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Originally appears in the Winter 2019 issue.
ONE OF THE NOTICEABLE changes this century in environmental education has been an increasing embracing of the need to go beyond just orchestrating great programs. We now realize that awareness and understanding only lead to action when we care enough about something to act — people protect what they have grown to love. An emotional attachment to nature and wild places can be simultaneously nurtured through environmental education and outdoor play and recreation. Since some types of outdoor recreation are linked to environmental activism, environmental educators can increase their effectiveness by simultaneously encouraging youth to be involved with outdoor recreation.
Benefits of outdoor recreation
Developing realistic fear expectations
Environmental educators working in natural settings with children on field trips are vividly aware of the differences in comfort levels among their students. Some students are comfortable, while others express fears of exotic animals, snakes, insects, and becoming lost. Some urban students may even express fears of the stars in the sky on their first camping trip away from the always-illuminated city streets where they live. These reactions are mostly a function of a lack of repeated experience in wild and semi-wild environments.
When students in natural environments express unrealistic fears, they have often learned about nature indirectly from naïve family and peers and/or sensational media depictions in films and the news. Lacking direct experiences with nature, they expect to encounter what they have seen in movies and other media. Having North American students expressing fears of encountering lions and cobras is not uncommon, and is not limited to urban populations.
Interestingly enough, a lack of direct experience can also result in either anxiety or disappointment when visiting “real” nature. Students who have viewed many nature documentaries on television may expect the same pace and depictions of these heavily-edited programs from real nature. As a result, they may find visits to “real” natural areas boring. For experienced nature enthusiasts, experiencing the types of novel natural phenomena that are common on-screen is viewed as a somewhat rare treat.
Feeling comfortable outdoors
Repeated experiences outdoors are necessary to develop tolerance for two qualities of natural environments: irritants and thermal comfort. Insects are the reason so many of us have screens on the windows of our homes. Since a few insects and other small invertebrates actively seek people as a source of their food, insects will almost always be an annoying part of being outdoors, but people do get somewhat used to them with repeated experiences. One mosquito may be all it takes, however, to run an inexperienced person out of the woods. A similar tolerance shift occurs through frequent experiences with dirtiness and disgust-evoking aspects of nature such as slugs, algae, and fetid smells. With frequent outdoor exposure, bugs seem less annoying, and dirt and sweat seem less disgusting.
Anyone who has spent time in Florida during the winter may have noticed the difference between local residents and Canadian “snowbirds” in terms of dress. The locals wear jackets, while the snowbirds are in shorts and tee-shirts. Over time, our bodies unconsciously develop thresholds for being too hot or too cold. A person who stays inside in climate-controlled conditions will spontaneously experience being too cold and too hot within a much narrower range than does a construction worker. People who frequently recreate outdoors develop a similar thermal comfort range to construction workers, and they become more comfortable outdoors in the heat and cold than do their indoor peers.
Fostering perceptual skills
Environmental educators working in parks are often troubled by the number of times some students trip over roots or rocks on trails. A person who has grown up walking on sidewalks has never developed the ability to rapidly, almost unconsciously, detect tripping hazards and avoid them while hiking. Instantly recognizing that some surfaces are slippery is a function of many childhood experiences clambering over boulders and stomping around in creeks. When people have to expend most of their mental efforts simply avoiding hazards on undeveloped trails, they spend less time enjoying their surroundings.
Nature is disorderly. All those plants just come up wherever they can. Unlike suburban landscapes with thoughtfully-placed trees and well-groomed ground cover, wild nature is much harder to visually comprehend. A naïve viewer is easily overwhelmed with the large number of strange objects, partially hidden objects, sounds, and smells. Those two triangle-shaped points sticking up behind a boulder are either two leaves of a shrub or the ears of the bogey man; experienced outdoor recreationists know they are leaves. Through repeated experiences with nature, its disordered complexity becomes much simpler, and easily recognized as not having threat potential.
From recreationists to environmentalists
Studies ranging back into the 1970s, and replicated numerous times, have consistently found a relationship between participation in outdoor recreation and environmental attitudes, often manifesting as activism. More recent studies have refined the relationship, indicating that outdoor recreation activities requiring the recreationist to know something about nature are the key activities associated with heightened attitudes towards environmental protection. These activities include hunting/fishing and natural history-related activities such as birding, astronomy, and wildflower-searching. Information shared by organizations promoting natural history-based outdoor recreation almost always contains discussions about related environmental issues. Thus, passionate outdoor recreationists readily become concerned about issues that threaten their interests.
