Joe Wilkins

 A product of home-made outdoor education in Rural Montana. Joe Wilkins, a nature writer and Linfield University professor, grew up on a remote Montana sheep farm, where vast landscapes shaped his deep connection to the land. Now in McMinnville, Oregon, he channels his experiences into writing and teaching, guiding students to explore their own connections to nature.

Allison Hemowitz

Using radical listening to hear nature’s beauty. Allison Heimowitz, a 30-year outdoor education veteran, emphasizes a holistic approach by integrating sociological perspectives with environmental education. Her transformative experience with Health and Harmony reshaped her philosophy, focusing on emotional connections to nature.

McMinnville, OR-- Wisps of white hair stuck out of a pink Yamhill Carlton baseball cap. Long sleeves and hoodies underneath a Native Plant Society vest. Nike running shoes, recently stained with mud, poke out from underneath flannel lined flare jeans.

She scored her first gig as a science and music teacher in 1972 at the Children’s House. The programs at the House ran daily, and it eventually moved to the Grange, which is south of McMinnville, and surrounded by trees. McMasters used this location to her advantage, and took the kindergarteners outside every day. 

In this program, she used music to ease the kids' nerves, “if I can sing a song that makes spiders seem friendly, I will. It gets the kids excited to explore,” she said.

Ultimately, McMasters said, observation skills are an innate human instinct--a gift we are all born with. “Why do kids always want to go into forts?” she asked. “There's something in us, and it’s not only that they want to be hidden and safe, but they want to be able to look out and observe what is going by.”

She continued, mentioning that even the “ugly stuff” in nature has the power to teach us something. “It seems to me the realities of nature are totally important for our psyches and we've just pulled ourselves so far from it that we're in danger not surviving,” McMasters said.

Eventually, McMasters brought her talents to the Yamhill County Parks Department, where she ran summer programs until about 2000, when she realized, “I could do this on my own.” 

She then received funding from the Yamhill Watershed Stewardship fund and started running an outdoor school program called Nature’s Way. In 2008, fellow environmentalists with their kids in McMaster’s program realized how special it was and wanted to help.

“Theresa had her kids in my program and she kept saying, ‘if I don’t do something I’m going to go crazy.’ She had to get out of the house to do something, so I let her come help me,” McMasters said. 

Crain learned all she could from McMasters and has since founded a non-profit called Outdoor Education Adventures with a Carlton local and former parks Ranger named Neyssa Hays. Their program runs weekly, and tries to reach kids in Yamhill and Carlton that might not otherwise have opportunities to learn about the Willamette valley ecosystems.

As she leaves the field of outdoor education to tend to her enormous home garden, she finds comfort knowing that other young people are taking up interest in the environmental movement. 

“We’ve raised a bunch of kids to connect with the beautiful, ugly, and beautifully ugly parts of nature. You can’t take care of nature if you don’t understand it,” she said blissfully.

McMasters checked the time on her waterproof timex, she’s playing music with her friend at 3:00pm sharp in Carlton and has to get going. Even though she isn’t running outdoor school programming anymore, her days are full. That day, on her morning walk she spotted a Goshawk, then finished her egg deliveries before meeting me at noon.

Interpreting Nature

How Environmental Educators in the Pacific Northwest Are Shaping Students' Connections to Nature

This exposé began as an effort to highlight the crucial role of environmental education in instilling sustainable practices in American students from an early age. The question is simple: by understanding and appreciating the natural world, we are more likely to protect it. Through interviews with over 20 environmental educators currently working in the Pacific Northwest, each of whom brings diverse knowledge and experience from across the United States to their roles, it became evident that environmental education is far from linear. Educating young people about the importance of the natural world takes many forms, and it would be reductive to present it in a single light. Here are the philosophies of four lifelong environmental educators that may transform your perspective on engaging with the outdoors.

Laura McMasters

Connecting hearts to nature, one exploration at a time. Laura McMasters, a vibrant 76-year-old from McMinnville, OR, embodies a lifelong passion for outdoor education, seamlessly blending her love for nature with hands-on teaching.

Amy Busch

Connecting students to nature through stewardship. Amy Busch, an outdoor educator in Wallowa, OR, has transformed local education with hands-on programs that connect students to their environment. Her innovative approach integrates stewardship and environmentalism, fostering a deep, practical connection to the land.

Laura McMasters, an energetic 76-year-old McMinnville community member, dresses and acts as though she’s never spent an entire day inside her whole life. And it’s likely she hasn’t. This signature outfit--layers of coats with pockets and crannies used for storing cones and critters out in the field--is typical of any outdoor educator who comes prepared to spend their day in the cold, Oregon wind.

