Siobhan Interprets Nature

In preparation for this last blog prompt, I revisited my posts throughout this course. I want start this blog post with revisiting my definition of nature and how this definition shapes my worldview, relationships, and ethics. The story begins when I was a child. It was key time in shaping my relationship with nature. I was fortunate that I had access to what I perceived as nature just out my backdoor. The beloved woods at my parent’s place in Eastern Ontario brought adventure, mystery, and joy. This interaction with nature as a young child shaped my view that nature should be respected and honoured. I had the advantage of having a forest right out my backdoor with habitat for many species of birds and animals. I will tell you now that I have changed my definition of nature. I will revisit this at the end of the blog post.

(Photo: Marlene Paibomesai)

Past Experience Shaping Future Connection

The photo below is of me and my Dad on a typical day in the summer -outside enjoying and exploring nature. My experience as a child that shaped my current views and interaction with nature fits closely with Richard Louv’s experience as a child as described in interview with David Suzuki and Richard Louv @AGO (DavidSuzukiFDN, 2012). This conversation between two leading thought-provoking people, highlights that everyone experiences nature in different ways. This was apparent to me when Richard Louv’s told the story of Juan Martinez. Juan Martinez’s experience would have been very different from my own. He grew up in a densely populated urban space with very limited access to wild spaces. Louv’s story highlights for me the importance of acknowledging all nature in all space including urban ones. These little patches of nature might be small and limited, but it is still there, and we should learn to appreciate it’s beauty, as Martinez had done. We have the opportunity of interpreting and sharing that urban nature that with others, we just need to look for it. I now live in an urban setting separated from nature at times. I believe that we have a responsibility to integrate nature in urban spaces for the benefit of both nature and humans.

The Beaver Pond!

(Photo: Marlene Paibomesai)

What beliefs do you bring?

Early life experiences at the beaver pond have shaped my interaction with nature. Those moments of exploring the woods with no single goal in mind moulded my beliefs that nature is a cycle. The cycle is respected by the plants and the animals. This course has shown me that I have much to learn and should spend time reflecting on how my interpretation may or may not agree with other peoples. One belief I shaped through this course and something that I revisited often was the principles of nature interpretation and the associated gifts presented in Beck et al., 2019.

Although all the principles and gifts are important. There were three principles that stood out to me - the gift of spark, joy, and wholeness. Why did I pick these three?

Spark! I believe that one the main goals as an interpreter is instil a sense of wonder in all audiences that we are spending time with. Whether it a group of school children or older adults or maybe someone on the other side of their smartphone. Sparking wonder and connection help to motivate people maybe delve a little deeper into a particular subject.

Joy! I believe in organizing events or content that brings joy to people. Joy helps to encourage people to continuing to engage in an activity. Part of this is offer accessible program that reduce barriers of others to enjoy. .

Wholeness! Another belief I have is that we should recognize both indigenous knowledge and western knowledge as equals. This represents wholeness as both knowledge systems are valid and would present the whole picture to the audience. This is especially true in Canada.

This is my joy! A canoe ride with my partner and my dog.

(Photo: Marlene Paibomesai)

What responsibilities do you have?

We also have the responsibility to encourage others to get out and enjoy nature and taking actions to preserve nature at the same time. We should tread lightly so that future generations can also experience nature in all her glory. For examples, when we take to the trails to experience nature, we should never leave a trace except for footprints. We can do this by packing out garbage and staying on the marked trails. When we step off the marked trail, we never know what we are stepping on and what ecosystem we are disturbing.

As a nature interpreter, I also have a responsibility to make a space accessible to all. This does not only mean creating a space that everyone can participate in, but it also means to preserve the space and knowledge for future generations. In addition to promote proper codes of conduct. We have a responsibility to share both indigenous ways of knowing and western knowledge. This might be in the form of a speaker who is focused on incorporating indigenous ways of knowing, consulting with first nation communities and elders when creating content and supporting indigenous peoples.

