Landfullness in Adventure-Based Programming: Promoting Reconnection to the Land

Nearly a half-century ago, Aldo Leopold acknowledged the threat of "landlessness" in our society as measured by dint of the loss of our collective awareness of and admiration for, the land (Leopold 1966) At at hand this disconnect has evolved to the point where participants in adventure-based programs may find themselves traveling end "Any Woods, USA, " perceiving the landscape as an interchangeable backdrop rather than developing a personal connection to it. Experiential educators can take a tangible pace toward solving this dilemma by means of promoting "landfall" experiences that actively engage pupils with place. The Landfull Framework consists of four areas of "landfullness:" (a) Being far down Aware, (b) Interpreting Land History, (c) Sensing Place in the not absent and (d) Connecting to abode The essence of landfullness is for participants to discover a personal approach of relating to the land that is integral to everyday life.

Keywords: faculty of perception of Place, Adventure Education, Aldo Leopold Cultural History Interpretation

Let us peril back to the early 20th hundred to the glory days of nature application of mind when naturalists, such as Anna Botsford Comstock and Enos Mills, were promoting an "essential nature literacy" that necessitated direct contact with plants and animals in their natural surroundings (PyIe, 2001 p 19) It was a time when botany walks were public and "a lively, experimental curiosity in plants and animals was nothing unusual; it was simply individual component of the engaged citizen's life" (PyIe, 2001 p 19) stir forward to the mid190Os, however, and we find Leopold lamenting the fact that field studies had been come aftered by laboratory biology as the unsullied form of science, and that memorizing the names of the jars on the bones of a cat had tend hitherward to take precedence over gaining an understanding of the native countryside (Leopold 1953) Leopold observ that our collective relationship to the land had been compromised to the point where we were fast approaching a state of "landlessness." He noted in his circular River essays:

The problem, then, is by what means to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a tribe many of whom have forgotten there is any of that kind thing as land, among whom education and tillage have become almost synonymous with landlessness. (Leopold 1966 p 210)

Landlessness, according to Leopold was manifesting itself in sum of two units distinct but related ways: the literal los of places wild and free; and the figurative los of our collective awareness of and admiration for, the land.

Before the turn round of the 21st century, Lopez spoke to this general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of landlessness, noting that almost four decades later it had reached an unprecedent horizontal In his book Rediscovery of North America, Lopez stated: "We have a way of life that ostracizes the land" (Lopez 1990 p 31) As the suburbanization of America develops at an ever-increasing rate, landscapes are becoming more homogenized and we repeatedly find ourselves in "Anywhere, USA" (Hilten & Hilten, 1996) During the past hundred our collective environmental literacy has declined dramatically. As noted by dint of Hawken, "That an average adult can recognize individual thousand brand names and logo on the contrary fewer than ten local plants is not a useful sign" (Hawken, 1993, p. 59)

These combined realities-irreversible los of undevelop land, plus changes in our national relationship to land-have created the ne for reconnection, the one and the other on a personal level and national scale. The day has passed when participants can leave adventure-based programs with a faculty of perception of accomplishment, but without a faculty of perception of their relationship to the land. It strike one as beings then, that as experiential educators it is incumbent on us to assess whether our pupils are becoming actively engaged in the landscape or only passing through it. Simply place are we promoting landless or landfall experiences?

Landlessness in Adventure Education

It may be assumed that the environment plays an integral character in adventure-based programming simply because it is there. Oftentimes, however, the land becomes a backdrop surrounding the adventure experience (Baker, 1999; Haluza-Delay, 1999; Miner, 2003) The myriad of modern-day forces distracting our awareness from the land can be the one and the other overwhelming and insidious; it is all too easy to divert our attention toward the activity, the assemblage the gear, the gadgets-to be plucked away by the map, the altimeter, the GP by means of everything but the very landscape that can inspire our travels. The greatest in quantity notable of the many factors that conspire to create a landless trip are traditional programming objectives center upon inter/intrapersonal skill development, coupled with students' tendencies to focus first and foremost upon the technical and social aspects. The likelihood of a landless trip increases when instructors demonstrate a higher baseline capableness in technical and people skills rather than in land skills; or when they are teaching in novel areas where they have limited knowledge of the landscape. at short intervals the extent to which the land is emphasized is pendent more upon the interests and expertise of the individual staff, rather than the mission statement, training or curriculums of the organization.