McMasters cut over muddy grass to a picnic bench, mentioning that the dirt doesn’t really bother her. It is a sunny day at the McMinnville Library. Robins and other birds are drawn to Earth that is soft from the most recent ice storm. They sing their songs while looking for an afternoon worm. McMasters stops frequently, mid-conversation, to comment on them. She tries to identify a mysterious bird call that she can’t recognize.

“I am not a birder,” McMasters insists, though she later told me that she goes on frequent nature walks with her partner, Tom, to listen and practice identifying bird calls. “I just enjoy knowing what is going on around me.”

McMasters has a muddy boot print on most outdoor education programs in Yamhill and Carlton. Since she finished her undergraduate degree at what was then Linfield College, she’s led wilderness exploration expeditions for elementary schoolers and taught them everything they need to know about flora and fauna. 

McMaster’s connection to the outdoors comes from her parents, both naturalists with a special interest in entomology--the study of bugs. Fender’s blue butterfly, a species native to the Willamette Valley is included in many McMinnville city logos, and is an iconic piece of her father’s legacy.

In old news articles about his professional discoveries, the press calls her father, Kenneth Fender, the “McMinnville bug man.”

McMasters watched the Willamette Valley landscape evolve over a lifetime. “Of course, I grew up a rug rat out in the boondocks, so it worked out for me to go into outdoor school,” she said. It was only natural for her to fall in love with the study of ecology and the environment after her childhood.

In her household, the line between outdoor recreation and education was blurred. Every family trip was filled with ecosystem trivia. It was practically a race between her and her siblings to see who could recall the Latin name for species before her parents.

Early on in her career as an outdoor educator, McMasters noticed a disconnect with her students and the natural landscape, “I remember being in Dayton, and geese went over, just like they do every year, and the kids who had grown up in Dayton their whole lives didn’t know what they were.”

Not only were her students wildly unaware of common patterns in nature, but they were also afraid of it. McMasters observed that people are raised to be squeamish, or even afraid, of the outdoors. 

“This is just such a barrier to overcome, you’ve probably seen kids touch something with their foot, but they won’t touch it with their hand. They won’t burrow into the bushes, you know they’re just timid about nature,” McMasters said. 

“I grew up in a rural space where what was physical and tactical was what mattered,” Joe Wilkins said. At his home in Eastern Montana, time and natural landscape are endless entities.

Wilkins, a published nature writer and creative writing professor at Linfield University grew up exploring his gaping backyard on his family's sheep farm, 80 miles from the nearest city. After school, there was nothing to do but go to the river behind his house with a slingshot, walk to the cottonwood forest, or “make big plans about nothing” with his brother.

“We were slow in those places… and there were various lessons to be learned,” Wilkins said. 

In a community dominated by ranchers and farmers, the reason for maintaining natural habitat is steeped in human-interest and ownership. This mindset is not uncommon in other Rural places where natural resources drive the economy, “you can’t keep this land producing if it is unhealthy,” Wilkins said. 

He grew up analyzing the land through a perspective of ownership, “you owned it, but you were also responsible for it. If something happened, it was on you.”

In the 80s, Montana experienced a farming crisis as a direct result of land neglect and mis-managment. In his most recent fiction novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, Wilkins portrays the frustrated farmers and landowners that he grew up around. 

“It was a really sad time in much of that country. And part of that sadness came out as anger,” he said. The anger was directed at government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management for enforcing environmental changes, but also in everyday situations. 

At the end of the fall, sheep ranchers corralled the sheep and sold their best lambs.  Wilkins explained that Most sheep are “scared of their own shadow.” They simply need a few loud clapps to “send them on their way.”

“You’d see some who would treat their sheep well,” But, some farmers brought out cattle prods, “it was ugly, there was a violence in it,” he remembered. 

Part of people’s anger, Wilkins explained, came from lack of knowledge and understanding about the landscape, “I do think we need to be schooled locally, schooled to see our place as much as possible.” 

As he grew up, Wilkins saw this attitude go unchecked in many of his peers who managed the land in the same angry way their fathers did. 

Despite that sense of ownership, Wilkins said, “there was a sense that there was something worthwhile around us. And so I paid attention to it,”

Wilkins remembers seeing friends and neighbors parked on the side of the road on their way home watching the sunset, or observing a lightning storm unfold.

Education was not important for most of the people Wilkins grew up with. But, even as a young boy he was more interested in reading books and writing than doing ranch work, “part of that was because ranching was hard,” he chuckled. “I would have loved to know that landscape I grew up on. I remember thinking that I grew up in a place without history,” he said. 

Over the years, through writing and teaching, Wilkins was able to reconnect to this home. “Writing was a way to be back in that landscape, at least on the page, it became a way to see that landscape anew and to understand myself in a different way. 

