EDUCATION & COMMUNICATION
The Outdoor Explorers Mentoring Program Multigenerational Mentors Fostering the Next Generation of Wilderness Stewards BY JENNIFER LUTMAN It’s a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it’s even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it’s a lot more fun. – Richard Louv (2005)
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issoula, Montana, is a university town filled with energy and excitement, surrounded by wild and open space. The Rattlesnake Wilderness lies on the edges of the city limits and the infamous Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex is only a few hours’ drive northeast. Missoula is an outdoor person’s paradise. However, many Missoula children face the same barriers to getting outdoors as other families across America: limited resources, competing priorities and a general fear among parents of letting children play in the outdoors (Novotney 2008). The Outdoor Explorers Mentoring Program was formed in December 2010 through a partnership between federal land managing agencies and local nonprofit organizations to provide outdoor experiences to underserved children and their adult mentors in the Missoula region. The program provides long-term learning and recreation opportunities in the outdoors, reconnecting children and their mentors with wilderness and other public lands while providing broad land-value and stewardship perspectives.
A Program Based on National Efforts The concern that today’s children are disconnected from nature has been voiced for many years. In 2005, Richard Louv wrote Last Child in the Woods, a book exposing “nature-deficit disorder,” a nonmedical term describing the decreased exposure of children to nature, and how this ailment is detrimental to a child’s physical and emotional development. The book spurred a movement among the
education and environmental communities, causing grassroots groups such as the Children and Nature Network to develop and organize around solutions to children’s decreasing appetite for the outdoors (Bruyere et al. 2009). A decrease in environmentally literate citizens is not only an unfortunate loss in cultural history through human connection to land, but a condition that is poten- Jennifer Lutman. tially threatening to the support of essential ecological resources and the federal agencies charged with protecting those resources. Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Studies Institute suggests, “If people never experience nature and have negligible understanding of the services that nature provides, it is unlikely people will choose a sustainable future” (Kareiva 2008, p. 2758). As a result of this public and governmental concern over nature-deficit disorder, many federal agency initiatives have focused on getting kids outdoors. Since 2007, the U.S. Forest Service has provided millions of dollars toward a program called More Kids in the Woods. This internal, competitive funding program provides financial resources to Forest Service district offices nationwide in order to “engage children in meaningful and sustained outdoor experiences; increasing awareness and understanding of the
April 2012 • Volume 18, Number 1
International Journal of Wilderness 31