The worst of it was on the other side of the globe, on the tiny Caribbean island of Navassa, near Haiti. Rather ominously, it was called Devil’s Island. Although Navassa didn’t have much actual guano, its coral reef was packed with deposits of tricalcium phosphate, the fossilized legacy of centuries’ worth of marine life—also a rich nutrient for ex

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In his 1993 memoir The Thunder Tree, ecologist Robert Pyle coined the term “extinction of experience,” and since then many researchers have jumped into the fray. There are bodies of work on the demonstrable decline of kids’ contact with nature, as well as the negative impacts of this trend—most alarmingly captured in Richard Louv’s 2005 Last Child

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