To end I will revisit the topic of our first blog post - my definition of nature. In the YouTube video from this week, Louv is asked “what the definition of nature?” and he is explains that the “definition of nature is up to the poets” (DavidSuzukiFDN, 2012). This is how I have chosen to change my definition of nature from a static definition to a dynamic one. Nature is in the eyes of the beholder. As a nature interpreter we are there to guide, suggest and share knowledge, but in actuality our responsibility is the give others the gift of observation. The gift to take a moment and build a relationship and connection with nature. My relationship with nature continues to evolve as I grow older, but I would say my base value of respect for nature will never waiver. I hope to inspire this in others to help change our future to one of hope!

Get out and enjoy nature! Miigwetch (Thank you).

(Photo: Marlene Paibomesai)

Sources:

Beck, L., Cable, T., & Knudson, D. (2018). In Interpreting cultural and natural heritage: For A Better World. SAGAMORE Publishing.

Your dog is very beautiful, and they really encapsulate the gift of joy. One thing I really love about having pets is that they can remind you to find unbridled joy in the little things. I love how much joy and delight a dog can take from just going outside and running around in a field. That being said, I have cats so they don’t inspire me to explore the world with boundless energy as much as they inspire me to sit still and enjoy the warmth of a sunbeam. It’s a different kind of nature appreciation.

I loved the way you described the gifts of spark, joy and wholeness. I think that these gifts are going to be instrumental in preserving the natural world for future generations. I’ve personally found that in light of the climate and biodiversity crises, caring about the environment can be painful and demoralizing. I know that I wouldn’t be able to keep caring if I stopped finding sources of joy.

I think that if your approach to nature interpretation can reach a lot of people who might be feeling demoralized or alienated. I think that inspiring people to enjoy nature and teaching them to observe and interpret nature in a dynamic, personal way will also inspire them to protect the natural world for future generations. If you can empower them to build their own personal relationships with nature, I think they’ll feel a drive to protect nature for its own sake. They’ll keep to marked trails and they’ll pick up their garbage not because someone told them to, but because they want to.

I can’t believe I am submitting my final blog post for this course. I specify “final blog post for this course” as I am not sure if I am done blogging. I found it very therapeutic each week to blog about what I had learned each week and explain my nature journey. However, writing this final post for the course feels like the perfect way to end the semester and commemorate what I have learned and how much I have grown. When I first began this course I thought nature interpretation was just for people that lead trail hikes or nature walks. However, I was naive as there is so much more depth to the role of a nature interpreter and it requires knowledge of not only nature ,but also how to communicate and effectively engage many different types of people. It is a complex job with a lot of responsibility to effectively communicate. Through developing an understanding of what a nature interpreter actually is, I also learned a lot about myself.

My understanding of what nature means to me and my personal ethics have grown extensively throughout this course. I believe everyone should have access to experience nature because nature is the most important place on earth. I know nature isn’t just one place but I know that all of nature is equally important and precious. From reading the course material, reading others' blog posts and writing my own blog posts, I have learned that nature holds a special place in everyone's minds and hearts. I believe that nature connects us all and I am so grateful for the relationship I have with nature. I believe everyone should have an equal opportunity to experience nature and learn about it. However, I also believe that nature is something we as humans take for granted. Maybe because we don’t fully understand it. We are so lucky to have all this natural beauty in the world but we don’t respect it. I believe if we don’t take action soon to protect it, we won't have much of the nature we know left to share with future generations. I have gained a new sense of responsibility as a personal ethic from this course. I feel responsible to share the knowledge I have gained from taking this course and my previous sciences course. Especially the nature specific knowledge I have gained on habitat destruction, pollution and climate change. Now that I know how to effectively interpret nature, as I have learned through this course, blogging and podcasting, I want to continue to share. I have shown my family and friends my blog and my podcasts and they all expressed that they learned a lot from what I shared. If I can make an impact on the people closest to me, maybe I can make an impact on a larger scale. To ensure I take what I learned from this course and use it moving forward I have decided to create an action plan for myself.

I will start a twitter version of my current tumblr blog

I plan to start a twitter account to share my nature knowledge as I believe it is a more useful platform. This is because I check twitter regularly but I don’t post often because I didn’t previously have a direction for my account. Furthermore, I believe more people post and read posts on twitter compared to tumblr. Therefore, I will be reaching a wider audience and have a wider variety of informative information to re-post on twitter because there is a wider variety of the science and nature community that post on twitter. I currently follow some of my previous science professors and some informative science figures on twitter and I truly enjoy reading their posts. I also enjoy that twitter has a 280 character limit which makes it easier to keep posts concise with only relevant information. This is because I feel like people are more likely to read a short burst of information compared to my current 500 word posts.

