Rewild Portland Summer Camp

Overview

We believe that environmental education is important for creating a sustainable future. Humans are tool-making animals. We craft the things we need from the natural world. This is how we have participated in nature for 2.5 million years since the beginning of stone tool technology. For the majority of human history, we have created the things we need for our survival from our neighbors: the sand and mud from the beaches, the stones of the mountains, the sticks from the trees, the bones and skins of animals. Using regenerative methods of harvesting, we lived sustainably for a very long time. If we want to teach sustainability we need to participate in nature again, so that we no longer see the separation between “nature” and “humans.” At our camps children re-integrate the human component of participating in nature by making the things we need to live and survive from the elements of the natural world.

At our camps we integrate three focus areas of nature-based education:

OBSERVATION: Through observation we teach children about the ecology of a place: how to identify wildlife, which direction the sun rises, where and why certain plants like to grow where they do, etc.

PARTICIPATION: Through participation, we connect the children in a fundamentally human way through creating things with our hands out of the natural elements that surround us; cord from plant fiber, knives from stone, containers from animal skin, etc.

STEWARDSHIP: Through stewardship, we learn how to go about participating in a way that is regenerative to the things that we take out of the ecosystem for human use; selective harvesting, removal of invasive species, planting seeds, etc.