Speaking at the Bioneers conference in Anchorage, Alaska. October 2011.

Connecting with Nature
The way we relate to nature ebbs and flows with the fashions of our culture, and nowhere is this more evident than in the management of our national parks. Places like Montana’s Glacier National Park, for example, were not set aside out of any particular conservation ethic, but at the request of the Northern Pacific Railroad, to create a tourist destination with ritzy accommodations to entice wealthy clientele to ride the railroad West. Later, the rise of the middle class made the national parks a playground for common people, a place to camp with the family and feed the bears for entertainment. And America’s love affair with the car led not just to drive-in movie theaters, restaurants, and churches, but also to paved roads winding through geyser features in Yellowstone, and drive-through trees in California’s Redwood and Sequoia National Parks.

The prevailing philosophy today is supposedly more ecologically enlightened, and environmental educators often remind us that we are part of the interconnected web of life. Yet, in the next breath, they tell us not to step off the boardwalk. We are told to leave nature as it is, and not touch, pick, or eat anything. It is as if nature has been reduced to an exhibit in a museum. We can look at it, but not participate in it. In many cases it isn’t even legal to gather firewood and build a campfire, not even in the dead of winter, camped miles from the nearest road, in the middle of a million acres of firewood.

This hands-off philosophy isn’t limited to the national parks. It is deeply embedded in our culture, touted by ecologists, environmentalists, wilderness advocates, boy scouts, parents, public land managers, and even taught in public schools. The theology is well intentioned. Our species is clearly devastating the planet. But there is something wrong with an ideology that tells us on the one hand that we are part of nature—and on the other hand that we are the bad part!

As a society, we have embarked on perhaps the greatest social experiment ever conducted. What happens when we tell our children to look at nature, but not to touch it? What happens when kids are herded into organized sports, but never really get beyond the lawn grass to explore, play, or build forts in the woods or gullies at the edge of town? What happens when kids spend all their free time exploring virtual worlds, but not the real one?

Consider the Army veteran who was unable to start a fire in my neighbor’s wood stove, because he couldn’t light a big log with a little match. He had no concept of tinder and kindling, and he was unable to warm up the house on a cold winter day. He is not alone, and I am continually shocked to meet adults who don’t know how to chop wood, or cannot start a campfire without gasoline and matches. We have an entire generation of young people who are very smart, yet don’t know how the world works and don’t know how to take care of themselves. Conceptual knowledge is meaningless without context, much like having a brain in a box on a shelf. What good is it unless you can take it out and do something with it?

Author Richard Louv called the nation’s attention to the dangers of losing our connection with nature in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods. His book sparked a new back to nature movement, as people began to recognize the importance of connecting with the natural world and having free time to play and experiment in the environment. Even the Forest Service has jumped on the bandwagon with its Kids in the Woods programs in an attempt to reconnect children and nature.

For those of us involved in traditional skills, Louv’s book labeled a problem to which we had already grasped the solution, as implied in the title of my wilderness survival book, Participating in Nature.

In short, what one can learn while playing in the woods is nearly impossible to quantify on a written test, yet essential to our understanding of real-world physics, essential to the quest for sustainability, and essential for sound resource management. In my case, figuring out how to meet my needs for shelter, fire, water, and food in the wilderness provided the proper grounding to address those same needs in society.

Self-Sufficiency
As a child, I lived in what later became known as the Silicon Valley, but every summer we traveled to Montana to visit my grandmother, Josie Jewett. She lived, “up a creek without a paddle,” as she often liked to say, and we kids spent our summers playing in that creek, building forts, and roaming the hills and meadows. Grandma Josie still cooked on a woodstove, and every day she made a pot of herbal tea, using herbs such as peppermint, yarrow, blue violets, or red clover, which we collected on our walks and dried. When we moved back to Montana for my junior high and high school years, Grandma’s house was the one place that I wanted to go every weekend and every summer.

As a teenager and young adult, I indulged in things that our culture doesn’t necessarily view as productive. I had little interest in going to college or getting a job. Instead, I hiked hundreds of miles in the mountains, studying plants, stalking deer, and experimenting with survival skills. Every day was a new opportunity to starve, trying to live on roots that were too small to justify harvesting them, trying to outwit ground squirrels that were smarter than me, or trying to down a dinner of fried grasshoppers and enjoy it.

Every night was a new opportunity to freeze in shelters that seemed like good ideas in the survival books, but didn’t really work in the northern Rockies. The challenge is that you can’t just take a class and get a diploma that says you now know how to survive in the world. You can get the basic idea, but ultimately, you have to go experiment to figure out how these skills apply to your specific environment.

I lay awake, shivering in many cold, damp, or drafty shelters, before I learned how to build some that were adequately warm and dry, or sometimes downright cozy, even without a blanket. Through trial and error, with little more than my bare hands, I learned the fundamentals of sound construction principles and energy efficiency. Lacking a tent or sleeping bag, a thermostat, or a furnace, I became acutely aware of heat loss due to drafts or conduction. Trying to stay dry taught me a lot about proper shingling and ditching around my dwellings. Hauling firewood to my shelters made energy itself tangible and quantifiable and taught me the importance of conservation. Rubbing sticks together and living with fire gave me an intimate familiarity with my energy source in all kinds of conditions, from hot and dry, to cold and windy, drenching wet, or even while sleeping inches away in a grass-lined bed inside a shelter built of kindling.

My greatest fear in life was getting stuck in a job and losing my freedom. I understood that I could not just hang out at my grandmother’s house and tan hides, eat cookies, and go camping my whole life. But I desperately did not want to go the conventional route of going to college, getting a job, and paying down a mortgage until retirement. That seemed a little more complicated than it had to be anyway.

