conference room filled with about eighty developers, builders, and real estate marketers, I offered my sermonette. The folks in the crowd were partially responsible for the problem, I suggested, because they destroy natural habitat, design communities in ways that discourage any real contact with nature, and include covenants that virtually criminalize outdoor play—outlawing tree-climbing, fort-building, even chalk-drawing on sidewalks.

I was ready to make a fast exit when Thomas, a bearded man with an avuncular demeanor, stood up and said, “I want you all to go into small groups and solve the problem: how are we going to build communities in the future that actually connect kids with nature?” The room filled with noise and excitement. By the time the groups reassembled to report the ideas they had generated, I had glimpsed the primal power of connecting children and nature: it can inspire unexpected advocates and lure unlikely allies to enter an entirely new place. Call it the doorway effect. Once through the door, they can revisualize seemingly intractable problems and produce solutions they might otherwise never have imagined....

Well worth the time reading.

Recapturing the inner-MacGyver is, I think, the key to 21st-century utility and bliss. Discovery, now that the drudgework is increasingly handled by black boxes and microchips, is our past and our destiny.