As author Richard Louv wrote in his awesome book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, "A child today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move." This, I think, sums it up perfectly.

As enlightening and crucial as global-environment understanding is, it wasn't while adopting humpbacks or singing the Rain Forest Rap ("Where living things vary from jaguars to ants!") that I really got to know nature.