Chad Dayton, Director of Programs & Partner Relations, delivered the keynote speech at the Lake Superior Wilderness Conference in Duluth, MN from September 5—6, 2014. Included below is a transcript of the speech, which received a standing ovation at the event:
Thank you Mike [Miller] for the wonderful introduction; and an especially heartfelt thank you to Mark Peterson, Northland College, and the Sigurd Olson Institute for organizing this conference. It has truly been a pleasure to be a part of this excellent and thought-provoking weekend, surrounded by friends and colleagues—both new and old—and I hope that this will indeed become a regular gathering. I look forward to the opportunity to reconvene often in the coming years as we all continue onward with our great work.
As we know, 50 years ago Congress passed what is known as the Wilderness Act of 1964. Since its passage, Congress has designated 758 different Wilderness areas, accounting for over 100 million acres of designated Wilderness—public lands—throughout the United States.
This is a fine and worthy celebration of a uniquely American idea, defining public land preservation and requiring a national land stewardship ethic. The law’s passage laid out a specific set of guidelines for how the general public might visit and use these public lands, but it what is missing, even today, is recognition of the groundwork/ the framework/ the process necessary to cultivate and inspire the next generation of environmental stewards and wilderness advocates.
The revolutionary idea that is the Wilderness Act and the forethought of its authors and proponents—many of whom Kevin talked so beautifully about last night—did not necessarily anticipate an entire generation (or more) completely disconnected from the natural world.
We all know, perhaps sometimes too deeply, the reality of what Rich Louv termed “Nature Deficit Disorder:” the community, cultural, and socio-economic barriers that manifest in this disconnection between communities and nature, between the public and our public lands…
It is my assertion that addressing these issues requires a coordinated and collaborative systemic change—a “collective impact” if you will. And much like implementing the Wilderness Act itself, this systemic change requires creativity, imagination, collaboration, and persistence.
I’d like to describe a framework, a stepwise continuum of engagement, exposure, and relationship building, that has room for all of us—agencies, corporations, non-profits, and individuals—to collectively participate in a strategic, coordinated, and cooperative manner as we work together to cultivate the next generations of environmental stewards and wilderness advocates.
The First Step
The first step in this continuum is twofold: the establishment of a connection to place—typically in the urban setting—at scale—and introductory exposure to the concept of public lands, recreational opportunities, and relationships with agencies, educators, and service providers.
Done well, this step alone can have tremendous impact. Youth gain confidence, develop curiosity for the natural world, and become, perhaps in small ways at first, engaged community stewards. They decide here, often far from Wilderness with a capital W, that they want wildlife; they want their water clean; they want access to nature.
With Wilderness Inquiry, I’ve had the tremendous good fortune to engage many thousands of kids all over the country in place-based, environmental educational programs, and I have witnessed this transformation occur at both the individual level—one kid at a time—and amongst whole schools, districts, and communities.
I believe that schools, public schools in particular, are the most viable portal for our collective success: we must create new, formal, and sustainable relationships between public schools and public lands. We must extend our reach, impacting kids pre-K—12, to achieve the scale necessary to facilitate systemic change.
We need to start young; teachers need to be bought in and supported in these efforts; land managers need to be open to large numbers of youth descending upon their parks. Unfortunately, too few land managers are open to this “youth invasion,” especially as the outdoor—or wilderness—culture is very foreign to most urban youth. We need to make significant progress in this area if we are to achieve our goal… we must patiently and appropriately introduce concepts like Leave No Trace and be open to the missteps that are inherently a part of this cultural learning curve.
Let’s strive to facilitate academically integrated place based education district wide, even statewide, connect each and every public school with a nearby public land, encourage and facilitate these places as viable extensions of the classroom, support teacher professional development in experiential education, facilitate exposure to a wide variety of opportunities, and begin building meaningful relationships with youth.
How many of you attended some type of summer camp when you were young?
How many of you remember, fondly, a particular counselor or other type of outdoor mentor influential in your being here today?
These relationships, this role modeling, this personal connection is as essential as the implementation of the structural framework I am offering. The delicate balance of operating collectively at large scale while still being mindful each individual is no easy task. This balance is, however, absolutely essential to the strategy that will lead to addressing a systemic opportunity gap amongst our youth. It is the beginning of a viable solution to our very real dilemma.
When I began my career transition from traditional academia to outdoor education, one of my first forays was as a volunteer for Wilderness Inquiry. I wanted to paddle 24-foot Voyageur canoes filled with school children on the Mississippi River, right in the heart of the Twin Cities.
It dawned on me very quickly that these canoes were a natural extension of the classroom; that I could teach or we could talk about whatever subjects interested the kids: history, ecology, geology, physics, literature… the possibilities were endless.
Behaviors deemed troublesome in the classroom transformed into leadership characteristics; curiosity and cooperation blossomed; and these changes do transfer back into the traditional classroom: attendance and student engagement increase in measurable ways. It is an exciting transformation and the beginning of larger, significant change.