I will get more involved in projects that work to protect nature

There are many initiatives working to protect the environment, however I have never taken the time to learn more about them and get involved. Specifically, I have always been interested in climate change mitigation. I plan to continue to get more educated on the topic. From my knowledge some of the ways I can help mitigate climate change and help protect nature is participating in garbage pick ups in nature areas, buying less plastic based projects, eating plant based, and traveling less by gas powered transportation. I know this won’t instantly fix the problem of climate change or instantly protect nature. However, if I start my journey of taking action against climate change and share my successes with others, I may be able to show others what they can do to protect nature.

I will continue to learn more about nature and nature interpretation

Even though our nature interpretation course is coming to an end, my nature interpretation journey is just beginning now that I better understand it. I plan to continue to research more about nature to expand my knowledge so that when I interpret nature for others I have all the facts. I truly enjoy reading online articles by Ecology Letters as they are a trusted peer-reviewed source that focus on a lot of topics I find interesting, including a lot about nature. The more I educate myself on current nature research, the better I can interpret nature to others. I also plan to get involved by joining different nature interpreter groups, such as High Park Nature Center on Facebook. This way I can network to get to know other nature interpreters and learn new ways to interpret nature for our world.

I will explore!

Lastly I plan to continue to grow my connection to nature by getting outside as often as I can and exploring our beautiful natural world. As I am signing off for the last time during this course I just want to say thank you for all the great connections that I have made. As well as give a final reminder to never stop exploring, because you never know what you will discover!

- Sydney Spearing

I also think that continuing your blog on Twitter is a fantastic idea!

My relationship with Twitter is very similar to yours in that I’ll check it fairly often and sometimes I’ll retweet something, but I don’t do a lot of original posting. I’ve thought about making more original posts so I can be a more active Twitter participant, but I agree that it can be hard to maintain a social media presence if you don’t have a direction.

Twitter does have a really wonderful science and nature community (and I suspect that we might be following a lot of the same people) and while you can learn a lot from them as a passive observer, I think you could learn a lot more if you actively participate. Also, I think that you’ve had some great insights this semester, so I’m sure there’s a lot you can teach people as well.

Your willingness to learn, and your commitment to using trusted peer-reviewed sources is going to be a great asset. Social media has given us some great opportunities to learn, but it’s also made it easy to spread misleading or sensationalized information, so I think that anyone who takes their platform seriously and commits to checking their sources before they post will do a world of good.

I hope you have a wonderful break!

How can I interpret nature through art? This question left me thinking for a few days. This question inspired me to look through different forms of art to try to interpret nature. The group of seven were mentioned in the unit four notes and the group of seven truly do an amazing job of interpreting nature through their artwork. Growing up, my parents and grandparents had a lot of artwork in their houses’. This meant that I grew up seeing beautiful nature through artwork in the houses I was in. My mother and my grandparents also took their gardening very seriously, therefore I grew up seeing many different plants and flowers in their outdoor gardens. Along with seeing more beautiful flowers and landscapes in the artwork inside the house. I always interpreted the artwork in our home as an extension of nature and thought my family was trying to bring nature’s beauty inside. Therefore, to me artwork was simply an extension of nature or a way to capture it and share it with everyone who came into the house. To me personally, all nature is a gift of beauty as we are so lucky to be able to see and enjoy what nature has to offer. After reading the textbook, the connection of nature through art and the gift of beauty becomes so clear because artwork is the perfect way to share natures “gift of beauty. For me specifically artwork was an influence for me to go out and explore nature to find its beauty. Nature has hidden beauty everywhere; however, you must look for it to find it. Therefore, when I see artwork, I just want to go to nature and see more of it. I do struggle with art sometimes, as I do find it beautiful, however sometimes it isn’t enough for me, especially when it is nature artwork. This is because when I see a beautiful work of nature art, I want to see more of it: I want to see how the scene moves in the breeze or what nature lies outside the edges of the frame. It also makes me wonder where the artwork was inspired and why the artist decided to paint this exact frame. These questions I ask myself potentially to fulfill the artist goals, in having the art viewers left thinking or wondering. However, for me, this can be frustrating as my scientific brain loves answers as well as seeing nature firsthand. Overall, I believe art is an amazing way of interpreting “the gift of beauty” that nature has to offer, however I would personally like to see natures beautiful gifts firsthand, and I am lucky that I had artwork in my life to inspire me to get outside and adventure.

