Being able to make your own shelter, light a fire, prepare water for drinking and find something to eat are the basic skills of life. When people develop these skills they feel more at home upon the Earth and good in themselves; they have self-esteem, a certain ‘I can take care of myself’ attitude. Learning survival skills can also be very humbling when, for example, you have to kill another animal to survive.

Survival skills put us in touch with the forces of nature. When we are close to nature we can appreciate the powers of the elements and our own ability to live amongst them. Slashing rain and buffeting winds are far more real when experienced from a rain-tight and cosy shelter -or even a leaky and cold one!- that we have built ourselves.

This chapter is not meant to turn you into a Ray Mears or Bear Grylls over a weekend. It contains playful activities that introduce and put into practice some of the fundamental elements of survival skills, namely shelter building, fire making, finding and preparing water, and knowing what you can eat.

Pen - Mightier than the Sword!

“The pen is mightier than the sword” is an adage coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. A pen or pencil is a valuable tool – and so is a notebook. For years I have had a ‘wossige’ book. My wossige book is a hard-backed notebook, usually un-ruled, for writing things down in, taking bark and leaf rubbings, doing drawings in and even for chopping  vegetables on when camping. I use it for writing poems, doing sketches, writing lists, remembering ideas and for processing feelings by emptying my whirling brain onto paper (something like a paper version of the ‘pensieve’ used by Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter).

Not everybody likes to use pen and paper, but when any writing or drawing is treated light heartedly, with no pressure on how people want to express themselves, using a note book, or even making our own books from scrap paper and card, (like the ones made by Creeping Toad and participants of one of his workshops, below), can be a lot of fun and results in a group of very proud people.

In the Coyotes' Guide to Nature Connection journalling is considered a core routine, and is a way to hone observations, make maps, let the mind wander and doodle, and write poems for example. I usually go camping with one in my bag somewhere. I make sure it is a hardback one. Then I can use it as a chopping board too!

What follows is a simple poem writing and coming to our senses activity, something you could do over and over in different places, and fill a journal with pictures made of words.

In this chapter we have a look at what our senses are and explore a few tracking games and activities.

Aidless Navigation and Ways of Lost-Proofing Ourselves

This chapter is about aidless navigation systems ancient ways of finding your way about the landscape and sharing the information with others.

This chapter is about learning to walk quietly, to slip away into and through nature unnoticed

This chapter is about Coppicing and Caretaking, Empathy and Responsible Harvesting of Shared Natural Resources

The word bard is said to have its roots in an Indo-European language where it means to raise the voice, to praise. In the British Isles Bards were those who sang of heroic deeds, told poems of gallant knights and strummed lutes from smoky galleries as kings feasted. They were also often, crucially, the keepers of community laws and wisdom.

Shakespeare has become synonymous with the word ‘Bard’. If we are to believe the particle physicists we all have some elementary particles inside our bodies that were once a part of the great bard’s own body! (eeuw!) We all therefore have a little bardic voice within us that can be encouraged to speak clearly, sing a song, bang a drum or tell a story round a camp fire. Some say a good draught of fine ale will loosen a person’s tongue, however often all that is needed is a few props to get the story going!

Chris Holland re-telling a story- shhh! the village is sleeping!

Storytelling is a wonderful way to develop listening skills and imaginations. Follow this link to watch a video of Chris Holland re-telling a story http://www.wholeland.org.uk/storytelling-the-name-of-the-tree/. 

Magic can occur when a tale is told with a personal combination of acting out, prop making and choice of setting. Stories seem to come from the land like flowers. People who may clam up in formal situations are moved to freely spin tales about a character they have just created from the mud beneath their feet. People gather and listen as a song flows or join together in the pulse and beat of dancing feet and a clapping of hands. According to Jay Griffiths, in her book about time, Pip Pip, the communities of England had a great number of stories and music, coming together in the form of festivals, that celebrated the land, its features and its cycles. Since the enclosures, 200 years or so ago they have all but died out. Something within the spirit of the community died when the land became fenced off from the commoner.

So let’s get out there and make up stories, sing songs, dance and have little festivals whenever we can!

Wild First Aid

This chapter is not about how to cope with worst-case first aid situations in the woods where you have only a handkerchief, a ripe banana and a few coins to deal with an emergency. In this chapter, I do three things:

Suggest that there is great merit for people of all ages in knowing how they can respond to some of the first aid situations most likely to occur outdoors.