With my background in survival skills, I recognized that it was fundamentally the same issue. We are all on one great survival trip, trying to figure out how to meet our needs for shelter, fire, water, and food—preferably without destroying the planet in the process. That really is the bottom line. How can we sustainably meet our needs for shelter, water, fire, and food without consuming all the earth’s resources, without altering the climate, and without being enslaved to a meaningless job until we die?

The conventional route of getting a job and paying a mortgage doesn’t really work. Conventional houses are way too expensive, and not even very good. Most houses require a furnace and constant inputs of fossil fuels to keep the pipes from freezing and breaking. The bathrooms are virtually guaranteed to rot out halfway through the mortgage. The walls are so flimsy that you can punch a hole through one with a fist. From the floor to the roof, there is an endless parade of ripping out, landfilling, and replacing carpets and cabinetry, furniture, and shingles.

It is any wonder that we struggle with resource depletion and global warming when every person in America is burning up the pavement running back and forth to a job that is generally bad for the environment, just to make a pile of money to throw at their home mortgage, utility bills, and endless repairs? What happens if we hit a recession and don’t bounce back? How long can we maintain the illusion of being an affluent nation?

It made sense to me to focus on the basics and build my own house, figuring that if I had a place to live and no mortgage then I would be free to do whatever I wanted in life. I had no qualifications to build a house, beyond having read some books on the subject, but I was accustomed to making do.

I did know how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together, and with that on my resume I got a job working with troubled teens in the wilderness, and saved up a small nest egg to get started. I married my girlfriend from high school, and together we bought land, moved into a tent and built a passive solar stone and log home for about the cost of a new car. Later, we added solar panels to generate electricity and run the meter backwards, producing on average as much power as we consume. Naturally, the house doesn’t have either a furnace or a thermostat.

Ironically, life’s choices later took us away from home for most of eight years, but I never really worried about the house. We could leave it all winter without risk of freezing the plants or breaking the pipes. The house just sat there sustaining itself. The solar water heater kept producing hot water; the photovoltaic panels kept generating electricity, running the meter backwards. I stopped by every couple weeks and watered the greenhouse, which kept growing greens, and thanks to my brother’s care, the chickens kept laying eggs. And that’s the funny thing about sustainable living. It’s really not all that difficult to achieve and it is far easier than the conventional route. If we had built houses properly in the first place, then we wouldn’t be facing such dire economic and environmental issues today.

I read an article recently outlining ways to create jobs and get the economy back on track. Oddly, one of key suggestions was to provide incentives for foreigners to come to America to start businesses and create jobs, as if we Americans are no longer capable of doing it ourselves. Are we really that far gone as a country, that we are dependent on the charity of others for employment opportunities? Have Americans lost all sense of self-sufficiency, reduced to mere couch potatoes, capable of thinking, but not of doing? What happened to the can-do attitude that built this country?

The reality is that graduating from college with a piece of a paper that says you know something no longer guarantees that you can get a good job. Getting a job no longer guarantees that you can keep it for life, and having a fat retirement fund one day is no guarantee that it will still be worth anything when you actually need it.

Welcome to the new era of self-sufficiency. It is about shelter, fire, water, and food. Whether you live in the city or the country, there are always steps you can take to become more self-sufficient. You can prioritize your expenses to pay down your mortgage faster. You can improve the energy efficiency of your home to become more independent from the power company. You can remodel and retrofit rot-prone materials with something made to stand the test of time. You can collect rainwater from the roof for use as household or irrigation water. You can plant fruit trees to grow free food either for yourself or for children walking down the sidewalk. If you have the skills to take care of yourself, then you have the skills to take care of others, and you will never be short of work. Moreover, if you have your shelter, fire, water, and food in order, then you can choose whether you want to work or not.

Today there are a great many disenfranchised young adults who don’t feel that college is for them, and don’t want to get a job and become hopelessly stuck in the machine for the rest of their lives. I founded a fledgling Green University® to provide a new and desperately needed model for higher education—one where young people can get grounded with hands-on wilderness skills, combined with a healthy dose of do-it-yourself alternative construction and sustainable living skills. It is my hope to eventually mentor participants in green business development, providing a support network to help students incubate enterprises that will make a positive difference in the world.

In addition to mentoring young adults, the highlight of my year is always taking the local junior high kids out for three days and two nights of wilderness survival skills. They sleep in shelters of sticks and bark, even in torrential rains, and sometimes they sleep in piles of grass without even a blanket. They make fires by rubbing sticks together. They make their own dishes; they wade into the swamps and gather cattail roots for food; they cook their own meals, doing such things as a stir-fry using hot rocks on a slab of bark instead of a metal pan, or cooking bread in a stone oven. They stalk wildlife; they stalk each other. They play in the mud; they have marshmallow blowgun wars.

As one student, John, wrote after a camping trip, “I have pondered the simple construction of the mousehut… sticks, grass, and bark piled on each other, but yet it is one of the warmest shelters I have ever encountered. How interesting that a mouse, a hundred times smaller than myself, can survive performing the same tasks we did to make the shelter. Also, how smart this creature must be to come up with this simple, but yet, complex design. In my opinion, you must experience it to fully understand what it is all about.”

I doubt that any one of these kids will ever be in a situation where they have to build a mouse shelter or start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. But I also know that you can ignite something much bigger than a fire with these kinds of skills. Doing hands-on skills connects the brain to the hands and the hands to the world. This kind of hands-on ability not only makes it possible to transform ideas into reality, but also facilitates the flow of information the other direction, from the hands to the brain, opening up a world of infinite possibilities.

