Chris North
Lecturer, School of Sciences and Physical Education, College of Education
“You can teach a far better lesson with your life than your words.”In the landscape of the constantly evolving university curriculum two courses offered at the College of Education are pushing new physical boundaries. TEPE110: Rock Climbing Contexts and Techniques and TEPE112: Land Journeys and Ethics are offering students taking Outdoor Education as a major or minor component to their degree an experience based learning environment that will leave them with crucial practical and theoretical skills to pass on to the next generation of outdoor adventurists.
For lecturer Chris North, the courses are also about highlighting the environmental issues that make a falsehood of the ‘100% Pure’ branding of the Aotearoa wilderness.
“I reflect back and my connection with nature came from spending time outdoors and appreciating those places,” says Chris, who is currently undertaking a PhD in outdoor and environmental education. “I think outdoor recreation has made me value natural areas and also highlighted the difference between some of the areas that we’ve set aside not to plunder and the areas that we are plundering – some of the stark contrasts there.”
Contrasts such as water quality: “I’ve got young kids and I take them into the mountains and teach them how to drink out of a stream and they’re so excited by that experience of drinking straight from water gushing down a mountainside. Yet I really do enjoy the parks that we have around Christchurch and the waterways that go through them and we’ve been on some little boating trips down the Heathcote River, and you don’t want to be drinking out of that so I have to teach my children not to.
“I so value the fact that Christchurch water is untreated – I love the taste of the water here. And it’s only a matter of time before the consequences of our agricultural practices and our urban practices start to contaminate that to the point where we have to treat it.” [This interview took place prior to the February 2011 earthquake – in the aftermath both the Avon and Heathcote Rivers were severely polluted by up to 40 000 litres a day of sewage, and our artesian water supply has been treated with chlorine, all of which has highlighted many of the sustainability issues around water to the wider community].
“One of the tragedies of society is that we change people’s behaviour so that we can maintain our economic platform. I’d love to see a planet where we understand the consequences of our actions whether it’s economically or recreationally on an individual level, on an organisational level, and on a national level.”
Leave No Trace
It is such thinking that inspired Chris to become a founder of Leave No Trace in New Zealand, which came about after he lived in the United States twelve years ago and worked for an organisation that ran month long expeditions and incorporated Leave No Trace training into their courses. During that time, he experienced a visceral example of the value of such an ethic in an area where the soil has a microscopic life in it called crypto-biotic crust: “if you place your foot there you actually crush the soil structure down and that can be there twenty years later. You look back and your footprint has crushed these castles that these microbes have designed and live in, and that’s a very tangible understanding of our impact. And I guess I see a really strong connection there between if you’re camping in an area for a while, what do you do with your toilet waste, where do you get your drinking water from? I think those connections are really valuable for people to understand how an individual’s actions and choices can have a wider impact.”
Chris felt that the Leave No Trace movement was an important vehicle for educating about these things and when he came back he set up a branch in New Zealand. Although the group is still a small team, they have developed a website and education resources, and also run education programmes. Last year the group had the opportunity to train staff at both the Outward Bound and the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre organisations. “What we’re trying to do is get the influential people,” says Chris, “so we’re teaching the people who lead groups because we feel that will have the biggest cascade effect.”
The value of outdoor education
Chris believes that outdoor education has a role in connecting people to the outdoors so that they begin to take action in their lives. “I feel strongly that global warming and other global issues are too big for most people, and children in particular, and there is quite a lot of research or academic writing that says, ‘let’s connect people with the places, let’s give them an affinity and affection and develop a relationship and once they care about something then they’ll choose to act’, so that’s where I think outdoor education is a powerful tool,” he says.
“It takes people into those beautiful environments where they tend to naturally feel peaceful. Sometimes it is action, sometimes it’s physically intense, but all those different ways of establishing a relationship inspire people to care. And then people are ready for ‘oh ok, I’d really like to protect this.’
“I think that the physicality of the relationship with the environment is really important so there are some people out there who don’t want to sit down and meditate, they want to charge up a hill at a high pace and max out aerobically and then they’ll collapse in a heap and enjoy the view and I think that’s a perfectly valid way to explore and enjoy nature in a really physical kind of way. And the fact that you’re carrying everything with you, you get to see how much food you need, you get to see how much rubbish you produce, and realise what you maybe don’t need.”
This philosophy is also behind the new courses in rock climbing and land journeys that are taught by Chris. As course convener for Land Journeys and Ethics, Chris says that the course is about “journeys from urban settings to wilderness settings, looking at how we interact with the land. People go into these places for certain values or certain things that they find there – the mystery, the naturalness, the kind of magic of the place. We’re actually seeking these places out for that reason and yet we’re bringing with us our cultural baggage and sometimes leaving behind more than just cultural baggage.”
Sustainability is factored into the learning within the courses. “The students have a bit of a taster of how we try and incorporate sustainability into the things that we do, for example, with our food purchases, and our environmental impacts,” says Chris. “We get school groups in and we go out to these places that are really beautiful and have some good historical context as well, so we look at the amount of place/space development, trying to get those environmental and social aspects of sustainability in. When students do the course for years 11-13 approximately a third is focussed on exploring education for sustainability and how we can re-envision outdoor education through sustainability, and part of their assessment is to develop a year plan that includes a sustainability focus.
“If the people who leave here as teachers have the resources and the support and the passion to spread some of these ideas and to teach people that they need to have open minds on the bigger level, they are going to be pretty influential.”
Profile by Sharon McIver