Wilkins now lives in McMinnville, Oregon, tending to his home garden, and teaching creative nature writing classes where he helps his students explore the written connection to the natural world. While his wife bakes homemade bread, his two children, Walter and Eddie, attend outdoor school in McMinnville and chase the clouds in their front yard. They live in the city, but it is clear their connection to the slow lifestyle practiced in rural America is strong.

Wallowa, OR-- Amy Busch is an outdoor educator in a rural county Located in the North East part of Oregon. Busch blended stewardship with environmentalism and practices the form of outdoor education that Joe Wilkins wished he grew up with. Her term on the Environmental Education Association (EEA) Board ended in March, but for the last eight years she has been a key influencer in outdoor education for rural areas in Oregon, such as Wallowa County. 

Wallowa is located in the northern part of the county which includes five towns. This small cluster of rural communities in North-Eastern Oregon used to house bustling logging mills and ranches. In 1915, the first mill opened in Enterprise, employing 500 men. By 1916, Wallowa County's population peaked at 12,000 people.

Wild Fauna thrives in the 33,000 acres of native bunchgrass habitat protected by the Nature Conservancy. To the east sits Hells Canyon which is frequently explored by teachers and their students on hiking or backpacking trips. Nature recreation, like backcountry skiing, hiking, rock climbing, and kayaking, attracts most of the town’s visitors, Busch said.

“There’s a sense of place and community. The people that work the land daily consider themselves stewards of the land,” she said.

Needless to say, the area is a perfect outdoor classroom. Busch, a former interpretive parks ranger, lived in a handful of small towns with her husband while they worked for the Parks Service. They eventually tired of living in transition and decided to move to Wallowa to find consistent work and for the avid back-country skii community. 

While it took Busch’s husband six years to find a stable job, she found her place right away with an outdoor education program in the county. In her experience, outdoor school in Eastern Oregon looks different than it does in other parts of the state.

“I kept losing it,” Busch said people on the west side of Oregon puzzled over the lack of outdoor programming in Eastern Oregon. But, in reality, the programming just looked different.

Busch explained that outdoor education programs in the eastern part of the state are overlooked because they aren’t residential and follow a different model.

“When people put environmental education in a box, and define it with best practices, it turns off a lot of people,” she said. Definitions and parameters around outdoor education narrows the conversation rather than including different perspectives.

In 2015, Oregon voters passed a bill that did just this. Senate Bill 439, known as “the outdoor school law,” sets parameters for Oregon students in fifth or sixth grade to attend a six-day residential, hands-on outdoor school. This project, administered by Oregon State University, is commonly known as Outdoor Education for All (OEA). 

The program is voluntary, meaning that every school district can access the funding, but has to sign up for it through Oregon State University’s Extension Service.

Busch appreciates the effort to expose students to the natural world, but the scope of the law is narrow, and fails to recognize non-profits in different parts of the state with diverse outdoor education models that already successfully engage communities. 

Some of these programs have already been working with schools and volunteers since the late 90s. They didn’t need structure and curriculum to follow, Busch explains. Not all districts looking to participate in Outdoor Education for All have access to a residential school site that can house students overnight. This is the case in Wallowa county.

For the last eight years, Busch worked with Wallowa Resources (WR), a non-profit founded in 1996 when logging mills were closed due to changes in national forest management.

The organization was founded by Wallowa locals who wanted to make sure the economy in their rural community didn’t disintegrate entirely. Part of the solution was to help educate farmers and ranchers on best practices, while also helping future generations connect back to the land. 

Penny Arnsten started the education program at WR. Busch joined Arnsten in 2010, and helped her design and run outdoor programming for local K-12 students in Wallowa county.

Around the year 2000, Busch explained, school district budget cuts forced schools to cut classes down to four days a week. Some schools in Wallowa county, and other rural areas are exclusive to one room school houses with only a handful of students and teachers. This change impacted them.

Parents were looking for educational programs, like the one Busch and Arnsten were running, so their children could still learn on their day off. It kept the students occupied, and taught them useful outdoor skills ranging from agricultural practices, land management, and watershed research, to camping, backpacking, and other recreational activities.

It was not uncommon for the students to participate in the programming until they graduated and left for college, “from second grade on you had a way to connect with us. And then the program ended with a paid in depth study for six weeks over the summer,” Busch said. 

Originally, Busch and Arnsten’s program focused on Middle through high school age students. But, as staff and community interest grew, they expanded day camps, and cohort programming to reach K-12 students. 

Arnsten’s programming was designed after a stewardship education model. This means educating people about their local ecosystems so they sustain healthy farming and living practices.