Towards a Sustainable Civilization
Perhaps most importantly, the hands-on quest for shelter, fire, water, and food ultimately enables a deeper connection with the natural world. As I wrote in Participating in Nature:

      In primitive living you learn about the wilderness as you create your niche in the ecosystem and gather the resources you need for living. For example, to harvest edible plants you have to learn about them. You learn the names and the habitats of plants. You learn about individual edible plants by eating them and by noticing the changes in the appearance and taste throughout the year. As you harvest plants you learn to recognize them throughout the year, as dead stalks, or seeds, or even by the roots. As you seek out edible plants you begin to notice characteristics of the soil; you begin to notice that your desired herb grows better in one type of soil than another.

      The knowledge that you acquire is not always scientific, but you develop an acute awareness of nature and natural resources. For instance, you learn the basics of geology as you look for different types of rock that are useful as tools in primitive living. You might look for quartz, quartzite, or chert rocks to use as “flint” in flint and steel fire starting. Or you might look for sandstone to use for sanding arrow shafts or bows, or to abrade a stone tool. You might look for a clay deposit for making pottery, or for various minerals for mineral paints. You learn about geology as you spend hours searching the riverbank for the right piece of round, symmetrical, fine-grained rock for a hammerstone. You begin to notice if the rocks around you are igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary. Instead of merely hiking from point A to point B, the process of hunting and gathering makes you investigate the land around you.

This intimate connection with nature isn’t just critical to our own well-being, it is essential to the effort to conserve nature. The bottom line is that the more you know about something, the more you care about it. The more you care about it, the more you will work to protect it. One of the greatest threats to wilderness and wild places is a lack of cars at the trailheads. If we reduce nature to mere wallpaper — something to look at, but not to touch — then who is really going to care about it or advocate for it?

As another student, Chas, wrote after the three-day camp-out, “It has always seemed to me that nature is like a piece of artwork, fragile, but only to be admired through the gentlest of hands. We go walking on a weather-beaten path that so many have followed, but never step off to travel farther into the heart of the forest. I now know what it is like to go into the depths of the forest, experiencing the full force of the wild. Nature is not a picture. It is much more than that.”

Some of the most successful conservation groups, such as Ducks Unlimited or Trout Unlimited, are driven by consumers of nature — people who work to expand habitat and breed more ducks and more trout because they like to hunt and fish for them. This act of participating in nature effectively increases the demand for more nature. As ecologists and environmentalists, we need to adopt this new paradigm and help the populace reconnect with the natural world before we bulldoze and develop everything that is left.

As Spencer wrote after the camping trip, “The outdoor classroom experience has given me a more in-depth look at nature and our ancestors than any movie or text book has or ever will. Living in the outdoors has shown me that nature is full of surprises and that it provides everything that we need to survive. If more schools took their students on outdoor trips like we do, humans might learn to be more conservative and save our world.”

An experiential connection with nature is in fact imperative if we are to conserve and sustainably manage our natural resources. Consider energy. What happens when people grow up without a quantifiable sense of energy or knowledge of where it comes from when they flip on a light switch? How can we formulate sensible energy policy or steward our resources when energy itself is an abstraction?

If you spend enough time living with fire, you can develop a quantifiable sense of energy. You will know approximately how much heat and light a given pile of firewood produces, and from that you can better extrapolate to make meaning out of energy policy concerning coal, oil, gas, or the various avenues of generating electricity. Likewise, if you have a solar water heater, you can temporarily turn off your electric water heater, to experientially discover just how much hot water a solar water heater produces according to the weather and the seasons.

My local utility would very much like to construct a massive transmission line, with fourteen-story tall towers, down our local section of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail. It is being touted as a “green” energy project because it would serve partly as a conduit to send wind energy from Montana south to markets in Las Vegas and California. But it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that there is nothing remotely green or sustainable about building this kind of industrial infrastructure and ramrodding it through virgin land. It would be far more sensible if utilities installed solar water heaters for their customers and took care of any maintenance, just as some utilities still come around to light customers’ gas furnaces each fall. Rather than each customer researching solar water heater brands and installers, the utility could take advantage of volume-pricing to install thousands of identical units, charging customers for some, but not all of the energy they save. In effect, the customer would get a small discount on the monthly utility bill, while the utility would get to sell the same electricity twice. That would constitute green energy policy.

A Deeper Connection
There is one more thing you may begin to see when you spend enough time in nature and begin to connect on a deeper level. You can begin to see the things that are no longer there.

That is perhaps the greatest irony of our cultural disconnect with nature. If you don’t know what lives outside your window, then you will not notice if it disappears, either. In fact, you can take a lush and forested ecosystem and completely denude it, and if it happens slowly enough, than nobody will notice any difference.

I’ve walked thousands of miles across several western states, looking at the ground. Prior to the domestication of livestock, semi-arid rangelands took care of themselves. In North America, massive herds of buffalo migrated across the West, sticking together for protection from predators. These herds nuked everything in their path. Anything not eaten was trampled into the soil, effectively planting fresh seeds while providing a mulch cover of organic matter and manure.

Today our rangelands suffer most from a lack of animal impact, so new seeds don’t get planted. The bare ground between the plants keeps spreading, even when the existing grass grows tall and green. In places like west Texas or South Africa, where the wild animals were too numerous to count only two hundred years ago, the land supports only a handful of cows over hundreds of miles today. The same process is happening all the way north to Montana, but almost nobody has a clue, because most people are too removed from nature to know what they are looking at on the ground, and whatever you see out the window looks completely normal, as long as you have nothing else to compare it to.

