Sharing Your Knowledge

You, Your Place, and Your Place Within Your Place

It isn’t enough to develop relationships with place or the land around you alone. Communicating your knowledge, interest, and passion to those you interact with, guide, or program for is a key part of being an Environmental Leader.

If you have participated in formal training to be an interpretative guide, you will know about ‘thematic planning.’ This is organizing your knowledge sharing into accessible and interesting themes and speaking to topics within each theme. For example, your theme could be ‘Climate Change is Cool’ and topics within that might be ‘Epic adaptations of local plants,’ ‘How we can all be scientists with just a camera and thermometer!’.

You will learn more later about getting comfortable with talking about challenging topics like climate change, but first let’s think about you, your place, and your place within that place.

Place Based Education Design Principles

Community Engagement and Justice

As touched upon in the place-based learning design table above, communities serve as learning ecosystems, including if there is capacity to involve local Indigenous First Nations. Whether the people you demonstrate leadership with are local or visitors who may take this knowledge back to ‘their’ place, demonstrating community connections is one way to engage people in developing their own sense of environmental leadership.

Research shows that community partners have great success completing environmental projects that they themselves initiate and that are physically located nearby.^[1] Inspiring participants with carrying a small trash bag to do litter picking as you hike, or relaying to them success stories of community collaboration within your sphere can create motivation for them to implement these programs themselves.

Being a part of yourself and encouraging your guests to participate in community projects like those that involve planting native species, restoring trails or habitats, or contributing to the overall health of a natural area can be incredibly rewarding.

We will speak more to environmental justice later in the course, but it is important to touch on the inequalities that exist in different places in relation to environmental justice. With visitors, especially youth from urban or low-income areas, you may have a very different perspective on community engagement.

It has previously been the case that “the environmental movement in Canada is dominated by a white, middle-class privileged population that finds it challenging to engage diverse communities and gain from their knowledge, skills, and experience.”^[2] There has been tremendous work recently from organizations in the outdoor and environmental world to counteract and dispel this, with a strong emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in programming.

Implementing a place-based inquiry approach to your leadership will ensure that you ask questions of your participants and can frame your approach around what is important and needed for them based on their responses. It can be ineffective to talk about, for example, restoring lakes if they live in-inner city Toronto and don’t feel connected to lakes.

Nature and Its Many Stories

“To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass^[3]

As you grow your environmental leadership skills, you will encounter people who hold differing worldviews on your journey. Nature and the outdoors can have very different meanings and connotations for people. Just as we talked about place as being a personal definition unique to the person, so will each person’s story be in outdoor or environmental spaces.

Our inherent social and cultural relationships have developed in relationship with the world around us. Different cultures have different special or revered plants and animals based on what is local and how humans and other beings have evolved together in a particular place.

In this place, it is now known that the stories from certain groups of people in Canada, particularly the Indigenous people here, have been suppressed, devalued, and discriminated against from the inception of colonialism in this country. There are also groups who did not come to Canada out of choice — slavery, forced labour, and immigration are major parts of Canadian history, too.^[4]

While there has been important work to change this situation through interpretative recognition in museums, parks, and literature and through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and their calls to action, it is important to recognize that our own lived experience may have left us with inherent bias and that the legacy of the devastating colonial damage, attempted genocide, racism, and abuse is ongoing and present.

Before we can spend time in nature and expect others to do so with us, we must acknowledge that there are an untold number of personal and lived experiences that lead us to our personal relationship with nature and our feelings about it. Some of these will be overwhelmingly positive, but others may have negative feelings related to nature spaces and their safety there.

It is important to share our own story within our education or sharing contexts but to also recognize the voices that might not be visible or present or that have historically faced barriers to being seen, heard, or shared about in nature spaces and places.

“For humans to get along with each other and to respect our relations on the earth, we must embrace and practise cognitive and cultural pluralism (value diverse ways of thinking and being). We need to not only tolerate difference but respect and celebrate cultural diversity as an essential part of engendering peace.”

– Melissa K. Nelson ^[5]

Jacqueline Scott and Ambika Tenneti in their report for Nature Canada identified numerous barriers to nature access for different groups. These barriers relate to knowledge and information, physical, economic, cultural, as well as psychological barriers. The research is summarized below in the infographic.

^[6]

You can download or see this image in full screen by clicking here!

Erasure of Indigenous Perspectives

“The land is not just land. It is medicine, it is history, it is culture. We must care for the land, working together, all of us, Indigenous and non-indigenous, or we will lose what keeps us healthy.”

– Mike Archie, Former Chief of Canim Lake Band, Cultural Advisor to Shuswap Indian Band

It is important to recognize that as you research, deepen, and develop your knowledge of place where you will be guiding or operating, you must recognize the limitations or lack of representation in some published literature or pedagogy.

If you are sharing botanical, etymological, or historical interpretive information, are you sharing a well-rounded overview of different viewpoints? The colonization of Canada has meant that in mainstream educational institutions and beyond, often only a Eurocentric viewpoint and knowledge-sharing systems have been acknowledged, honoured, or recognized as valuable.

Whether looking at a diverse First Nations approach to education in Canada, relationship and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or other Indigenous or cultural groups globally, there are myriad ways of disseminating information, interpreting the world around us, and sharing knowledge that has long been dismissed or ignored by colonial powers.

Whether we share a particular knowledge system ourselves, it is important to recognize and acknowledge other systems to participate in a more equitable society and become true leaders for the environment.

It is also important to educate ourselves on the truth of Canadian history, including continued systemic racism and discrimination. Listen to ‘The Right to Know’ podcast here to learn just one story of truth and take personal action for reconciliation (beyond the one day on September 30th for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation).

You can also download a free ‘How to be an Ally’ PDF guide here.

Climate Change Education

It is now widely accepted within the scientific community (at least 97.1% agree)^[8] that anthropogenic climate change (humans impacting the natural climatic cycles) is occurring. In an online survey for Environment Canada in 2023, 60% of Canadians think climate change is a fact and is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities. But despite the worst wildfire, flood, and drought seasons across the country, this figure is down 9% since a similar poll conducted in August 2022.

More than one-in-four Canadians (27%, +7) think global warming is a fact and is mostly caused by natural changes, while 8% (+3) say climate change is a theory that has not yet been proven.

More than three-in-five residents of Atlantic Canada (63%), Quebec (63%), and Ontario (61%) think global warming is human-caused. The proportions are lower in British Columbia (58%), Saskatchewan and Manitoba (55%), and Alberta (52%).

The reality is that Canada is warming at twice the rate of the global average.^[9] As Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, shares…

“Climate change is real, and Canadians across the country are feeling its impacts. The science is clear; we need to take action now. Practical and affordable solutions to fight climate change will help Canadians face the serious risks to our health, security, and economy, and will also create the jobs of tomorrow and secure a better future for our kids and grandkids.”

As we live in a time of mass information dissemination through online media and social media, it can be challenging to verify such quantities of information. We all have biases, and as such, it can be difficult to accept new worldviews on this topic, especially for young people, older generations, or those who work in primary resource or fossil fuel industries. Public trust in scientists and government has also seen polarizing shifts and decreases in trust, often linked to political parties or ideologies and particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic and the meeting of science and state.

This can lead to challenging conversations with our participants. It is our role as communicators, guides, and those spending time in our natural environment to share good information with our guests, clients, or work communities (to the best of our knowledge) and to create space to centre the discussion and offer action for Environmental Leadership.

Let’s continue on and take a look at Climate Change Education.