Greening outdoor practice

It’s a wild and beautiful day and you are walking in the hills – the Glyders, say – with a group of young people. Tryfan, Glyder Fawr, Glyder Fach; a horseshoe of craggy summits coming in and out of the clouds. Birds fly up, chattering and scolding as you pass. There’s a raven crarking over the sound of the river and, underfoot, mats of purple thyme amongst the rocks. The group is moving well and spirits are high. Just ahead of them, you pull over a small rise and there, spreading out in front of you... is a dirty great pile of litter. How would you respond? I’d bet a month’s salary and a bottle of Laphroaig that 99% of people reading this would stop and pick it up. You’d almost certainly engage the group in the task, and use the incident to open up a discussion about outdoor ethics. Litter is obvious; packing or not packing out poo considerably less so. Then there’s shutting gates, thinking how to minimise footpath erosion, and all those questions about where and how to camp. As outdoor professionals we are really good at this stuff. And it’s important not just because of the actual impact – visual, ecological and otherwise – of the litter or camping scars or misplaced sheep; but because of the message it sends out about caring for the environments we love to work and play in

Natural values: promoting outdoor experiences for all children

Examples of best practice for promoting inclusion of all young people in real learning opportunities in school grounds and outdoor environmental centres. This chapter argues that all young people need access to nature and that this would have a beneficial effect on society and its environmental values. An innovative educational proposal to reconnect young people with the natural world was unveiled by the UK Sustainable Development Commission as a potential “Breakthrough for the 21st Century” in June 2009. This was one of 19 best ideas, selected from 300, to really inspire and motivate policy makers and others to catalyse change and accelerate the pace of progress on sustainable development over the next 3 to 5 years. Promoting outdoor experiences in school curricula to support changes in society’s values were selected by SDC as one of the 19 best ideas which could transform the UK into a sustainable society. The SDC’s Breakthroughs project set out to identify the ideas with the most potential for tackling climate change, resource depletion and inequality. Natural Values, an idea promoting outdoor experiences for all children in the UK, was submitted by Dr Kate Rawles and Dr Chris Loynes of the University of Cumbria

Outdoor adventure in a carbon-light era

This chapter examines outdoor adventure from the perspective of climate change and the need to tackle it. I’ll argue that climate change raises some really difficult questions for all modern societies in which adventure is valued, and for any of us who are citizens of these societies. This is especially so in relation to adventures that involve long-distance flying. The good news is that there are many opportunities to reduce carbon footprints while still adventuring, and many ‘win-wins’ – although leadership and guidance are urgently needed in this area. Perhaps even more importantly, I’ll argue that adventures have, potentially, an extremely positive role to play in contemporary society. Adventures can give us opportunities to question and change some of the most problematic features of our ‘normal’ Western lives. In exploring these issues, I will not focus on any one author or set of concepts, as has been the case with the previous chapters in this book. Instead, at appropriate points in the chapter, I will identify the relevance of the theories that have been discussed by authors of other chapters, and indicate where else in this book you can find more information on each of these

Working equines and the environment

This article discusses an overview of the integration of animal welfare, human welfare and environmental issues in draught animals. The effect of sustainable development and animal welfare, and the impact of local environment, global environment and global climate change on working equines are also presented

An IFLAS open lecture with Kate Rawles - The life cycle: a biodiversity bike ride

In 2017/18 Kate Rawles aka @CarbonCycleKate rode the length of South America on ‘Woody’ a bicycle made of bamboo that she built herself at the London-based Bamboo Bicycle Club from bamboo grown at Cornwall’s Eden Project. From Colombia to Cape Horn, (or as close as you can get to it on a bike), Kate and Woody – the UK’s first ‘home-grown bicycle’ - travelled for 8288 miles following the spine of the Andes through an astonishing variety of landscapes and ecosystems, from Pacific ocean to high Andes paramo; from cloud and rainforests to Bolivian salt flats and the Atacama desert. The aim was to explore biodiversity: what it is, what’s happening to it, why that matters and, above all, what can and is being done to protect it – and then to use the adventure story to help raise awareness and inspire action on this hugely important but relatively neglected environmental challenge. En route, Kate, who rode most of the journey solo, visited a wide range of projects and met some truly inspiring people. From a school whose entire curriculum was based on turtles to a group of young people standing up against one of the largest gold corporations in the world; from a woman who bought millions of acres of Chile to turn then into nature conservation reserves to an organisation protecting endangered monkeys by showing local people how to earn money by turning waste plastic into high fashion handbags rather than by catching monkeys for the illegal (but lucrative) wildlife pet trade. Having arrived back in the UK by cargo ship, Kate will share pictures and stories of her adventure, the highs and lows, the challenges, the ethical dilemmas and sustainability learning, the people and places and of course, the bamboo bike. Kate’s previous ‘adventure plus’ journey, The Carbon Cycle, a ride from Texas to Alaska exploring climate change, lead to a slide show and a book that was shortlisted for the Banff (Canada) Mountain Festival Adventure Travel Book Award. Writing The Life Cycle book is underway! Web: www.outdoorphilosophy.co.uk Twitter & Instagram: @CarbonCycleKate FaceBook: The Life Cycle@biodiversitybikerid

Promote flexitarian diets worldwide: Supplementary information to: Governments should unite to curb meat consumption

Marco Springmann and colleagues warn that we must shift to more plant-based ‘flexitarian’ diets if we are to reduce the food system’s projected greenhouse-gas emissions and meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement (Nature 562, 519–525; 2018). We urge countries to work with the United Nations towards a global agreement on food and agriculture that promotes the adoption of such diets, which are more sustainable than meat-based diets and are backed by evidence on healthy eating. Such an agreement would be in line with findings by focus groups in the United States, China, Brazil and the United Kingdom, which indicate that governments should urgently address unsustainable meat consumption (see go.nature.com/2asd1ag). In industrial agriculture, cereals that are edible to humans are fed to animals for conversion into meat and milk. This undermines our food security: rearing livestock is efficient only if the animals convert materials we cannot consume into food we can eat. That means raising them on extensive grasslands, rotating integrated crop-livestock systems and using by-products, unavoidable food waste and crop residues as feed. Feeding animals exclusively on such materials would greatly reduce the availability and hence the consumption of meat and dairy products, as well as the use of water, energy and pesticides — thereby cutting greenhouse-gas emissions