Nine Reasons Why
I’ve got a question for you. Well, I lie. I’ve got three questions for you, but they’re all related. If you had a whack of time and no limitations, what’s the one thing you’d choose to do? In other words, what’s your favourite pastime or activity? That one special something you wish you could do all the time?
I’ll guess many of you envisioned doing something active, in the outdoors. Something adventurous. Maybe bushwalking, or packrafting, or mountain biking, or rock climbing. Or skiing, or mountaineering, or canyoning, or kayaking. Perhaps it was simply being outdoors, engrossed in nature. Or maybe it was none of the above, and something more obscure … like baking scones.
I’m studying to become a teacher, and I recently posed these same questions to over a hundred Year 12 students during an educational presentation. But instead of describing their favourite pastime, I asked them to draw a picture of it. And what I found staggering was that not one student drew a picture of an outdoor adventure sport. Not a single student. None of them drew a picture of scones either, but that’s beside the point.
What is your point, then? I hear you ask. Well, aside from being concerned about some students' artistic skills (seriously, how hard is it to draw a stick figure?), for me it raised another important question.
Do we, as a society, place enough value on outdoor recreation?
You be the judge. Personally, I question whether we’re doing enough to ensure that future generations of young adventurers, and therefore conservationists, are being nurtured. If that’s the case, then how do we get more young people into the outdoors?
I think that understanding the different motivations for being outdoors is a good place to start. And I reckon that having an awareness of the positive effects that can arise from doing so can only be a good thing, for everyone. For those of us—young and old and everywhere in between—who haven’t had the opportunity to experience what the outdoors is really like, it can inspire us to get out there and give it