Provide you, the first aider, with a fun way to refresh yourself with best practice in a first aid situation while giving your charges opportunities to play at being first aiders.

Inform you about a few common wild plants you might find useful in minor first aid situations and give you an example of a more ‘holistic’ first aid kit. The ABCDE of first aid is Airways, Breathing, Circulation, Deformities and Emotions and alternative first aid remedies can help significantly as they act on the body, mind and the heart.

I was amazed and proud of my 8yr old daughter’s behaviour recently when the tip of an escaping whittling knife made a deep hole in my thigh when I was packing kit into the car for a camp. I came into the house white faced, holding the outside of my left leg. She looked on in interest as I cleaned the wound and applied some steri-strips. Ok, she did go “euuuuw” and look away for a moment but she was soon looking back to see what I was doing. When I had cleaned myself up I lay on the couch with my leg up, applying more pressure to the wound. She took herself off into the kitchen and made me a cup of sweet tea! Without any prompting!

“That is a perfect first aid response,” I told her gratefully.

Being able to keep calm in adverse situations comes from a lack of fear. Simply, first aid is about making sure the injured person’s condition isn’t getting any worse, calling for help if needed and keeping the injured person alive until the experts arrive. In first aid situations some people are naturally fearless and simply respond to a situation with great common sense and practicality. 

Others are left in a dither, running round in circles like headless chickens too panicked to know how to respond. Experience is often the key to overcoming the fear that arises in such situations. It is good for people to have some experience of problematic situations, to know how and when they can make a real difference to someone in difficulty.

However, over-confidence (too much fearlessness) can sometimes lead to someone taking unacceptable risks and being the cause of a first aid situation! It is experience that develops a sense of what is and what is not an acceptable risk. 

Wet logs are more slippery than dry ones but there is seldom any use in telling a young person that information; it’s better to allow them to find out for themselves, in a ‘safe’ environment. A safe environment does not mean it is entirely risk free! It is our responsibility as parents, leaders and educators to put our children in a place of acceptable risk so that they can learn from situations and build up the neurological pathways needed to facilitate the healthy development of the whole person. Children like to put themselves in new and sometimes dangerous situations because adversity nurtures resourcefulness. This is why children test our boundaries so much – they want to learn. They are hungry for experience.

Take tree climbing for an example - a brilliant activity for developing strength, stamina, judgement of distances, hand-eye co-ordination, moving in different ways and planes. It’s something almost every small person will want to try. Risky? Yes, of course and the higher you climb, the harder you fall. How risky? While reading the spring 2009 National Trust magazine I read that research has shown that more children are admitted to hospital from injuries sustained from falling out of bed that falling out of trees! The only way someone can become a better climber is through extending his or her experience. By climbing a different shape of tree or gaining greater heights, new skills can be developed. By playing in different species of trees the climbers learn about the qualities and strengths of wood in various tree species. Slowly but surely, through experience, the climber becomes more adept at assessing the risks of a wide range of tree climbing situations and there is then less and less risk of that person falling from the tree they are climbing.

However, accidents do happen. What if someone falls from a tree while in your care? Perhaps a group of friends are in the woods around a campsite you are staying at. They are climbing trees. One of them doesn’t notice a dead branch and falls 20ft face down to the ground, unconscious, with a broken back. How the friends respond in the next few minutes could affect the rest of their mate’s life. Knowing what to do in that kind of situation is useful learning, possibly more useful than remembering the names of Egyptian Gods or pi to three decimal places!

How can we provide the learning required to respond effectively in a first aid situation, without the risk?

Role-play is a wonderful way to provide experience without anyone really being hurt. It is easy to think up possible situations, write them down on a scrap of paper, put them all in a hat and hand them out to small groups to enact and come up with good practical ideas of “what you could do if…” It can be fun to wrap someone up in a bandage, tie a splint to an arm, make a stretcher or hop around screaming, pretending you have just poured boiling hot water on your leg! As well as having a laugh, learning how to respond to simple first aid incidents and accidents can be a source of great self-esteem to some people. It also helps us feel more confident about being in the great outdoors as we are equipped with an idea of “what to do if”. Being more confident will hopefully mean that a person also feels more at home and relaxed in nature.

