Overview of Feed in Tariffs: a quick guide

This short paper explains Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs), which are payments for electricity fed into the supply grid from a renewable energy source. FiTs can be mandated by the government or offered voluntarily by an electricity retailer. The primary aim of FiTs is to encourage the adoption of renewable energy. FiTs make the installation of renewable electricity systems more affordable for the owner of the system. They do this by reducing the payback times (the length of time it takes to recover the cost of installation) through savings in electricity fees. ‘Early adopters’ of new technologies tend to pay high prices for systems which are often not as efficient as later designs. By using a FiT to stimulate demand, governments assist early adopters financially but also, through increased demand, drive the industry to develop new and more efficient systems

True tales of adventure

Recently, on the outdoor research discussion group, two people signing themselves off as ‘grumpy old men’ had ‘a go’ at Forest Schools. Their complaint boiled down to the fact that the traditional notion of adventure education was off the front pages of websites and magazines displaced by this upstart of Forest Schools ‘whatever they were!’ They bemoaned what they considered to be the death of ‘proper’ adventures. What it seems to me that these two have not noticed is that their kind of adventure is doing fine if not burgeoning with expeditions to far flung corners of the world, scouting and guiding and Duke of Edinburgh award trips, not to mention overflowing outdoor centres. They also seem to have forgotten what it is to be 5 years old, for this is the age group Forest Schools are aimed at, not as competition for teenage daring do. As I remember it my fifth year was full of climbing trees, riding bikes, exploring further and further afield, building dens and lighting fires. Ponies kicked us, nettles stung us; and bumps and bruises from falling out of those trees were soothed with Nivea® cream. All this sounds pretty adventurous to me

Story and the outdoors, fiction or non-fiction?

The landscape is storied. The landscape is cloaked in multifarious stories. ‘Scape’ is a suffix derived from the French meaning to cloak, as in ‘to cloak in meaning or stories’. Some of these stories are from the past ‘written’ in the features and names in the landscape or the memories of people. They tell of ice ages, forests, long extinct animals, human settlements and lives, invasions, agriculture, industry and leisure. For example ‘Grizedale’, the name of several valleys in the English Lake District where I live, is constructed of old Norse words integrated into the local dialect from Viking settlers 1,200 years age (Rollinson, 1989). A ‘grize’ is a wild boar, extinct in Britain since the thirteenth century (though recently returning to the wild in the south of England). A ‘dale’ is a U shaped glaciated valley. Just one word holds so many interweaving stories. As in this case, some of these stories are natural histories and some are cultural histories

If you want to learn to navigate throw away the map!

Navigation using maps has been a ‘core skill’ of outdoor learning since it’s early days. I heard myself saying ‘I’d be lost without a map’ at a conference in Australia in conversation with local practitioners including an aboriginal national park ranger. He laughed saying ‘I always know here I am’. A Finn, an Australian and I decided in that moment to experiment. What kind of experiences could we facilitate in the wild travelling without maps? The Finn let his students undertake a self-reliant journey across the tundra in winter. They thought it could be done in five days, might take ten and planned on fifteen. In the end it took twelve days. Using natural navigation such as the sun, stars, wind direction and river valleys as guides and staying in camp when it was a blizzard or no visibility, they headed east until they reached a catch feature, a north south road, where they were picked up. The Australian let his students loose in the bush with the rule that they must always stay on a trail. The bush was dense and the trails few, all of them bringing the group to one exit from the forest or another. The group emerged after three days and a walk they enthused about for weeks afterwards. I managed just a few hours in a Lakeland woodland. Two groups set out to create a walk with natural markers as waypoints. They then turned a description of the route into a poem that they then taught to the other group. Each group would then try to follow the path of the first group. It worked a treat – even with lines involving ‘sunlit birches in autumn colour’! – it was a day of sunny periods and birch was the dominant tree! A key for all of us was a change in our attitudes to time as a safety factor and to space in that we needed to know where our groups were. In each case risk assessments focussed on the skills, equipment and experience of the group so that they could mange space and time effectively for themselves. However, we also noticed a significant change in the nature of the experiences reported by the participants. The focus on nature was considerably enhanced – including noticing more and the apparent development of new knowledge, understanding, skills, behaviours and values. I decided to experiment further

On growing potatoes and outdoor education

If you have visited the Andes mountains you may have seen piles of small potatoes of all colours and hues from yellow and orange to blue and black. They are left to dry stacked outside farms under the eaves where the chickens scratch through them and they glow in the evening sun. People have been growing potatoes on the old Inca terraces for hundreds of years. Each field has its unique characteristics of altitude, aspect, soil type, drainage, distance from the farm and many more. The farmers are intimately aware of these subtleties in their fields learned from their fathers and mothers and gained from many years experience of working the land themselves. They know how each field will respond in different seasons and in the variations of weather from year to year. They know which pests will appear and where and how to tackle them. They know what variety of seed to plant and what harvest to expect. Time, to them, is a cycle of seasons. But they also understand time as a spiral of steady improvement in each field, as a response to long term patterns of climate change and as a reaction to population changes and needs. They experiment constantly to adapt their practices to achieve the best results they can with the resources they have. They have a detailed, almost invisible, lay knowledge of their work