Busch avoids using the term “environmental education” when talking about her program, “I called it either outdoor education, or some variation of outdoor, land, water, stewardship, because those are terms these communities identify with,” she said.

Her program was very intentionally called the Youth Stewardship Education Program, “the word ‘stewardship’ out here resonates more with the communities,” she said.

In some ways, Busch’s program left a more impactful imprint on her community than some of the residential outdoor schools run by Outdoor Education for All.

Some of her students came from active families that went on camping, hunting, and fishing trips. Others did not have as much exposure, “we took them to some pretty remote spots in the area, and we have such great relationships with a lot of private landowners, so we gotta take the kids to places that most people in the county don't get to go because they're not private,” she said.

Parents have shared with Busch that she taught their kids their own self reliance, “it's cute. Some of the parents don’t even have to make the backpacking trip plans, their kids plan the route.”

They eventually set up paid internships with the Nature Conservancy for the older students who wanted to learn more about restoration issues happening in the area. 

The outdoor school in Wallowa became a large part of the community, “From second grade until you graduated high school, you had a way to connect with us,” Busch said.

Alison Heimowitz has been in outdoor education for 30 years, and served on the Environmental Education Association board with Amy Busch. She also emphasizes that outdoor education does not have one sure-fire blueprint. 

“Of course, there are best practices, but as soon as you make a best practice, that's when we stop listening. Because we think we know the answer,” she said. 

Her time on the board was spent drafting and writing guidelines for excellence. She published a set of six or seven different books with the other educators that outline the best practices in environmental education, “and then I just, kind of, exited,” she said. After all her time spent on the board Heimowitz was missing something.

She took a deep breath, and took a long pause before continuing, “I don’t think it does enough. It doesn’t do enough to support culturally relevant teaching.” 

Around five or six years ago, Heimowitz hit a block in her career. She still loved the concept of outdoor education, but grew weary of the educational practices trying to define it.

After many literature searches, and what she describes as “a journey,” she reached a conclusion that environmental educators were missing something. “Environmental issues are usually taught within their own little silo,” she explained. 

When there is a problem with an ecosystem or within the larger environment, there are often sociological implications for the problem. But, more often than not, scientists look at it through a narrow lens that solicits an environmental solution--one that can exclude human influence or perspective--creating a “silo.”

“This didn’t resonate with me. I can’t tell you how many buckets of tears I cried just feeling really hopeless because I couldn’t find anything out there that was different. Nothing that provided a glimmer of hope,” Heimowitz said. 

At this low point in her career, Heimowitz was working at the Oregon Zoo. She was reluctant to attend any presentations around conservation or species protection. It all seemed very dry and repetitive to her. 

One day, a presentation was being given by a Portland-based non-profit called Health and Harmony. They partnered with an Indonesian non-profit to protect a population of orangutans in Borneo. “I wasn’t going to go,” she said, “this is just going to be another one of these programs where they are going to tell me the solution to saving the orangutans, and I can’t hear it again.”

She decided in a split second, after the presentation started, that she would attend, “so I ran there, sat down, and within five minutes, tears started streaming down my face.”

The premise of Health and Harmony re-thought environmental issues to find the sociological link. According to their website?say, “you can’t have a healthy environment if you don’t have healthy people, and you can't have healthy people if you don’t have a healthy environment,” 

Health and Harmony created an innovative conservation program that evaluated the intersection of ecosystems with civilization. It tried to find solutions that recognize our lived experience in nature. 

Heimowitz said the cornerstone of their program, what they called “radical listening,” is a concept that became a part of her own personal education philosophy. Something she ended up incorporating into the new curriculum. 

Heimowitz said radical listening includes listening to not only the land, but also the people living there.

“What is it that we’re trying to accomplish with outdoor education?” Heimowitz asked. One answer to this question is, “if we just teach people, if they become more aware that’s going to change their behavior.” But, Heimowitz said this does not always translate. She said this outdoor education philosophy is skewed towards environmentalists who already have an innate love for nature. It isn’t true for students who still might be looking for that connection.

“We absolutely know that’s not true. That change happens when you care.” To Heimowitz, environmental education isn’t about “an opening of the mind, as much as it is an opening of the heart.” 

Many educators have different ideas or ways to facilitate finding this connection, but the bottom line, Hemowitz said, is that it’s different for everyone. 

“You don’t actually need outdoor education to form that connection. You know, I didn’t have outdoor education,” Heimowitz said she formed a “heart centered connection” despite her lack of traditional outdoor education.

“I really, truly believe that getting outside is not going to be every kid’s desire, as much as I would love for every kid to want to go outside and stomp in puddles, not every kid is going to want to do that,” she said.