If you want to find out more about what to do in a certain kind of first aid situation there is plenty of help on the web - just type in ‘first aid’ and you will find there are many pages of information from the St John’s Ambulance, the BBC, the Red Cross etc. There are also many first aid courses available but not all deal with practical first aid in ‘wilder’ settings. For outdoor first aid expertise, there is Devon Discovery, Wilderness First Aid and Rubicon Solutions all of whom have websites with details of their training courses. On a final note, I trained and now refresh regularly with Devon Discovery and going back to role play, had a lot of fun learning some valuable lessons, in pretend extreme situations, up on Dartmoor. But that is another story for round the campfire…

Making the links to joined up thinking

This chapter is about physically joining things together in the world, and how the metaphor of weaving and tying can help us link into the web of life in a real and practical way. 

Seeing the links between disparate objects and events can be very difficult these days. The world we live in, and are part of, has become very ‘large’. We are no longer living in small clans or village communities that provide us with everything we need to survive. For most of us who read this book the ‘things’ we have in our everyday lives are sourced from all over the globe and not from our immediate surroundings, as they were a few hundred years ago, so the effects of our actions are not so easily noticed. For example, when we buy a book it may have been printed and bound on the other side of the planet from the original timber from which it was made and which might have been logged a thousand miles away from the printing press, whilst the printing might have used inks made from GM soya beans in yet another part of the world. The energy used to print and transport this book to you will have come from fossil fuels or renewable energy. Whichever it is, there will be a whole gamut of effects on the environment, locally and globally.

It is very difficult to see the actual effects of the consumer choices we make. By encouraging joined up thinking, we encourage our children to see the world as a plethora of interwoven systems, not a bunch of objects and events isolated in time and space. We can encourage inquisitiveness by tugging on a strand of the web of life and asking what happens if I do ‘this’.

For example, let’s consider a lime tree, Tilia cordata, for example. A tree is just a tree? No, it is an ecosystem, providing habitat and food for a whole host of organisms from bacteria to birds. How could a tree such as a lime tree have affected humans? Surely it is a separate object and if we have no reason to have a relationship with the plant now, what has it got to do with us? What are the links? 

There may be a clue in the name cordata - lime trees make excellent cordage! By making string from the plant, we begin to see how the strands of circumstance relate to our lives. The inner bark, or bast, has been used by humans for thousands of years to make string and rope of many thicknesses. It could be that some lime-bark cordage was used to bind the fletchings of an arrow one of your ancestors used to kill a deer that sustained her through one tough winter. Without that meat and hide she would have died and you wouldn’t be here now. Perhaps one of your ancestors made a raft of wood lashed together with lime bark rope and that raft made it to the island your other ancestors lived on. It may be that now you drink some kind of relaxing herb tea, with linden blossom in it (Tilia species blossom), to help your mind unwind from business so you can sleep peacefully and therefore cope with the next day. Perhaps the honey you eat is partially made from nectar that bees have collected from Tilia trees. Who knows how many links you have with a lime tree, past and present. If you start tugging at the web of life, you will soon see that all things are connected… 

Stephen Harold Buhner is an ecologist who has been studying the effects of the medicines we humans use to heal ourselves on the environments we live in. In his brilliant book on the ecological importance of plants and plant medicines to life on earth, The Lost Language of Plants, he reveals some of the incredible ways natural systems are affected by the chemicals we, and other organisms, produce. Buhner suggests human kind is at a very interesting point in its history in that we are making so many profound and invisible changes that we cannot possibly keep track of them. We are loosing the thread, so speak, of the effects we have on the world around us.

Cordage, be it a sewing thread or a thick mooring rope for ocean liners, is made from many separate fibres, all wound together to produce a cord, turning a chaotic bundle of fibres into a yarn made up of plies, twisted round and round each other. DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid), is a double helix made from simple chemical elements wound round and round each other. Up close, it looks like a two-ply yarn. DNA makes up hereditary material present in the nucleus of cells, the building blocks of all living organisms.