Environmental education becomes more efficient and effective when participants are already emotionally- and experientially-attached to nature. During a school field trip, the children staying close to and hanging on every word of the environmental educator are usually the same ones who play outdoors and are outdoor recreationists. The Children and Nature Movement is an important part of this process, but older children also need to regularly take part in certain types of outdoor recreation. The payoff is fostering a person who enters adulthood comfortable, skilled, and knowledgeable about the outdoors. As formal education ends, continued participation in natural history-based outdoor recreation means that our former students-turned young adults are more likely to directly encounter, pay attention to, and act on environmental issues related to their recreational interests. They are also well-equipped with the support skills to be effective environmental studies students and to go into field-based environmental careers.
Environmental careers
Field ecologists must be able to read maps, tent-camp, backpack, operate boats, rock climb, equip themselves for a range of weather conditions, and be familiar with wilderness first aid. These skills are typically learned through outdoor recreation experiences.
Years ago, evaluations of the Becoming an Outdoor Woman program — designed to introduce fishing and hunting — revealed that the women struggled more with learning how to back up a boat trailer than learning to fish. In the last ten years, a professor in the forestry department at Clemson University in South Carolina has had to start training students how to dress for forestry labs. Previously, when told to wear boots, some students were showing up in suede dress boots (and being ridiculed by other students for their errors). The professor attributes this to some of his current students’ developing interest in environmental studies through media involvement rather than direct experiences with nature, including outdoor recreation.
Making it happen
During childhood, parents, residential summer camps, scouts, Girl Guides, nature center adventure clubs, and 4-H programs provide ongoing and expanding opportunities to participate in relevant outdoor recreation. Some of the issues mentioned above are only addressed through frequently-repeated activities resulting in habituation to irritants and development of habits. Parents and children should be steered away from outdoor recreation that involves going fast or only requires physical prowess to participate. Rock climbing is an exception to this as it is a useful field research skill in some environmental careers that involve working on cliffs or in trees and caves. Ideal outdoor recreation activities are those that allow for observation of nature and require participants to learn about nature as part of the activity.
Residential (overnight) summer camps are ideal experiences for learning outdoor recreation skills. Many of us learned camping skills at summer camps. A child in North America can begin attending residential camp as a camper between the ages of six and eight. Expanding work experiences at a camp are then available through the college years. So-called “tweens” can first become adventure trip campers and then become counselors-in-training in their early teens. Eventually, employment as a cabin counselor is available each summer, and then some counselors move on to become program counselors teaching the camp’s nature program. Scholarships are often available for low-income children; teachers and environmental educators can help find scholarships for needy children who show interest in nature.
Some types of outdoor recreation provide an emotional bond to nature, an intrinsic interest in natural history, and the skills to safely and comfortably enjoy wild places. Combining the knowledge and understanding gained from environmental education with the attachment to nature developed through outdoor recreation leads people to protect what they both understand and love.
Further Reading
Bixler, R. D., Carlisle, C. L., Hammitt, W. E., & Floyd, M. F. (1994). Observed fears and discomforts among urban students on school field trips to wildland areas. Journal of Environmental Education, 26, 24-33.
Bixler, R. D. & Floyd, M. F. (1997). Nature is scary, disgusting and uncomfortable. Environment and Behavior, 29, 443-467.
Bixler, R. D. & Floyd, M. F. (1999). Hands on or hands off? Disgust sensitivity and preference for environmental education activities. Journal of Environmental Education, 30, 4-11.
Bixler, R. D., Floyd, M. F. & Hammitt, W. R. (2002). Environmental socialization: Quantitative tests of the childhood play hypothesis. Environment and Behavior, 34, 795-818.
Bixler, R. D. & James, J. J. (2016). Where the sidewalk ends: Pathways to nature-dependent leisure activities. In D. Kleiber & F. McGuire (Eds.). Leisure and Human Development, 107-131. Urbana, IL: Sagamore Publishing.
James, J. J., Bixler, R.D. & Vadala, C. E. (2010). From play to recreation then vocation: A developmental model of natural history-oriented professions. Children, Youth & Environment, 20(1). 231-256.
Shipley, N.J. & Bixler, R.D. (2016). On the need to interpret insects: An always small but gargantuan opportunity. Journal of Interpretation Research, 21(2), 65-72
Robert D. Bixler is emeritus faculty at Clemson University where he spent his career identifying and describing the informal socialization processes that encourage interest in nature and the environment. J. Joy James is a professor at Appalachian State University where she teaches recreation program management and conducts research related to nature and health.