Moreover, the thing that makes the soil brown or black in the first place is carbon that has been extracted from the atmosphere and, in the case of rangelands, trampled into the ground to build soil. Grasses grow rapidly, and grasslands can sequester significantly more carbon per acre than forests. We’ve not only shut down the sequestration cycle on every continent, we’ve also oxidized half or more of the organic carbon from most crop and rangelands back into the atmosphere. And we wonder why we have a global warming problem.

It is hard to imagine now, but people once hunted pigs in the forests of Israel. Greece was also covered by rich Mediterranean forests. The fertile fields of Libya once grew grain for the Roman Empire. Is it any wonder that people fight all the time in places like Libya, Afghanistan, or Iraq, where the land has lost its fertility?

We may see on the news that the capital of China is in danger of being buried under sand dunes, but what we don’t see is that we are also turning the American West into a new Saharan desert. You can watch it happen year by year if you are accustomed to looking at the ground.

The problem can be easily remedied once it is understood, and with proper soil management, we could potentially put the brakes on global warming. Yet, the ground beneath our feet is functionally invisible to most people. Perhaps we could see it better if we took off our shoes and got back in touch with the earth.

I like to think of primitive living as a metaphor for living in the modern world. The metaphor reminds us that we are part of the ecosystem and we have no choice but to take from it. But in the quest to meet our needs for shelter, fire, water, and food, we learn about ourselves, we learn about the ecosystem, and we become empowered to make a difference in the world. Playing in the woods won’t solve all the world’s problems, or necessarily any of them. But it can point us in the right direction, and direction is perhaps what we need more than anything else.

Thomas J. Elpel delivered this as the keynote speech at the Bioneers conference in Anchorage, Alaska in October 2011.

See our DVD: Classroom in the Woods

Check Out Participating in Nature

Working with Kids - From the Junior High Camping Trip, 2011

Working with kids, I can tell when they are having a good time and excited about learning. But I consistently underestimate the true depth, insightfulness, and heart of our young people.

My work with public school kids began in the mid-1990s, when my daughters, Felicia and Cassie, were in elementary school. I volunteered to take them and their classmates out for an all-day field trip every spring. We built shelters, started fires with flint and steel, told stories, did crafts, made ashcakes and wild tea, and played some stalking games. It was lots of fun, and a chance for the kids to get out of the classroom and have some fun at the end of the year. But it wasn’t just an excuse to “get out of school” for a day, as the kids were truly learning, and very importantly, they were learning about the world directly, instead of just reading about it in a book.

We upped the ante a bit when my daughters entered junior high, taking their classmates out for overnight camping trips on a local ranch. Lacking any tents or tarps, we built shelters out of sticks and bark… and survived more than an inch of rain (on multiple occasions). I taught the kids how to start fires with the bow and drill, basically a simple mechanical device for “rubbing two sticks together.” I demonstrated how to do it, then provided a couple of sticks to each group and had the kids figure out how to replicate the bow and drill and start a fire. We harvested edible wild plants and mushrooms, cooked a stir-fry dinner with hot rocks on a slab of bark, practiced stalking skills, observed wildlife, and played games. It was great fun, and the kids ate it up like it was the greatest thing in the world.

That was ten years ago, and my daughters are now in their twenties. But I still do the junior high camping trip every spring, and we now take the seventh and eighth graders out for three days and two nights, charging a small fee to make the program sustainable. Every year we look at new ways to fine-tune and improve the experience for the students, to make it more educational and more memorable.

The seventh and eighth grade teacher at Harrison School is Linda Ehlers, who was bold and adventurous enough to try this wild idea in the first place, and after doing it for a few years, began to realize just how deeply and positively the experience impacted the kids. She has the students for nearly nine months before I see them, and I am told that the kids talk about the junior high camping trip all year long. Two weeks before the campout, she finds it impossible to focus on anything else, so she structures her lesson plans around the upcoming trip, covering skills like plant identification, fire-starting, and knife safety in the classroom. She talks to these same students in the hallways as they continue on through their high school years, and the way she tells it, they never stop talking about the experience and the memories. But sometimes I have trouble believing it. I have trouble believing that three days of hanging out in the woods doing skills and playing games could impact these kids so much.

It isn’t until I see the written comments – in the students’ own words – that I began to get a sense of how deeply they have been touched by this little camping experience. On a purely academic level, it is obvious that they are truly learning, and they resonate with the lessons in a way that could not be achieved by reading about it in a book:

“I think our Indian ancestors were awesome because they lived how we did, but we only stayed three days. I think it is amazing how they lived, and when they killed something, they used everything off of the dead animal. It is also fascinating that they used everything that they found or killed. The coolest thing was all the cooking utensils and how they used fire and coals to cook.” –Brett P.

“The life we lived out there for three days is what our ancestors’ lives were like year-round. I see that my ancestors routinely did what I struggled to do once. It makes you stop and think about how technology has changed our way of living. This experience has changed the way I see people back then.” –Britt C.

Sometimes I try to get in the heads of the kids while we are out in the field, and I imagine them to have little depth beyond the desire to have fun. Yes, I can see that they are excited about learning, but I rationalize it as “excited compared to sitting in the classroom.” After all, this is technically a school trip, and they are conditioned to follow instructions and do whatever I tell them to do. And yet, when the kids have started some game of their own – and it is obviously a healthy and satisfying activity – I hesitate to interrupt them. I experience a moment of self-doubt, thinking that they will be disgruntled at the interruption – that they won’t get excited about learning some stupid stalking skills or playing some dumb stalking game. But when I finally make the call, I am shocked to see their game break up immediately as the students come streaming over, excited for the new activity:

“My most meaningful experiences were Wolves and Deer and the Stalking Game. These were meaningful because they are games that everyone was involved in. We were having fun and enjoying ourselves. Wolves and Deer was meaningful because it involved paying attention and being knowledgeable. The Stalking Game was meaningful because we had to be quiet and know the placement of our feet. I enjoyed this because when I got out, it was very fun watching everybody else try to get the bag of candy.” –Colton C.