Humans all over the world, for thousands of years, have made cordage. Cordage making was one of the first craft processes to be industrialised. Cloth making was a significant driving force in the industrial revolution and subsequently the way the first computers were designed. We humans would not be who we are today without this ability to turn the ‘chaos’ of nature into all kinds of clothes, chemicals, and machines. It may be that our ability to turn nature into order might, in turn, spin our civilisations back into chaos.

Making cordage by hand involves repetitive movements of fingers and hands. Some people say crafts involving repetitive movements with both hands develop links between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and strengthens the myelin sheath. The myelin sheath is an insulating material essential to proper functioning of the nervous system in vertebrates (animals with backbones). It helps signals travelling along axioms, (a very long thin kind of nerve cells), to stay on track as they weave through the nervous system. This in turn helps with the deliberate, ordered movement required to operate a large body with many moving parts. 

Repetitive crafts like cordage making, weaving, spinning and knitting seem to bring order to the psyche too. Many people will tell you it makes them feel peaceful and relaxed. While teaching, I have noticed that once people have learnt how to make cordage or weave willow, a peaceful atmosphere permeates the camp, with people quietly nattering away to each other. It is also said that knitting is the new yoga!

Single flexible strands, woven together bring strength and stability.

All the remaining tribal groups, which have needed an incredible internal, flexible order in their communities to survive the ‘guns, germs and steel’ of industrialised cultures, have strong cordage and basket-making traditions. Making baskets and string enables people to sit and chat. Time spent with others in this ‘crafty’ way binds communities together just like the interwoven strands in a basket. I would argue that we westerners really benefit from picking up some simple crafts to rekindle our own community spirit.

Knot work in art and jewellery, involving seemingly endless interwoven yarns, can symbolise the interconnectedness of life. One of the simplest ‘Celtic’ knots (more accurately Christian Saxon manuscript decorations), symbolises the interconnected and inseparable triune of mind, body and spirit, or perhaps of head, heart and hands.

Learning and teaching how to physically tie knots and lashings is one way to start the process of connecting ourselves to nature, thus joining up our thinking. It is important understand the metaphor and hold the intention of connection in your mind as you are teaching. As with healing, one of the most important parts of the process is of the intent of the healer to heal.

A true listening heart may be a more effective remedy than a pill prescribed in haste as surgery is closing. So I suggest it is important to know why you are teaching something, on as many levels as possible. For me, teaching knots is about weaving us in to the interconnectedness of life. It is a good opportunity to remind people of our connections with nature, and there is no better way to do this than to tell a story, (or spin a yarn:-) at the same time!

Community, Citizenship, Feasting and Celebration 

Every year the moon goes through a cycle of 13 full moons. This 13th section is the final chapter in the cycle of teachings this course offers. 

As mentioned at the outset of this learning journey, helping people to be native and to feel a part of their local ecological community has been one of the main aims of this book. I hope that by this stage in the journey cycle you and your students do feel a little bit more native and ‘of the land’. All that remains, then, is for us to tie up the loose ends and ‘return the native’ to the human community, with a game, something to build, some gifts, a feast and a celebration! 

Being out in the woods at night, around a roaring fire awakens the tribal heart.

When we have been into the woods and return to our houses, villages, towns and cities, we bring a little natural magic, perhaps a sparkle in the eye, or a scent of wood smoke, back into the landscape dominated by the human. I like to think that nature takes a deep breath in, drawing us from our little boxes into the heart of natural wonder and then breathes us gently back out, to return to our own communities, spiritually refreshed.

It is my hope that through engaging with the activities in this book people will feel the ‘calling’ from the wild places, a tug on the heartstrings that can only be fulfilled by going alone, somewhere wild and beautiful, perhaps camping out for a night or two, leaving nothing but footprints and gratitude, to return carrying some new wild vibe inside. I believe that this kind of experience enables a person to feel part of the natural order, to fully become a citizen of the planet, with something akin to a gift to offer back to one’s own community.

A group out on a foraging teambuilding awayday with me. The feast and fire brings us all together!

Going into a wild place to sleep in a simple shelter, by a fire we have lit, to eat some gathered food and drink collected water helps us feel more at home on the earth. It is a rite of passage. To venture deep into the wild or the woods, with ones fears and demons gathering like moths to a flame around a hearty campfire, can help us to feel at home in our bodies, to be more self assured, self confident and happy with our own company. From that place of personal bedrock, we can nurture our own garden of talents and share the surplus with our community, both natural and human (if there is a difference). 

