Dan McCaslin: Outdoor Education and New Nature-Based Myths Needed in the Anthropocene – Noozhawk

Although some young teachers may be willing to take responsibility, the truth is that few schools practice true outdoor education (Midland School near Los Olivos is an exception).

About 220 years ago, German Romantic poets realized that an overdeveloped scientific rationalism threatened their cultural vitality and individual imaginations. Poets likeFriedrich Schiller, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Novalis noticed that the Industrial Revolution and scientism had heavily impacted their epoch in the Germanies (and also in 19th century United Kingdom and United States).

Novalis claimed that the highest form of true culture was music, and later in the century, Friedrich Nietzsche agreed through his adulation of operas by Georges Bizet and Richard Wagner.

Like the English Romantic Lake poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, the Germans looked to nature and the green vitality at the core of the cosmos for spiritual sustenance, proclaiming that simply walking in the woods or shrublands creates energy in the human spirit and mind. (Only a few hundred years earlier we would read only negative stories about scary nature [wildeor], vicious wild animals about, with no roads at all.)

Wordsworth memorably wrote: "Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, through all the years of this our life, to lead from joy to joy."

Accentuated by rigid COVID-19-based self-quarantining, many of us today remain wary of going farther outside past the local parks and frontcountry to the less populated backcountry trails in federal wildernesses. Like the materialistic central Europeans, we also need new and enchanting nature myths and stories to lift the brain fog and draw us away from town and its many cares.

I know that local Rattlesnake Canyon Trail has been inundated with hikers, hence, as with most of the other local frontcountry trails, there are now parking issues at some trailheads, e.g., along Hot Springs Road and at the Romero Canyon Trailhead.

We can imagine how indigenous people in pre-contact days also might have chosen to head across the local mountains (e.g., past Santa Barbara's Painted Cave site on todays Highway 154 to enjoy the interior areas during bounteous springtime. They might have been drawn by spiritual stories about alapay, petrified mythic boulders, skulking nunasin, coyote tales and the sheer animistic magic of the older times.

UCSB political science professor Tae-Yeoun Keum writes about those late 18th century German idealists and poets (including Friedrich Schlegel), who found themselves in a modern [German] political society so thoroughly dominated by a culture of rationality that it has become impossible to imagine it any other way (see 4.1.1 Books).

I definitely admire and appreciate logical thinking and the scientific method, and happily acknowledge the achievements of the Industrial Revolution.

Yet, it remains that the Holocaust is still the major lesson of the 20th century, and our industries continue to decimate the Earths climate. The growing dystopian worldview, especially the cynicism growing among the young, is partly a result of the mistakes of materialism and just too many humans (and their 1.5 billion cows) on the platform.

Therefore, we really need new stories and poetry to illuminate the positive, to cheer on good solutions-oriented science, and to entice humans to drag their kids farther out of doors for longer sojourns.

UCSBs Keum writes that those German idealist-poets thus made calls on the literary genre of myth to serve as a ground from which individuals can begin to imagine different possibilities for what politics and the society can look like (see 4.1.1).

Honestly, I gain absurd joy from roaming around the backcountry, out past Cachuma Reservoir and into the dry hinterlands beyond Nira Camp. Today, we have some truly depressed children and adults. Vitamin N nature therapy is an infallible cure for such conditions! Despite the driving and gasoline costs, day-hiking and car-camping is pretty inexpensive ($20 a night at Fremont Camp along Paradise Valley Road vs. $200-plus a night at El Capitan Ranch glamping center).

It seems like many local schools, including private schools, have given up leading students out into local wilderness areas or on light backpacking treks anywhere and they gave this up long before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

A wonderful 20th century Santa Barbara public school teacher and legend led many students into local nature areas for decades without any issues. Frank Van Schaik taught for several decades at the old Wilson School (since shuttered), eventually becoming principal and retiring in 1982.

In his fascinating 1994 memoir, "Home of the Wilson Wildcats" (see 4.1.1), he eloquently describes repeatedly hauling students into nearby nature areas, much as we did at Crane School when I taught there in the 1980s and 1990s. Thirteen chapters cover outdoor trips he led, some with his pal, the legendary Dick Smith, and the adventures became very exciting for the students and truly educational (and somewhat outlandish).

My gosh, did they take chances back in the day! Yet, some of this camping and rough play was precisely the attraction for the students. I located a dozen activities in Van Schaiks book that simply would not be sanctioned or allowed at any school I know about today.

These are outdoor losses for children in my view, and most of the hikes and regions remain fabulous and enticing today. See below, although the B.B. gun wars (!) would certainly have gotten me fired at any school!

Van Schaik lists these destinations among those he visited with his Wilson Wildcats: We went to Rattlesnake Canyon to Bear Meadow and to Figueroa Mountain to the beach camps at Gaviota and Las Varas to Big Sur to the Monterey coast to Blue Canyon and to Pine Mountain to Mineral King to various spots on the Mojave Desert to Mount Abel and Mount Pinos ... (partial listing).

Intriguing stories about backcountry characters such as the Kansas farmers led by faith-healer Hiram Wheat in the 1880s, or memorable vignettes from the Chumash oral tradition (Blackburn, 4.1.1) including the "Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island" (cf. Scott ODell novel), and scores of semi-mythological tales about the Road to Similaqsa abound.

In truth, uttering a few tales around a tiny campfire at Nira Camp with 15 students, all enjoying a mug of hot chocolate, strumming a few guitar chords and singing, may be worth any five or six algebra classes (especially if the class has been on Zoom!).

Make every effort to go over into Santa Ynez or Matilija Creek or Manzana Creek areas and entice your children to come along and enjoy the greenery, too. Good nutrition and gear make it more enjoyable, of course.

We all desperately need Vitamin N and new backcountry tales told after hiking and climbing around. As Wordsworth chants, Nature leads us from joy to joy as we tread the shrubland path beside the flowing creek.

Tae-Yeoun Keum, "Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought" (Harvard, 2021); Frank Van Schaik, "Home of the Wilson Wildcats" (Capra, 1994), p. 169 for BB gun wars and pp. 333-334 for partial list of places he camped with fifth-grade students; Thomas Blackburn, "Decembers Child" (UC Press, 1975); I discuss the Road to Similaqsa in "Autobiography in the Anthropocene" (2019), pp. 139-147 and rock art pictograph N-1, p. 133.

Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at [emailprotected]. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Dan McCaslin: Outdoor Education and New Nature-Based Myths Needed in the Anthropocene - Noozhawk