First Few Pages

If, as writer Robert Michael Pyle writes in his ecological biography The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, “… people connect with nature, it happens somewhere” (1993: xv), I believe that people connect with nature with and because of someone. Just as salient as Pyle’s moment of revelation about personal connections to place and landscape, then, is the recognition and acknowledgement of the interdependent chain of people and happenings that lead you to that moment of wild-eyed wonder. I have had the good luck and the privilege to be that person, and witness the moment of discovery first hand. The notion that our knowledge and exploration of place could facilitate connections between us, however, caught me entirely unawares. I first discovered the power that organized outdoor programs posses to bring together participants from very different social standings and backgrounds while working as a wilderness trip leader for a girls’ summer camp in the Midwest, and have since been captivated by the possible place for social justice work under the auspices of outdoor education.

In this paper I attempt to bring together the outwardly divergent forms of outdoor education and social justice learning. I am attempting to prove that outdoor education is an ideal setting and opportunity to face social justice concerns in a meaningful way. By design organized outdoor activities attempt to “immerse participants in a different environment, exposing them to the unfamiliar and in the process encouraging them to question accepted beliefs and practices” (Dumond, McDonald, and Ungar 2005: 332). Outdoor education innately places participants outside of their normal milieu; outside of one’s comfort zone and normal arenas, outside of one’s traditional setting it is easier to discuss controversial issues like social justice (Warren 2005: 1990). Although some efforts have been made to meld the teachings of outdoor learning with social justice facilitation, I will use Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and habitus, Murray Bookchin’s notions of humanity’s hierarchical relationship with nature, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ontological discourse, Max Weber’s ideas of nature and culture, and Louis Althusser’s connections between society and setting to make the arguments that certain changes have to be made in the outdoor industry in order for these programs to be used to discuss social justice concerns.

The unlikely friendship between two eleven-year-old, dishwater, and Wisconsin north woods long past sunset combined to teach me my first valuable lesson about outdoor education and social justice facilitation. XXX, by far the most talkative and eager of the group of ten campers who had been entrusted me for three days of beginner wilderness adventures, fiddled her braids, tapped her foot anxiously, and looked at me in disbelief as I began to dig a small cat hole. YYY, small and blond looked so far from her home in Kansas clutched the bucket of wash water from dinner as I instructed them on the proper disposal methods for waste in the backcountry. No matter that our backcountry happened to be a local state forest campground. I handed the trowel to XXX to finish digging our sump hole to help drain the dinner remnants, and laughed as she commented on how no one from her Detroit neighborhood would ever imagine her playing in the dirt. YYY chimed in about how in school a few years back they had gone to dig for earthworms in science class, but that was the only time she’d ever done so. They shrieked together, while holding both sides of our small sieve screen, as they accidentally splashed a bit of soapy water on their fingers. YYY then gravely hushed XXX, as she feared the extra noise would wake the bears. The chatter continued as I talked them through the rest of the task, and once we’d finished XXX and YYY bounded off to bed together, best friends through the rest of the trip. Bears and a terror of the darkness surrounding our campsite were never mentioned again. The small job which I had inadvertently and unwittingly assigned both girls, helped them to not only gain some first-hand wilderness living skills, but also to work through a fear of their surroundings, and to connect with yet unknown peers on a more meaningful level.