One of the troubles of the modern world is a lack of community. Most people like to feel at though they are part of something - that they fit in, (especially teenagers, who naturally seem to flock together). But a gang is not really a community; a community needs people of all ages and various talents to keep it going. A community is based on communication and it seems we have less and less of it in our western world, biased as it is towards mobility and in spite of the advanced communications technology so widely available today. 

Community is at its best when its members are functioning for the common good. I believe it is part of our roles as environmental educators and mentors to encourage our pupils to give some of their energy into their communities. Here are some reasons why: 

Ecological communities are more stable the more dynamic they are. Every organism gives something of him or herself and has a part to play. Gandhi, a great one for living by the principle of being the change you wish to see, advocated giving 10% of ones income to charity. Why 10%? It follows a natural pattern of energy accumulation in what are known in ecology as food pyramids. At the bottom of a pyramid are the producers, the plants. Of all the energy from the sun they use to grow and reproduce, 10% is available to the next layer in the pyramid, the herbivores. 10% of the energy these animals use to grow and reproduce is available to the carnivores, and so on. It’s the reason there are very few ‘top predators’ in an ecosystem; there is only so much energy available. 

It follows that at least 10% of an educational programme should be spent focussing on activities that build community, require teamwork, and work towards a common goal. Many of the activities I have described so far in the book are very suitable for developing teamwork: ‘making blobster villages’ and ‘capture the flag’, for example. Hopefully some of the activities will have involved a bit of laughter too as it is such a good community builder.

What follows are some more teambuilding activities, followed by a few personal suggestions and wider examples of simple community building.

"Yeah! We made this!"

This section is taken from the 2009 book - I hope to update it one day with more recent resources and links!

HI, and thanks for being curious about this section.

This bit is a part that really interests me. It's part of the next step I can take, we could all take, to make a difference

What if we could all step into a closer relationship with nature?

There are so many ways we can do this, and every little thing we do can have a positive step. What one, small achievable thing could you and your family do to say yes, there is climate change, but....

An example is I still drink some cow milk, and oat milk from containers, but I now make most of the milk I drink, from oats, at home. It's a small difference.

As you know, I like stories. One of the books that helped me realise that even a small animal can make a big difference was reading The Te of Piglet. I hope that reading this book had made some small changes for you.

If it has, please email me and let me know, I am curious to know how?  chriswholeland@gmail.com

What if we felt confident to use story led learning to ignite curiosity?

I would suggest there would be a Natural Flow to the learning.

What if we could educate and lead in a Nature-Centric way...

one that helped us feel part of nature, and this earth at a deep level...?

Well, I have been using a model, a thinking system, developed by the 8 shields Institute for over 15 years that helps us do just that.

You might find it useful too. I use it for everything from planning an hour forest school session, an hour keynote speech, a week family camp, teacmbuilding days, to designing a flier or planning a meeting.

Like all models, it is apt not to encompass everything, but it's so useful to have something based on rhythms, directions, patterns and cycles in nature to fall back on 

So not only do I lead storytelling workshops, and INSET team building in schools and organisations, for indoor or outdoor education, I also give training in what I call Natural Flow Learning.

Based on the 8shield model developed by Jon Young, it uses natural cycles and directions, patterns and rhythms to plan lessons, to understand the needs of learners at any age,  inspire and guide personal growth, group leadership, event planning, management and teamwork in a way that is simple and yet also gives a profound sense of direction and belonging.

Once people know the model it is infinitely adaptable, and yet also easy to find your way through, because it's based on the natural cycles and patterns within, and outside of us all.

At the moment I deliver a range of fun, wholistic INSET, CPD and 
Nature Centric Leadership events, that involve a lot of fun, teamwork and nature connection.

If you are interested in knowing more about what I can offer schools, please visit:

https://www.wholeland.org.uk/for-schools/inset-training/

or if you are more interested in what I can offer businesses... look here:

https://www.wholeland.org.uk/for-business/

Thanks again. 

Chris

HI Folks, after some customer feedback I have decided to add a PDF version of the book to enable you to access the content offline.

Obviously, please don't share this as I am a self published, self employed person and this is part of my income stream.

Thank you so much!

I hope you find this useful!

Chris