This is a provocation for those who take people outside.
After being part of a conference of outdoor educators at Camp Kawartha, I found myself sittng with a quiet but persistent question. It surfaced in conversations over meals, during workshops, and in the spaces between sessions.
Outdoor education, as it is most often described, is a venue. It is a settng. A practice. A place where learning happens. But it is not in itself, a purpose. And when we fail to articulate the deeper reason for taking people outside, we risk confusing the means with the meaning.
Why do we take children, youth, and adults outdoors in the first place? What is it that the outdoors offers that the inside cannot? Is it to build skills? Confidence? Fitness? Resilience? Mental health? Environmental awareness?
Yes these outcomes mater. And it is true, these are all urgently needed. But none of them, on their own, feel like they offer a satisfactory answer.
At its heart, I believe that Outdoor Education exists to help people build meaningful relationships with the life systems that nourish us, fostering care and connection. When we step outdoors, we find ourselves held within a rich and interdependent community of life. Soil, water, air, plants, animals, fungi, weather, and time shape and sustain us. We are connected not only to the living and nonliving beings around us, but also to our ancestors and to those yet to be born.
Outdoor education, at its best, situates us within this continuum of life. First Nations have always understood this, as have our ancestors for countless generations. I don’t believe that we take our students outside simply for the sake of being outside. We go with them to discover what it feels like to become more whole. We begin to sense that we belong to something larger than our individual lives. And in feeling connected, we feel less alone.
We can take a lesson from the wisdom of trees. A tree takes in carbon and gives out oxygen. It provides food and shelter. It anchors the soil. It moderates temperature, moistens the air, and creates beauty. A tree gives more than it takes. It does more good than harm.
If outdoor education is rooted in the living world, then this is the ethic we are implicitly teaching. And this is where I want to gently provoke my own field. Too often, we frame outdoor education primarily in terms of what Outdoor Education does for us. Improved health. Reduced anxiety. Increased focus. Greater resilience. Enhanced wellbeing. These goals are of course, important and worth striving for. But if they become the whole story, we risk turning the natural world into a service provider rather than a community we belong to. Nature becomes something we use, rather than something we are in relationship with.
Outdoor education should not be about escape. Instead, it should be about returning.
Returning to place. Returning to relationship. Returning to responsibility.
If the purpose of outdoor education is relationship, kinship, and care, then we need to ask ourselves some harder questions.
• Are our programs cultivating belonging, or simply delivering experiences?
• Are we helping learners see themselves as part of the living world, or merely visitors to it?
• Are we inviting people to give back, not just to take?
That doesn’t mean we abandon climbing, biking, hiking, camping, canoeing, and exploring. In fact, these activities are needed now more than ever. They build skill, confidence, joy, and a felt sense of being alive. However, alongside them, let’s slow down enough to notice where we are. We can learn the names of the trees that shade us, the plants that provide food and medicine. The Anishinaabe have a saying that when you know something’s name, it calls out to you. That green wall resolves itself into many different beings – all with unique characters and a story to tell. We can honour water and trace the watershed that carries our canoe. We can tune into the music of the forest – bird song, frog calls, wind moving through the canopy. We can learn about the First Peoples who have known this place for generations and learn more about the ways they have related to the land. We can invite our learners to sit quietly, open their senses, and be fully present. And we can practice gratitude by offering thanks, out loud, to the land we move through.
Outdoor education maters not because it happens outside, but because it helps people remember who they are in relation to everything else. At its best, it restores a sense of belonging to the living world and awakens a quiet but enduring responsibility to care for it. This is the deeper invitation of our work. Not simply to take people outdoors, but to help them come home. To place. To relationship. To a way of living that gives more than it takes within this beautiful and irreplaceable web of life.