“I felt everything I stepped on as I walked in the all-leather moccasins… Stalking to get that candy was so intense. It shows how patient you have to be to get your food in the woods. From the birds chirping to Koby running through the trees, all the natural sounds really made me open my ears and listen.”  –Alecia P.

I am always surprised at how much the students comment on the importance of teamwork, friendship, and appreciation of each other, especially because our schedule doesn’t have include any specific team-building activities or agenda. But from the kids perspective, it is all about teamwork:

“My most meaningful experience was being able to work together to start a fire with the bow and drill. The campout taught all of us that we had to work together or you wouldn’t get anything done.” –Gabie A.

“The bowdrill is one of the best ways to make a fire. It takes teamwork and passion. When my group was making fire, Britt was working the bow, then she said, ‘Help!” I grabbed the other end of the bow and helped her through it. We were the first group done because of the teamwork we did.” –John E.

“Friendship and teamwork are priorities above all others. Without these I would have never been able to start a fire, find Kris, or even fix the wickiup. You need friends and partners to survive in the real world, and without them, we are lost.” –Jon S.

More surprising to me is that the kids truly connect with the natural world. I often imagine our young people as being totally into the social scene and not really interested in nature, beyond the excuse to be out of the classroom for a few days. I imagine them to be patiently tolerant at best, when we wake them up early in the morning to go stalking through the woods in the hopes of seeing wildlife:

“Another meaningful experience was when we went on a morning wildlife walk. This time, I could hear the animals waking up. That morning was very peaceful. I felt proud that I was on this walk seeing animals, not disrupting them, and making my way through the great outdoors.” –Taya D.

“Before I went on the campout, I did not take the time to enjoy all of the experiences that are out there. I would walk to the bus each morning with my headphones in my ears, ignoring all of the natural music around me. The birds sang their songs each and every morning, and I ignored their exquisite music. Now, when I walk to the bus in the morning, I try to listen to each and every song that the birds have to offer. I slow my pace as I indulge the sound of the songs. I allow myself to ‘stop and smell the roses’ when I stroll along the twisting, winding road to the bus.” –Michaela J.

Most of all, I am surprised at the depth, reflection, and insightfulness of many of the comments. These comments come from young teenagers, yet sound more like adults:

“For three whole days, we were shut off from the TVs, the iPods, and even the world famous cell phone. It is hard to believe, even now, that we could survive without these advances. Now, new things can replace this “junk” that has taken over our lives. Instead of watching TV, we can play the real live video game of marshmallow wars, instead of being stuck on a couch with a joystick in hand.” –Britt C.

“It has always seemed to me that nature is like a piece of artwork, fragile, but only to be admired through the gentlest of hands. We go walking on a weather-beaten path that so many have followed, but never step off to travel farther into the heart of the forest. I now know what it is like to go into the depths of the forest, experiencing the full force of the wild. Nature is not a picture. It is much more than that.” –Chas B.

Seeing feedback like this from the kids makes me realize just how deeply they are affected by this one-time experience in nature. And they are definitely hungry for more. In his book Last Child in the Woods, author Richard Louv called the nation’s attention to the growing problem of “Nature Deficit Disorder,” a concern that was shockingly brought to life in the documentary Play Again: What are the consequences of a childhood removed from nature? The book and the movie highlight the crisis that faces our young people and the future of our society. How can society function if we raise an entire generation of kids who are plugged into something like Second Life, while lacking a First Life in the real world?

I never imagined that our little camping trips would turn into cutting edge work that could make a critical difference to the future of our young people. But while Last Child in the Woods and Play Again have called attention to the problem, we have apparently stumbled into a critical piece of the solution. The experiential model that we have created resonates with the students and reaches them at a deeper level.

It is my greatest hope to expand our programs to many of our other local schools to share similar experiences with the kids that are currently missing out. More than that, I hope that our work can become a role model for other people seeking to introduce experiential outdoor education to the young people in their lives. As one student wrote this year:

“The outdoor classroom experience has given me a more in-depth look at nature and our ancestors than any movie or text book has or ever will. Living in the outdoors has shown me that nature is full of surprises and that it provides everything that we need to survive. If more schools took their students on outdoor trips like we do, humans might learn to be more conservative and save our world.” –Spencer O.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

For more information about the Junior High Camping Trip, be sure to read Outdoor Classroom (Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 2011) and more comments from students of the 2011 camping trip. Also, take a look at our Classroom in the Woods DVD, and please check out our Stone Age Living Skills Programs for Schools for more information about our classes.

Jeremiah could not wait to dispose of his brand new, taxpayer-funded prison boots.

I threw a few things in the back of the truck to make room and off we went. “Got in a fight with my lady,” he explained. Jeremiah said he’d been living with his girlfriend in Billings for the last 2 ½ years, working on roofing jobs until she kicked him out. “She needed some time,” he said. So, he was headed back home to the rez to his brother’s house. The story was oddly incongruent with his crisp new attire and his distinct lack of baggage. “I left it all behind,” he said.

We talked a lot along the way. We had a lot in common – in a really indirect way. He grew up in Saint Ignatius on the Flathead Reservation. His brother did traditional sweats. I went to the Flathead and participated in a sweatlodge ceremony when I was sixteen. Jeremiah’s grandmother did beadwork; I tan hides. He wanted to know how much I charge for my hides. He’d never tanned a hide, but he’d seen it done a lot.

