This teaching unit consists of pre and post field trip activities for the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve in Morongo Valley, California. The lessons provide background information to teachers and provide classroom activities on the desert and wetland environments. The lessons can be easily adapted for kindergarten through sixth grades.

In this paper I argue that aesthetic appreciation of nature should be reflective and based on respect for nature. I believe first-hand experience is crucial and that nature can be aesthetically experienced freely in a multi-sensory way. Aesthetic experience will bring attention to features of the environment which the subject needs to reflect on and make sense of. My main argument is how Yuriko Saito’s metaphorical notion of “lending your ears to nature’s own story” and “recognize its reality as apart from your own” can manifest the moral obligation of reflecting on what is given in experience. Some implications of this notion will be looked at. First, the perplexity that nature has its own reality and story apart from us while nature is also what encompasses our own life and grounds the experience of judging it. Contemplation on this issue may bring with it a strong sense of self- and environmental awareness that potentially can result in a sublime response. Second, to lend your ears to a story of a landscape leads to considerations about authenticity and true wilderness. I argue that one can think of wildness and authenticity to acquire a better understanding and one should not see those terms as a basis for value judgments. I will then take a closer look at the links between the moral considerations and the aesthetic experience itself. To preserve the autonomy of taste I separate the perceptive and reflective parts of aesthetic experience, saying that although both levels can inform one another, knowledge or moral considerations don’t necessarily determine aesthetic judgment. Departing from other cognitivists, I don’t think the wild is per definition beautiful, it is even sometimes difficult to aesthetically appreciate at all. In the last chapter I consider the significance of the sublime affect in establishing aesthetic relationships with more diverse environments.

Adventure-based programmes are one of the most exciting and effective intervention strategies that can influence youth-at-risk to make the right choices, guiding their development while simultaneously exposing them to positive values modeled by excellent people. Although adventure-based programmes are not a recent phenomenon in South Africa, very few research studies have been undertaken regarding this phenomenon. The aim of this research was to explore and describe the nature, requirements and limitations of adventure-based programmes to youth-at-risk. The main goal of the research was to develop guidelines for intervention through adventure-based programmes for youth-at-risk, based on a literature study and empirical research that was undertaken. Adolescents are becoming increasingly involved in high-risk behaviour, compromising their health, future and lives. Multi-professional interventions are necessary to address the issues and problems children and youth experience. Adventure-based programmes offers a solution and many skills necessary for successful living appear to be inherent to adventure-based learning: self-esteem, communication, problem-solving, group living, responsibility, spirituality, confidence. Facilitating adventure-based experiences to youth-at-risk is no simple task and the outdoor leader needs to be trained to deal with many forms of anti-social and other negative behaviour that could include aggression, disobedience, hyperactivity smoking, etc. It is clear from the research results that adventure-based programmes encompasses much more than simply offering activities in the outdoors to participants. Adventure-based activities can only be optimized to the level of an educational tool through purposeful planning, debriefing, follow up and evaluation. Many different terms are used to describe essentially similar outdoor programmes: adventure education, environmental education, experiential education, wilderness therapy, organized camping, outdoor education. Social workers, because of their broad, value based approaches and extensive training, is well equipped, if not best equipped of all professions, to play an active role in the development of adventure-based programmes to youth-at-risk; be it in developing and offering programmes, training staff to work with youth-at-risk or as staff member during an adventure-based programme. Adventure-based programmes as model of experiential education, offers the social worker an alternative intervention strategy to achieve psycho-social and competency outcomes with youth-at-risk. / Thesis (MA (Social Work))--University of Pretoria, 2002. / Social Work and Criminology / unrestricted

University educators are concerned with student leadership development in order to generate much-needed leaders in every aspect of society. This sequential mixed methods study found that students who participate in a university co-curricular outdoor education leadership training program, combined with the experience of leading a wilderness backpacking trip, had increased leadership self-efficacy. Empirical evidence was found to support leadership development, as well as the effectiveness and importance of university co-curricular outdoor education leadership training programs. This research is significant to educators for determining priorities in providing resources and designing effective co-curricular programs to create tomorrow's leaders.