The way you described the conflict between your artistic impulses and your scientific brain really spoke to me as well. I think a lot of people see art and science as being opposites which makes sense to a certain extent. A lot of art demands that you embrace not knowing, or even that you suspend your disbelief and “forget” what you already know, for the sake of the story and having to embrace ambiguity can be frustrating if you thrive on finding answers.

My working definition of privilege is an advantage (conscious or unconscious) given to a certain demographic or individual that allows them to have access to more resources and opportunities than others. It is a privilege to have access to good health care, healthy foods in grocery stores, clean water, higher education, money to afford a car or a house, and even to be able to access and enjoy Provincial and National parks. I acknowledge that I have many privileges as a white, English-speaking woman in university who has access to good health care, food, water, a car, and have had the opportunity to experience camping in some Provincial and National parks in Canada. I also grew up in a house with a large backyard that allowed me to experience nature in the safety of my home.

Through various stories in our textbook and readings for this week I understood more about how much of a privilege it is to be able to experience all that our parks system has to offer in Canada and the United States and there were some points of view I hadn’t fully considered. The very first story in our textbook in Chapter 7 mentions the Junior Naturalist program run in 2014 by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority and the Boys & Girls Club of Mar Vista Gardens in Los Angeles. This group of kids aged 12-16 lived only a few miles from the coast but many had never experienced the ocean until they went on trips with the club. Access to transportation to the coast and parents who were able to take the kids on a trip were barriers to experiencing nature that was right next door.

At the end of the program there was a camping trip, but many of the parents were skeptical as they had worked so hard to have a roof over their heads and they associated sleeping in tents with being homeless. That was the last thing they would want to experience “for fun”. This point of view really stood out to me. Many people have the privilege of living in a house and not worrying about becoming homeless and so they feel comfortable leaving their home environment to explore nature and many prefer living outdoors. But to people who have struggled to find a place to call home permanently, their priority might be to find a stable home rather than go out to explore nature and “rough it” with outhouses and camp food. Sometimes the issues with reaching different demographics in environmental programming is not about the content of the presentations, but the fact that many individuals can’t even make it to the park to participate. A positive and engaging program is nothing if you can’t reach more people.

In nature interpretation, privilege is present in many ways such as the languages that signage and programs are written in, the accessibility of the area to different forms of transportation, accommodations for those with/without disabilities, and programming directed towards different age groups and cultural demographics. As interpreters, we can and should strive to open nature interpretation events up to many more people by creating programs in different languages, working with other nature interpreters from different cultural backgrounds, fighting for more access to parks through public transportation, and by being open to traveling to different communities to bring nature to them. I thought that the idea of roving interpretation sounded really fun, and I think that that kind of spontaneous interpretation can allow more individuals to learn about the positive and amazing aspects of nature that get so many of us hooked. If we, as environmental interpreters, acknowledge our privileges and work to find new, innovative ways to communicate our knowledge to others, we can help remove more barriers to the natural world.

I think you’re right to say that effective nature interpretation should inspire curiosity and leave you wanting to do more research on your own. I remember feeling that way during the first Environmental Science course I took at Guelph when the experiment we performed yielded inconclusive results.

It hadn’t occurred to me that you could inspire that kind of feeling as a zookeeper or a tour guide, but now that you’ve pointed it out, it makes perfect sense to me. I think that in a sense, nature interpretation can be as much about drawing attention to highlighting knowledge gaps you didn’t know you had as it is about filling the ones you did know about.

I also like that you highlighted the importance of being willing to learn as an interpreter and that you’re likely to encounter questions where you don’t know the answer. I think that on top of a willingness to learn, an interpreter should also have the strength of character to admit when they don’t know something because an important part of teaching is avoiding contributing to the spread of misinformation.