Timeline of Australian climate change policy

This paper presents a record of Australian climate change policies, including key international developments to provide global context.IntroductionClimate change is a long-term, global problem. Long-term problems generally require stable but flexible policy implementation over time. However, Australia’s commitment to climate action over the past three decades could be seen as inconsistent and lacking in direction. At times Australia has been an early adopter, establishing the world’s first government agency dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions; signing on to global climate treaties the same day they are created; establishing the world’s first emissions trading scheme (ETS) (albeit at a state level); and pioneering an innovative land-based carbon offset scheme. But at other times, and for many reasons, Australia has erratically altered course: disbanding the climate change government agency, creating a new one then disbanding that; refusing to ratify global treaties until the dying minute; and introducing legislation to repeal the national ETS

Creating global students: internationalization of curricula in higher education

Travelling, curiosity and the quest for the unknown have been a key metaphor for personal growth and human development for at least two thousand years. These ideas re-appeared in the late 13th century when students began to go on so-called Peregrinatio Academica – peregrinations – to foreign universities. These reached their peak in the 17th century. Today most universities worldwide value transcultural travelling and cooperation in their internationalization strategies. Financially supported by the European Union’s education programme Erasmus Mundus, a two-year joint international master’s degree entitled Transcultural European Outdoor Studies (TEOS) began in the fall of 2011 and is now in its fifth year. The programme is run collaboratively by Marburg University, Germany; the University of Cumbria, UK and the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo. It is explicitly inspired by the ancient idea of peregrination. TEOS involves travelling cohorts of students who spend a semester at each of the universities to explore three of the main European outdoor traditions in their native contexts: Erlebnispädagogik, Outdoor Education (Loynes, 2007) and Friluftsliv (Gurholt, 2008), respectively. The cohorts of approximately twenty international students each come from nearly as many countries and five continents. The course is full time and two years long. Cultural interaction on the programme takes many forms including living and studying in an international group, studying in three countries, studying with the national cohort of postgraduate students in each country, being taught in English yet learning two other languages, exploring the local cultures and landscapes, experiencing and examining outdoor activities and outdoor educations of each nation and engaging with visiting scholars from other countries as well as the host nations. The central question of the programme is how the different landscapes and cultural contexts of the three nations, whilst influenced by many of the same historical roots, lead to varying forms of human nature relations and outdoor education practices. Over the first five years of the programme this question has been asked by both staff and students

Transition camps, a Learning Away case study

This case study of transition camps comes from the experiences and evaluation of the Learning Away Initiative, a Paul Hamlyn Foundation project. It has been prepared for the Natural Connections blog by Chris Loynes, a Learning Away advisor

Outdoor learning: a many splendoured thing

It’s hard to keep up with the many names under which outdoor learning is developing at the moment – forest schools, learning outside the classroom (LOtC), bushcraft, adventure learning, outdoor therapy, etc. It is sometimes easy to forget that the term ‘outdoor learning’ was only developed 12 years ago in the process of forming the Institute for Outdoor Learning as the national body, after heated debates about the alternatives. It’s hard to keep up with the many names under which outdoor learning is developing at the moment – forest schools, learning outside the classroom (LOtC), bushcraft, adventure learning, outdoor therapy, etc. It is sometimes easy to forget that the term ‘outdoor learning’ was only developed 12 years ago in the process of forming the Institute for Outdoor Learning as the national body, after heated debates about the alternatives

The benefits of camping with year 2 pupils

The Bulwell EAZ partnership (of six primary schools and one secondary school in North Nottingham) runs a series of progressive camping residentials. These start with a one-night, single-school residential in Year 2, followed by a one-night, two-school shared residential in Year 3/4 and a two-night, two-school shared residential in Year 5. To keep costs down, all of Bulwell’s residentials involve camping, are within 30 minutes drive of the schools and are run by teachers and student leaders. The Year 2 camp takes place annually in the summer term within a secure walled garden at Wollaton Hall, twenty minutes away from Bulwell. Each of the six Primary schools in the partnership takes their Year 2 pupils to camp in tents on the site for one night, where they take part in activities including den building, orienteering, team games, storytelling and toasting marshmallows on the camp fire. They also use the Hall itself for curriculum-related activities. For many children, the Wollaton Camp is their first taste of life away from home where they look after their own belongings, get themselves ready for bed and dressed in the morning, and deal (with the help of staff and friends) with any problems they come up against in their time away. Food is cooked and brought in from a nearby school kitchen and there is a ready supply of drinking water on site as well as portable toilets