Climate change has already had noticeable effects on the environment. Glaciers are retreating, ice on lakes and rivers is melting earlier, plant and animal species have relocated, and trees are blooming sooner. The Alpine landscape is one very good example of these dramatic shifts, which significantly impacted its identity and the economic stability of its communities. The effects on the classic forms of alpine tourism, especially the winter one, coupled with the mismanagement of the land and the lack of valorisation of the cultural heritage of the valleys have led to two equally disruptive phenomena: on one side, mass overtourism affects the most popular locations in the mountains requiring the construction of new infrastructures and resorts; on the other, the abandonment of the smallest or less known villages threatens the disappearing of rural communities with the consequent undermining of their surrounding landscape. Addressing the recovery plan drafted by the Italian Government after the pandemic (PNRR 2021), which includes giving new life to smaller villages and their ecological environment as well as reintroducing the Italian cinematographic industry as a competitive player within the international scene, the project aims to tackle the progress/paradox situation affecting the Italian Alps, Overtourism versus Abandonment, and its consequent impact on the landscape. The design is located in the Valle D’Aosta region, due to its proximity to Turin, a scenographic city where Italian cinema was born, and to its controversial nature which sees overbooked glamorous locations juxtaposed to the abandoned small rural realities. Particularly the proposal takes the story of the hamlet of Oyace, whose abandoned buildings are currently being sold at the symbolic price of 1 euro, in order to imagine a different future for alpine communities, which includes both economic growth and environmental awareness.Thought as a continuous dialogue between reality and fiction, the project starts in Oyace, taking shape as a film director’s studio in one of the currently abandoned buildings. It then continues as a new village envisioned by the director on the nearby artificial lake de Place Moulin, chosen for its symbiotic natural and man-made environment. The masterplan, drafted as a movie unfolding on site, borrows from the narrative of a romantic novel, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by Italian Francesco Colonna and published in Venice in 1499, which is set in mythical and personified landscapes. The different chapters of the novel with their allegorical nature inspire the ethos of each of the buildings of the village.The architecture of the proposal, which accommodates different programs typically present in a traditional Italian alpine village alongside spaces and structures necessary to the moviemaking, borrows from alpine forms and heritage, set design and movie strategies and the landscape. The result is a series of performative infrastructures staging, re-enacting, revealing and counteracting issues currently experienced by the hamlet of Oyace, these can be environmental, social or economic, and their consequences on the alpine environment. Despite taking from the story of the book and manifesting itself as a village, the project is not limited to the novel, but rather it attempts to start an investigation into the role of architecture within the wider context of the endangered alpine environment, whilst arguing for a multidisciplinary approach and the use of narrative as critical tools for the production of impactful architecture in times of crisis.Ultimately the design aims to envision a new future for the community of Oyace and its ecological environment, speculating on a new approach towards giving new life to alpine communities based on a deeper awareness of their surrounding environment.

In this comparative examination of cinematic representations of American and Brazilian wildernesses, I argue for the necessity of a transnational, postregional, and ecocritical approach to film studies. The way that the deserts of the American West are represented by Hollywood Western filmmakers reveal underlying ecological and political philosophies, and provide a productive contrast with representations of the sertão, a similarly arid biome in Brazil. Among other theoretical approaches, this study uses W. J. T. Mitchell’s idea of “landscape” as a verb to examine the formal devices by which filmmakers and audiences “landscape” these “wildernesses.” Using John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as an example, I suggest that Hollywood Westerns inscribe the land with a colonial gaze that reflects and perpetuates a dualistic conception of nature, one that sees nature as separate and distinct from humankind. Cinema Novo, the radical anticolonial movement in Brazilian cinema, provides an aesthetic and philosophical alternative. Through an analysis of one of Cinema Novo’s foundational works by one of its founding figures—Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o diabo na terra do sol [Black God, White Devil] (1964)—I demonstrate how the theory and practice of Rocha’s anticolonial “aesthetic of hunger” has an ecological dimension, one that rejects and collapses a binary opposition between humans and nature. By looking beyond borders which too often function not only as national boundaries but to delimit fields of academic study, this project finds common ground for comparison in representations of nature, and demonstrates the political and ecological implications thereof.

A man does not always see himself as others see him. John Muir is venerated by several generations of Americans as a man who left a legacy of State and National Parks, State and National Forests, outdoor beauty and untouched wilderness areas which would never have survived has it not been for this dedicated man. He did not plan such a course. He did what he found necessary to be done, without thought of personal gain or public honor. However, during his lifetime there were those who did not view him with such veneration. Countless ranchers, lumberman and politicians must have considered him a formidable foe. The purpose of this paper is to show how involved he was politically. He really became quite an adept politician, although the whole idea would have been extremely distasteful to him if he had heard himself designated as such.

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