I’ve picked up quite a number of hitchhikers over the years, some that were drunk, some that wanted to be, some that were on drugs, some that tried to sell me watches and junk, some that were delusional, some that were desperate, some that tried to convert me to Jesus, and one that fingered a blunt metal rod with a handle on it as if he were contemplating stabbing me with it, until he finally put it away after I described my background as a survival instructor. So, it was refreshing to pick up a hitchhiker who, aside from the broken relationship, was otherwise a nice, clean-cut young man who seemed to be on the right track in life, “especially for a Native American,” I thought, unable to avoid a bit of racial stereotyping.

Aside from some paperwork in his manila folder, he had a few nicely woven horsehair barrettes that he had made, and he gave me a pair when I mentioned my daughters. I told him about my adopted kids’ older brother who was learning to do beadwork while locked up in Montana State Prison in Deerlodge, as we whizzed by that town on the highway. I suppose the incongruities should have snapped together at that point, but I never gave it a thought.

I am familiar with the drug and alcohol problems on the reservations and inquired about the challenges he faced growing up, partly out of curiosity to hear an insider’s perspective, partly because I want to get into politics and make a difference, so I am always looking for new ideas, and partly because I wanted to know how he managed to negotiate that minefield himself. I was curious to know how he had successfully held his life together when faced with challenging conditions.

He acknowledged the problem and said he’d seen a lot of friends die in car accidents. He admitted his own fondness for alcohol and said with some pride that for a while he believed he was “God’s gift to women.” Getting away from the rez for had been good for him.

I described my own fears as a parent of young adult and teenage children in a world rife with drugs and alcohol. I commented that as a society we seemed to play Russian roulette with our children. “Here’s a gun with one bullet in it. ‘Hope you survive.” Some kids live. Some don’t. But we as a society consider the losses acceptable enough that we glorify the party life on the big screen and role model it to our children.

I asked if Jeremiah had any insights or ideas to help the situation on the rez. He acknowledged that it was a difficult situation. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” he said, using this mismatched metaphor to communicate that people have to make their own choices about whether they drink or do drugs.

Jeremiah offered to treat me out to lunch in Missoula, and although I hardly need the handout, it felt right to accept his offer. I drove him to a bank to cash a check and then to Fudrucker’s for burgers. Over lunch he confessed to me that he had been afraid to tell me the truth – that he had just been released from prison that morning. Ah. That would explain the crisp new clothes and the manila folder. Apparently he spent three years locked up for selling crystal meth, along with a felony charge for stolen property.

Given that it is illegal to hitchhike out of Deerlodge (where the prison is located) the wardens had dropped Jeremiah off at the bus station in Butte less than an hour before I picked him up on the side of the highway. So much for being the first hitchhiker I’d ever picked up who actually had his life together!

On the other hand, he really did have his life together, at least for that moment. I’m just not sure how long it was going to last, as he treated me to a twisted ice tea and explained how good it was if you drank a little bit off the top, then filled it back up with Black Velvet. He was going home to a tough situation, a place where people harbored hard feelings toward him for selling meth to his younger friends and relatives. He was going home to all of the problems that landed him in prison in the first place. But what else could he do? What else can anyone do?

I’m not sure that a bigger hammer is the answer. If cracking down with tougher laws was the answer, then we would have cured the problem long ago. But as Jeremiah explained to me, you can even buy weed and cocaine in prison. It just costs a lot more than it does on the outside.

Sometimes I think the answer to our toughest problems is not to face them head-on, but to approach them more indirectly, and in this case, to question why our culture is so empty and devoid of meaning that we glorify getting high and getting wasted as worthy achievements.

When I take junior high classes out into the woods to teach them wilderness skills, I see these kids sparkle as if they had been waiting for this their entire lives. They learn how to start fires without matches; they learn how to cook a stir-fry meal over the campfire without any pans; they learn to make their own dishes and utensils; they learn how to sleep warm without a blanket, sleeping bag, or a tent. But most of all, they learn how to have fun – running through the woods playing stalking games, throwing sticks and rocks at targets, having mud fights, swimming in the river, and engaging in marshmallow blowgun wars, as documented in our video Classroom in the Woods.

We never once bring up the topic of drug or alcohol avoidance or prevention, but that’s absolutely what the junior high camping trip is all about. These are kids who live in rural Montana with boundless opportunities, yet live out their daily lives bored to tears with books and paperwork in school. At home they are saturated with media about fast cars, big cities, and living it up with the party life. These kids are desperately hungry for something – for anything – and they will turn to drugs and alcohol if that’s all there is in life. But when they spend a few days in the woods they experience something real, and it is so simple, and yet so profound, that they talk about it all year long.

Jeremiah had another set of barrettes, which I bought for a friend. I drove him to a department store so he could buy a baseball cap and some tennis shoes. He could not wait to be free from the prison boots he wore. He pitched the boots in the back of my truck, and I drove him another four miles up the highway to the intersection with Highway 93, heading north to the reservation. I wished Jeremiah the best of luck, and I meant it with my heart and soul.

There is a reason why I have worked my butt off my entire life with the hope of one day getting into politics. There is a reason why I would like to someday run for governor. It is because I believe in our children. It is because I believe in our young people like Jeremiah. It is because I believe I can make a difference in their lives, and that propels me out of bed every day to do the work I do.

NorthWestern Energy's actions resemble those that destroyed the Montana Power Company

So begins the narrative from the 2003 CBS News/60 Minutes expose, Who Killed Montana Power? Reading the narrative online, it is difficult to shake the sense of déjà vu, that we are witnessing the same tragic story all over again, through NorthWestern Energy’s risky investment in the proposed Mountain States Transmission Intertie (MSTI).

