Fragile, ethereal, beautiful, the butterfly is at the same time decidedly strange in appearance. They are without mandibles, unlike most insects, but sport instead a proboscis, sometimes one and a half times their body length, which they use to drink liquids as if through a straw. They have large, compound eyes, tiny nails or claws, and strange…

The author loves Toronto, where she has lived for more than three decades. Two of those she has resided in an apartment on the west side of town--close to the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), to the parks and pathways that connect her living and working sites with those institutions and her other haunts. What…

A group of Latinas sat down one day around a wooden table on the third floor of a downtown Toronto community center, lit candles and began to write. They came together through a flier inviting all Latinas interested in writing. On the second meeting, they named themselves Lengua Latina (Latin Tongue). Lengua Latina is a structure established by…

A Blackfoot woman, caught in the act of adultery, was condemned at this site to have her nose cut off as a penalty for her actions. People do not know her story. The tribe cast it on the ground. And so She, Nose Hill, was named. John Laurie Boulevard holds her mound in a circlet of asphalt, defining the map of her "terra incognita." She is a park…

In this essay, the author recalls several of her experiences in which she successfully pulled her boats out of river holes by throwing herself to the water as a sea-anchor. She learned this trick from her senior guides at a spring training. Her guides told her, "When you're stuck in a hole, take the "C" train."" "Meaning?" The author asked her…

The lake is blue black and deep. It is a glaciated finger lake, clawed out of rock when ice retracted across Nova Scotia in a northerly direction during the last ice age. The lake is narrow, a little over a mile long, and deep, 90 to 190 feet in places according to local lore, off the charts in others. The author loves to swim there, with a sense…

Sailing, a harnessing of wind with canvas to propel a sailboat across distances of water, in winds shaped by landforms, airflow and temperature, requires constant renegotiation by skipper and crew in response to the wind's changeable presence. In a choreography of movement, sails secured by sheets are loosened or reined in by hand to allow wind…

Walt Whitman defies ontology: he strives to be eternal, to journey ever in the now, and thus to forswear beginnings. And there is a great deal of "place" in Whitman, space both concrete and metaphorical, Alabama and Maine, body and "kosmos." But Whitman the man was born in Huntington, Long Island, which is a good a place to start exploring how…

I propose that for ethics to become a normal activity, practiced by citizens on a daily basis, we begin by identifying barriers to this activity. Once things that get in the way have been identified, I examine ways that environmental educators can create conditions for ethics to become part of mainstream practices and processes of inquiry--to…

In addressing the theme of ethics as an everyday activity, this essay makes a case for the primacy of preventive ethics over interventional ethics. Preventive ethics aims at creating a condition of viability and wellbeing for all members of the earth community, an ethical ideal that follows from the thesis that all life-phenomena are…

This paper begins by weighing the term sustainability and considering its meaning in "common culture" terms as people outside the academy might understand it. The first implication is that none of our current behaviour meets the simplest criteria of sustainability. The question "why?" is raised. In responding to this question I suggest that our…

The Murray River, lying at the heart of Australia's largest catchment, is used extensively in outdoor education programs in south-eastern Australia. Since European settlement the river's ecological health has declined considerably due to activities such as damming for irrigation and clearing of native vegetation. Colonial notions of how the river…

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field's…

Racial and cultural diversity issues have been a source of some interest amongst outdoor and environmental educators. Early research was framed in terms of the "under-participation" of people of colour, which led to the development of ethnocentric and methodologically problematical "marginality" and "ethnicity" theories. There is, however, a…

We reflect on methodological issues arising in two of our own research projects as a form of practice, as a way of engaging in a praxis of project research. The projects chosen for this purpose are themselves concerned with teacher education and curriculum development in environmental education: they include participatory "reflective practice"…