The Great Outdoors Project (GOP)

The Free Range Great Outdoors Project (GOP) focusses on communicating education and practical skills for adapting to a lower energy and consumption oriented lifestyle. For most people this is a challenging prospect, and so The Great Outdoors has been developed around a simple acitivty which most people are able to undertake... camping outdoors! The Great Outdoors is the result of our experiences working with the EBO Project, and is our best attempt yet at finding a practical way to teach depletion issues.

What's The Great Outdoors all about?

The Great Outdoors is a Free Range initiative on the simplest route that most people have to learn to reduce their consumption and practice the skills required for a low impact lifestyle – living outdoors. It's not just that camping offers you a way to learn the skills of simple living by living simply; camping, or just relaxing on a long walk in the countryside, encourages you to slow down, sit back, and operate at the speed of the natural world rather than that of our 'technological society' – and this is a far more effective means of reducing energy use and carbon emissions than any gadget that you can buy!

There is a truth about the future of human society that mainstream environmentalism just "doesn't get": Many campaign groups lost this idea long ago, when they became lobbying rather than a grassroots organisations; some might get it, but it can't put the idea across because they fear the media backlash that would result; many small groups, especially those supporting mainstream solutions such as the "Green New Deal", not only fail to get it, but the solutions that they propose will not produce the outcomes that they intend. The basic truth of our present situation is this – You cannot consume your way out of a a crisis of consumption!

The Great Outdoors arose out of ideas developed from the Free Range Network's Less is a Four Letter Word initiative. We had to solve the basic problem of communicating the need for change encapsulated in the question, "in a world of excess consumption and luxury, how do you develop a means of teaching people to live simply?" It's actually quite difficult to communicate these ideas because they represent such a divergent view of the world from the view that dominates our lives today – that more is better. To find a suitable means to deliver this message in a clear and unambiguous way we've had to be quite inventive in designing a format to get the points across, and after much deliberation we hit upon a quite novel approach – we go camping!

Lighting fires with thistledown The focus of The Great Outdoors Project is communicating the most basic of skills that are essential to life – cooking, making fire, heating water and finding shelter – so that we can rediscover our potential as 'human animals'; functional beings who can look after their own needs irrespective of what's happening around them. What fifty years of consumerism has done for Britain is de-skill its citizens; if we look at the practical skills possessed by their grandparents, many people today have only the vaguest idea of how to manage without mains services and ready-prepared food.

Lighting fires -- even kids can do it! This is why the focus of The Great Outdoors project has been on camping outdoors, and manipulating the basic set of tools that humans have developed for millennia to meet their needs (like fire). Whether you're an adult or a child (as shown on the right, it's important that we re-equip our children with these skills) in order to comfortably manage the imminent contraction of energy and other mineral resources we must re-learn the skills that the present generations have lost. It is only by living outdoors that expressing these skills becomes a natural and essential part of life. 'Modern' society shuns these tools as dangerous or old fashioned when in fact these skills can form the basis of a low impact and reslient mode of living as we enter the age of resource depletion.

Project Activities

So far the project has developed three workshop events and a range of information to accompany them:

The Great Outdoors Weekend Camp: This is our main activity – a weekend camping event where people can learn the basics of shelter, heat and fire, food, adapting to resource depletion, but most importantly the way in which practical skills can help us reduce our demand for energy and resources more effectively than "green gadgets".
The 'Great Indoors' Presentation: Developed for the poor souls who couldn't/wouldn't leave the confines of the urban environment, this is a 2-hour (but adaptable to 1-hour) presentation and discussion currently being trialled with selected groups (hence why the details are not on the web site yet). It covers the issues raised by The Great Outdoors Project – the impacts of energy and resource depletion on society – and why developing our practical skills can help is adapt to the pressure of resource depletion. We hope to have this presentation on-line late in 2011.
The Great Outdoors 'Urban' Day Workshop: This is a new spin-off from the camping weekend, currently being trialled with selected groups (hence why the details are not on the web site yet). Many people didn't have the time/money to travel across the country to camp for a weekend and so we've developed a day workshop especially for urban areas. It examines the general resource depletion issue and why that's a bigger problem for urban areas, but also – as Britain's energy supplies become more problematic – it looks at the ways we can adapt to live with less energy, and how to cope with any 'energy emergencies' that might arise in the future. We hope to have this presentation on-line late in 2011.
The Great Outdoors/O-Series' Publications: A series of (by late 2010) twelve sheets that examine different aspects of both living outdoors, the way in which outdoors skills can help us cope indoors during an energy/national emergency, and the psychologial and practical benefits of learning to cope "in nature" without using lots of resources.

Where next?... be the change that you want to create!

To solve the problems of peak energy and climate change we need to use about four-fifths less energy within 30 to 50 years. Given the difficulties created by the depletion of essential natural resources, any plan will have to be based upon meeting essential needs through basic technologies and of course that means that people must become more involved in providing the things that support their lives. As noted above, what 50 years of consumerism have done to Britain is de-skill its citizens relative to their grandparents. The essential component of living with less energy and resources is not gadgets, it's practical skills. For example, if you can cook your own food from local, seasonal, raw ingredients that represents a significant reduction in energy consumption compared to the "modern" diet (e.g. see see recent scientific research on the environmental impact of consumption; see also the Swedish research which suggests the change of impact by taking this approach, based upon existing trends within Sweden, could be a factor of four difference in total energy consumption within the average diet).

The difficulty is that "gadgetising" our response to environmental and economic problems is far sexier than than achieving real change in our own lives: Firstly there's the "new toy" issue – buying something that allows you to carry on your present lifestyle without change is far easier than having to actually change how you do thing; secondly, and more significantly, buying a gadget, be that a wind-up radio or (through your energy bill) massive renewable energy projects – you personally do not have to be the agent for change because you shift responsibility to some other agency who acts to provide a solution on your behalf. And of course, this process involves far more than just economics or consumerism; as outlined by Theodore Roszak in an essay published in the book, Ecopsychology (Sierra Club Books, 2005) –

The fact is that to turn around the present consumption trend we have to stop the outsourcing of responsibility for our personal ecological footprint – be that through asking campaign groups to ask "the Government" to solve the problem, or by deflecting the need for change by promoting different options for existing consumption patterns (e.g., "green lifestyles" or "sustainable consumption"). Consumption is the problem; adopting different methods of consumption will not change the overall outcome. Also, if we look at the weight of the impacts of consumption overall, given that the largest proportion of the impacts of consumption are as a result of the supply chain, not direct use, seeking direct local solutions to our needs will enable the impacts to be more easily managed – because they will be a local, not a global, problem that people can see and directly relate to their personal choices.

The path ahead We must take a different path; and the ideas that we need to guide us are there within the history of our species, if we choose to study them and act to make them part of our everyday lives. For two million years, before the inception of industrialisation, human "progress" was rooted in the skills and knowledge that was passed between generations. This was a truly sustainable system because the major part of the infrastructure for survival – practical knowledge – didn't require a large investment of energy and resources, but was instead a natural and inevitable by-product of human social organisation. In looking to develop another paradigm of human progress this model of organisation is obviously the place to start since, albeit there is a gap of a few generations, the social skills required to support such as system are still largely intact (albeit dormant in the UK).