Sim Van der Ryn has been a leading proponent of the green building movement (even before it was known as that), and for more than a half a century has been leading the way to a more regenerative, resilient, and sustainable future. It is his hope that society will increasingly acknowledge the critical value to our health and well-being by our connection to nature, and that designing in collaboration with nature will become a major tool toward creating a vital new architecture for an empathic world. He has experienced a psychological condition in his students that is called nature deficit disorder. He says, “I’ve experienced it with Berkeley students in their 20s who, when we’re out in the forest or at the ocean, I could see were fearful. They’d never been in a natural environment…We are designed as humans to be part of nature and, if we paid attention to it, the architecture of the inner self tells us that.”