Quoting again from the 60 Minutes report, “Everyone was happy, except for the corporate officers and their Wall Street investment banking firm who decided there was more money to be made in the more glamorous and profitable world of telecommunications. The result exemplified the worst of American capitalism… [The demise of Montana Power] may not be the biggest scandal of our time, but to its stockholders, it shows how greed and outright stupidity destroyed one of the oldest and proudest companies in America.”

In parallel with Montana Power, NorthWestern Energy is betting the company on a risky investment that offers nothing for its customer base here in Montana. MSTI’s sole purpose is to satisfy corporate greed by exporting electricity from Montana to potential customers in Las Vegas and southern California. MSTI will not provide electricity to Montanans. It will not provide jobs for Montanans. And there is nothing green about industrializing the Montana landscape with fourteen-story tall transmission towers. What MSTI will do is give out-of-state customers the opportunity to bid against Montanans for our hydroelectric, wind, and coal-fired electricity, driving up rates instate.

In the pursuit of profit, NorthWestern Energy is openly waging war against Montanans, trying to ramrod this monstrosity across farms and ranches and right through some of our most scenic valleys. NorthWestern lobbyists pressured state legislators into passing HB 198, giving corporations the power of eminent domain. It enables companies like NorthWestern to take private property for profit-making ventures. But what kind of a company wages war on its own customers?

Quoting again from the 60 Minutes expose, Montana Power “was going to join the dot.com revolution by transforming itself into a high-tech telecommunications company called Touch America. The decision was made on the advice of its New York investment banker, Goldman Sachs, without consulting the stockholders.”

Montana Power lobbied the legislature to push through a bill that deregulated the price of electricity, and opened the markets up to competition – even though Montana had some of the lowest utility rates in the country. Deregulation inflated the value of Montana Power, at which point the company began selling off its assets to invest in Touch America, following the advice of Goldman Sachs. The result was that, “Electricity prices in Montana doubled, then redoubled, and doubled again – refineries, lumber mills, and the last working copper mine in Butte was forced to suspend operations because they couldn’t afford their electricity bills.”

Any corporation that wages war on its own customers in the pursuit of profit is at risk of implosion. Good investing begins here at home, not on market speculation. We lost a great power company when the executives at Montana Power got greedy. It is unfortunate to see NorthWestern Energy following the same path, gambling on risky investments at the expense of its customer base. It is going to take a long time for NorthWestern to heal these wounds. The company could start by canceling MSTI and offering a big apology for its actions.

Thomas J. Elpel is president of the Jefferson River Canoe Trail Chapter of the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation (www.JeffersonRiver.org), PO Box 697, Pony, MT 59747. This guest editorial was published in The Madisonian September 22, 2011.

Northwestern Energy's proposed MSTI transmission line would include fourteen-story tall transmission towers along the Jefferson River segment of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail

That is how we can promote local tourism if the Montana Department of Environmental Quality approves NorthWestern Energy’s proposed Mountain States Transmission Intertie (MSTI) through the Jefferson Valley. The transmission line is proposed for the purpose of exporting electricity to out-of-state buyers at the expense of Montanans who have to live with the monstrosity.

The Jefferson River is part of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail, established by Congress in 1978. “It is the mission of the National Park Service to preserve the remnants of the historic route of 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery Expedition located along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail,” according to the www.nps.gov/lecl website.

In essence, the LCNHT can be thought of as a long, skinny national park–but without any federal protection. The Jefferson River segment of the LCNHT is significant, in that Lewis and Clark named the river in honor of the president who initiated their expedition to explore the Missouri headwaters and search for a navigable route to the Pacific.

Most of the Jefferson River runs through private land, and the entire length of the river is already threatened by encroaching development. Yet amazingly, when you get into a canoe and experience the river from the viewpoint of Lewis and Clark, you discover how much the viewshed remains intact from the river. Most of the existing development is far enough back from the river that you only experience the cottonwood ecology along the river, against a backdrop of undeveloped mountains in the distance.

Although MSTI’s fourteen-story tall steel towers would be largely built away from the river, the towers will be glaringly visible from the river and throughout the Jefferson Valley.

This transmission line is not being proposed to serve the people of Montana, nor is there anything remotely “green” about this kind of industrial development. MSTI will create only about 50 temporary jobs in the state of Montana, but it will be a permanent scar on our landscape and our tourism industry. There is only one purpose behind MSTI, and that is corporate greed. Do we really want to turn our homeland into an industrial wasteland to make NorthWestern Energy look good on Wall Street?

Unfortunately, the National Park Service lacks any jurisdiction to say “No” to this absurd proposal. It is up to the people of Montana to protect ourselves and the Jefferson River segment of the LCNHT from desecration by NorthWestern Energy. NWE is a relative newcomer to this state, and the company has made it clear that they are not here to serve Montanans but to exploit us for profit. Montanans will pay for this transmission line, if not in higher utility bills, then definitely in lost tourism dollars and a devalued landscape.

We are blessed with an incredible quality of life here in the Jefferson Valley. If we are to preserve our quality of life for future generations, then we must begin by preserving our past. The bottom line is that MSTI is a threat to our past and our future. NorthWestern Energy doesn’t belong here if the company is going to trample over the people of Montana.

Thomas J. Elpel is president of the Jefferson River Canoe Trail Chapter of the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation (www.JeffersonRiver.org). This guest editorial was published in the Montana Standard on June 25th, 2010.

"It is an interesting contradiction to have the absolute confidence that I could change the world, while on the other hand, being too shy and socially awkward to walk through the halls at high school."