It also dawned on me that once somebody paddles under a bridge that they drive across every day, their relationship with that bridge, their waterway, and their community is forever changed. There is a sense of ownership—the first step in establishing a stewardship ethic. For the rest of their lives, even after only one time, every time they drive over that bridge, they will remember paddling underneath it: a small but deep moment, a connection, that serves as the starting point for our much larger, more ambitious, and forward looking goal.
It is through this connection to place, often in the most urban of settings, that we can create engaged community stewards. This is the essential first step to our collective success.
The Second Step
The second step of this continuum is an even deeper exposure to local places, providers, agencies, and opportunities. We can continue to reach large numbers of youth by using schools as our access point. Introductory overnight camping close to home, extended service learning projects in local communities, public places, or on school grounds… focusing our efforts on providing these opportunities to those youth who would not otherwise have access to them is essential.
The Third Step
The third step of this continuum is exposure to public lands—to Wilderness—farther from home.
Let’s imagine that summer school statewide begins to take the form of weeklong trips to National Parks or Forests—to designated Wilderness Areas—with students, teachers, and outdoor educators working together, collectively. That these experiences include academics tethered to applied learning, recreational opportunities, job shadowing, and mentoring. This is how we achieve a sense of ownership—of belonging—and the further development of a stewardship ethic, community engagement, and curiosity about the natural world that inspires lifelong learning, engagement, advocacy, and stewardship.
This IS happening, and many of us here, and our colleagues, are doing great work in these first three steps of this framework, this continuum, but often we are siloed, operating great programs in isolation impacting small numbers of kids. Together, coordinated and collectively, we can significantly expand our reach and play off each other’s strengths to achieve significant mutual and societal benefit.
The Fourth Step
The fourth step of this continuum includes personal and professional development opportunities. It is absolutely imperative that we work together in creative ways to offer internships and summer jobs to youth at scale. Currently, 1 in 20 jobs in the United States are in the outdoor sector, and this figure does not include government jobs. Many effective career-tract programs do not include the “outdoor sector” in their areas of focus. We all need to do better advocating the viability of our work. We need to passionately recruit, develop, mentor, and support youth more actively and aggressively.
When I say outdoor sector, it is important to note that this is actually a wide swath of all types of employment: science, pr/marketing, education, legal, etc. The “outdoor sector” is actually a focused combination of all types of employment.
Conservation Corps and Green Team type programs are a great starting point, and often operate at scale, but we can do even more to create a meaningful connection between youth and nature. If it’s not fun; if it’s not broad in its goals and objectives; if it’s not part of a larger continuum of experiences, it isn’t as effective as it has the potential to be.
Combinations of service projects, exposure to recreational opportunities, job shadowing, and mentoring—this relationship building component of the framework—will deeply foster connections between youth and the natural world in more meaningful, tangible, long-lasting ways.
Take for example Wilderness Inquiry’s new National Park Service Fellowship program—a creative and partner-based approach to addressing federal hiring barriers and limited budgets. As a youth employment program, we were able to secure funding, passed through an NPS friends group, to hire and pay 6 urban youth as seasonal NPS Fellows—engaged in Park Service training and program support as well as facilitation of Wilderness Inquiry summer programs. A small start perhaps, but a successful, replicable model that relies on multi-agency collaboration and cooperation.
We all need to find these creative ways to continue to change the face of the land management agencies to better, more accurately, reflect the populations they serve. This is a critical step in achieving the sense of belonging, of ownership, that is necessary to achieve our mutual, vital goal.
The Fifth Step
The fifth, and final step of this framework, this continuum, is to effectively bridge the gap between internships and summer jobs and gainful employment in the outdoor sector. We need to work collaboratively to provide all types of college opportunities to these next generations as well.
Northland College is an integral part of a new, innovative, and exciting partnership, assembling many players to provide college scholarship opportunities supplemented by infrastructural support. A grand plan, with Northland in the lead and including other 2 and 4-year college programs as well—many varied partners working together toward a significant and lasting impact. Again, a replicable, scalable, collective impact model open to all.
As Jamie [Pinkham] said so eloquently last night: “Our greatest honor lingers in the future,” and he couldn’t be more right. Working together in a coordinated, strategic, and collaborative manner we can—and will—achieve our goals. This framework, this continuum, I have described is open to all ideas and inclusive of all players, all agencies, all entities, and, most importantly, all populations.
Working together, our collective impact:
WILL meaningfully engage youth at scale.
WILL forever change the relationship between public schools and public lands.
WILL facilitate the systemic change necessary to uphold the goals—both articulated and implied—of the Wilderness Act.
WILL change the face of land management agencies to accurately reflect our populations.
WILL cultivate the next generation of community and environmental stewards.
WILL yield advocates of Wilderness and all public lands.
AND WILL be our generation’s collective addition to the work of our predecessors—this framework of youth engagement that ensures our public spaces, our nature, and our Wilderness survives.
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