We subscribe to Earthwatch Radio and today's article led us to the original article: http://home.comcast.net/~oliver.pergams/JEM.pdf Here is some of the text from the email: EARTHWATCH RADIO Program script for 21 August 2006 Title: Screening Out Nature Author: Alison Coulson Video games are up. The national parks are down. A new study finds a shift in leisure-time activities. -------------------------------------------------------- For 50 years, visits to America's national parks had been steadily rising. But the trend reversed in 1987, and park visits began to decline on a per capita basis. The Nature Conservancy recently funded a study to find out why. Oliver Pergams, a conservation biologist at the University of Illinois, conducted the study with ecologist Patricia Zaradic. Pergams says they compared the National Park data with a number of other factors. "So at first we tested more traditional things, like income, or foreign travel, amount of vacation time. We also tested whether federal funding might be responsible." They also looked at park capacity, the aging of baby boomers, hours spent on electronic media, and changing oil prices. "The ones that explained most of the downtrend, that had a 97.5 percent explanatory power, which is, you know, very large, were video games, movies, Internet, and oil prices." Pergams worries that waning interest in the national parks show that people - kids in particular - are spending less time overall outdoors. He says parents need to get their kids away from the video games and computers and send them outside. "The action on this has to come from the parents. We have to limit the time our kids spend on these media. We have to make sure they get exposed to outdoor activity, especially involvement with nature." Research has shown that spending time in nature as a child is an important step in developing an adult appreciation for the environment. -------------------------------------------------------- Earthwatch Radio is a public service of the Sea Grant Institute and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Earthwatch Radio now features RSS text and audio podcast feeds: look for the orange icons at: http://ewradio.org Best wishes, Linda Scarth [log in to unmask] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To get off the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to: [log in to unmask]