Physically, I spent most of my youth identifying flowers, hiking and camping, and practicing my survival skills. Mentally, I was seriously distracted by a nonstop inner dialogue about pertinent social, economic, and environmental issues. I developed an early appreciation for holistic thinking and the idea that there was a win-win-win solution to every problem – we didn’t have to give up jobs to save the environment, we didn’t have to sacrifice quality of life to live sustainably. Although the media always seemed to frame issues as this-against-that, I found that there were typically third alternatives – options that would enable us to build a clean and green society, one that made people both richer and freer.

I hiked miles and miles through the mountains, exploring my backyard, while processing ideas such as low-cost, high efficiency house construction, sustainable farming practices, launching green businesses, holistic management, foreign policy, reducing the national deficit, designing more fuel-efficient cars, biogas plants and swamp filters for treating city sewage, revamping the educational system, and on and on…

I wanted to change the world, but I was just a kid with a lot of big ideas and no credentials. If anyone were to ever listen to me, first I needed to walk the talk and demonstrate that living green was indeed the path to prosperity. But to do that, I needed a partner.

It is an interesting contradiction to have the absolute confidence that I could change the world, while on the other hand, being too shy and socially awkward to walk through the halls at high school.  If the weather permitted, I walked from class to class around the outside of the building. At lunch, I sat at a table for other social misfits who had nowhere else to sit, and there met my first love. Being a holistic thinker, I believed that any relationship could be made to work; I just needed a partner who believed in me.

Together, we built an epic story. We walked across Montana, then returned home, got married, bought land, moved into a tent, and built the house of our dreams on a shoestring budget.  We avoided the mortgage trap and the job trap, not by earning a lot of money, but by avoiding the need for it in the first place. Although we were poor by any reasonable standards, we had few expenses, so we went on exciting wilderness adventures, and we installed a photovoltaic system to produce all of our electricity from sunshine. It wasn’t that difficult to do.

Along the way, we started a family, I wrote books and produced videos, taught survival skills, built my own publishing company, bought a business and started a bookstore, and founded the nonprofit Jefferson River Canoe Trail.  I built houses, testing out energy-efficient design concepts and alternative methods and materials.  I bought a diesel truck and attempted producing my own biodiesel from waste French fry grease from restaurants. I launched our fledgling Green University® LLC and began to explore an alternative approach to higher education, mentoring young people in sustainable living and green business development.

The inner dialogue never shut off in my head, and I never wavered in my belief that I could change the world. I built up a resume that, while sparse in some areas, was at least minimally adequate to launch a political career and run for governor of Montana. The one thing I still needed was the support of my partner.

From the beginning, my marriage was predicated on the belief that there was a win-win solution to any issue.  No two people will agree on everything, but there is always a workable solution if both parties are willing to consider all the alternatives. That belief held my marriage together for nearly twenty-one years, despite our differences.

I wanted to change the world. My wife just wanted to raise our family and live our lives. I wanted a public life. She didn’t want anyone to know we existed. And most importantly, I wanted to pounce on her and play and wrestle and run through the woods. She wanted me to sit still and talk. On the one hand, we got along great as friends, we seldom fought, and we were together 24/7 for most of our marriage. And yet, we never resolved our differences, and we never bridged the emotional divide between us.

My marriage was sustainable as long as I believed we could ultimately resolve our differences. It just took me twenty-one years to admit defeat.  I experienced the last three of those years as a string of chronic panic attacks at the prospect of ending my marriage, breaking up our family, and losing everything I had ever believed in, worked for, and in a sense, campaigned for.

As I start over with a new life and a new relationship, I find myself optimistic at times, but also greatly shaken.  Emotionally, losing everything shook me into rubble.  I lack the inner confidence I always had – that I could change the world, that I could learn or do whatever was necessary to accomplish that mission, even stretching far beyond my otherwise quiet and introverted self.

Challenges that once seemed easy, now often seem insurmountable. Rebuilding my personal life, my enterprises, and my resume often seems like too much work and too much trouble, and I don’t presently have the emotional spine necessary to endure a political life. More than anything, my outlook is darker, as for the first time in my life, I have acknowledged that some problems have no winnable solutions.

By any reasonable measure, I could be immensely successful if I would just focus on any one topic and make a career out of it, as most normal people do. I am sufficiently well-versed in at least a dozen different subject areas, any one of which could become a full-time career. And yet, there is nothing that I am willing to give up, and so I find myself stumbling along, scattered in so many different directions that sometimes I feel ineffective at accomplishing anything.

More than anything, there is still that inexorable pull to keep flowing in the same direction that I always have. Working to make a difference in the world is the only vision I have known since childhood. It is this big dream of changing the world that inspires me, and nothing less seems worth working for. Trying to look at the bright side, losing my marriage has at least made me a little more human, and I can better relate to other people and their circumstances.

I don’t know if I will ever run for governor, but at least I may run for a local house or senate seat and see what happens. In the meantime, I have started this blog to begin articulating my resume and vision – if not for the reader, than at least for myself, as part of the process of getting back on my feet and starting over. Or, maybe I am just getting eccentric at an early age, and I can spend the rest of my life pretending to be governor.

If you like what you see on my websites, and want to be part of it, then please ask away. Being introverted and solitary by nature, I have often tried to do it all myself – everything from writing or filming, editing and formatting, publishing, marketing, and often packing and shipping my own books and videos, to handwriting all of my own HTML, to designing and building my own solar water heaters and developing new construction techniques.  I have tried to be an institution unto myself, seriously understaffed and underfunded for the scale of the projects I undertake. Thus, I am seeking partners who want to make a difference in the world, anyone who thinks we might have even one thing in common and wants to work together to make it happen. Drop me a note. Let’s see where it goes. [Read More...]