News

June 25, 2007

Activists promote the outdoors

Group seeks ideas on how to keep people interested in and connected to nature.

RON LIEBACK rlieback@timesleader.com

WILKES-BARRE – As a continuation of the Governor’s Outdoor Conference, a group of outdoor activists met Thursday night in the McGowan Building at King’s College to solicit recommendations and ideas about keeping people connected to nature.

The most emphasized suggestion — incorporating outdoor experiences into all levels of education.

“The bottom line is we must re-educate the educators,” said Sally A. Corl, northeast regional manager of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. “We must also have parents instill this passion for the outdoors into their children while they’re young.”

Worried that the connection with nature is diminishing, Gov. Ed Rendell in March held the conference, a forum in which multiple professional people discussed protecting and enhancing our natural heritage and relationship with the outdoors.

Thursday’s public forum was the second of five statewide post-conferences. The 31 participants were split into six groups to gather additional ideas on how to tackle the most pressing issues. Each group wrote down three specific recommendations to immediately help build stronger outdoor connections.

Gerald T. Kelly, district forester of the state Department of Conversation & Natural Resources, said what schools must do is create a need for a connection to the outdoors.

“We must hammer, hammer, hammer to instill a want for outdoor connections, especially in the schools,” he said. “My wife is a third-grade teacher, and she was only out of the classroom once this year … because of the PSSAs, they’re too busy to be outdoors.”

Sandy Long, a reporter for The River Reporter, said having the children journaling about their outdoor experiences will help instill a “much-needed connection to nature.”

“We have to get the kids outside to where they think about the outdoors, write about it, draw about it or snap pictures about it,” she said. “We must also keep it simple and make it easy to connect to the outdoors.”

Data from the five public forums will be compared with the conference data and other feedback collected during the post-conference process. A task force will use all the collected information as the basis for the final report by the end of the year with recommendations for action.

Approximately 300 people, including policymakers, business representatives, sportsmen’s groups, conservation organizations and representatives of the health and education sectors, participated in the first Governor’s Outdoor Conference March 18-20 in State College.

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