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The Great Outdoors Project
The Great Outdoors Weekend
The Free Range Great Outdoors
Project's Great Outdoors Weekend is, in it's simplest sense, a weekend event
camping in a field, but it has a more subtle purpose – allowing the participants
to practically experience the skills required for "having less". By taking
them out of the everyday luxuries of modern society we create the 'headspace' that
allows them to learn the art of living simply.
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?" The concept of 'The
Great Outdoors' was piloted at a number of events during late 2007 and over 2008, but
the whole package came together at the Free Range Network's 24th Weekend (as
pictured on this page) in September 2008. It was also the launching point for the
Great Outdoors sheets
(aka. the Free Range 'O-series') that collect the ideas developed into the pilot events
into a set of simple guides to different aspects of living outdoors.
Workshop outline
The approach behind the Great Outdoors workshop is not to provide a prescription or a strategy for
living your life; we take the opposite approach. The aim of the weekend is to introduce people to those
things which were once essential to human society – harvesting and cooking food, making and
manipulating fire, keeping warm and finding shelter – as a means not just to reduce their
environmental impact, but also to improve their resilience to the shocks that will affect modern
society as energy and resources become more scarce over the next three or four decades.
The focus of the workshop 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. 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) – 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.
Learning new skills is the most important aspect of this process. How you might choose to utilise these
skills to change your life is up to you, but unless you learn these skills first you cannot develop options
to change your life at all. A good example of this is the simplest way to heat water without electricity or
fossil fuels – a storm or volcano kettle, such as the
Kelly
Kettle.
The Kelly Kettle is a very portable and efficient way of heating water, even if you're just out walking for a
day. It runs on sticks and other small pieces of combustible material, and can be easily carried and used
for a quick brew. But, whilst simple and easy to use, the main problem we have in conveying the skills to
use it easily is the modern phobia of fire and all things related to burning materials in ways which don't
have simple "off switches". It's by focussing on simple, extensible skills, like using
a Kelly Kettle, that we hope people can begin to change their lives for the better, realising that in the
home this same simple, basic approach to life can reap great rewards – both personally and for
the planet.
One of the important factors that we must relearn about humans is that we form communities
– we come together in small groups, often with certain individuals specialising in certain types
of activity (because it's very difficult for an individual to learn, within the space of their single lifetime,
every skill required to survive) in order to meet our basic needs. Communal activity, especially food
preparation and putting together shelters and structures, is an important part of the weekend.
The two main activities that we look at are preparing food and finding shelter:
- Preparing food from basic raw ingredients and flavourings is something that is becoming less common. As shown in other areas of research by the Free Range Network, food is probably the single biggest sink of energy and source of carbon for the average person. Dealing with how you obtain, prepare and consume food is therefore one of the most important aspects of changing your lifestyle – and in terms of essential skills in an increasingly uncertain world post-peak oil, it's probably the most important skills-set that you need to learn.
- Shelter is an interesting issue within itself. Many people camp, but camping with very little, and camping so that you leave the smallest imprint on the land possible, is a wholly different subject to the popular image of luxury camping promoted on the High Street today. We look at basic shelters, as well as unconventional ways of using traditional camping equipment to be able to live outdoors comfortably, no matter what the time of year.
These issues are described at length in the handouts that accompany the workshop.
Another aspect of the weekend that we try to organise is the entertainment... "Man doth not live by nettle stew alone!" If possible we like to organise a party and musical session in order to demonstrate that another essential component of human activity is being social – making music and entertainment to share with others.
The purpose of the weekend is to give people an experience of activities which are not normally available
in society – for example, people might go camping, but many sites prohibit the use of open fires.
Through these activities the aim is to allow people to realise that there are very simple, non-consumerist
approaches to the resource and climate problems the world now faces, and that these options can be
practised very simple in your everyday life. After all, if you can do them in a field where the options are
very restricted, in the home undertaking these activities will be a lot easier.
Another aspect of the skills that are communicated over the weekend is that whilst they might help
you have a far better and more rewarding camping experience, where they really are useful is being able to
look after yourself when things 'go wrong' – for example power cuts and floods. As we move into
the era of resource depletion the services that we take for granted will become less reliable. Whilst 40
years ago the skills to manage in a resource crisis were common because power or water supply
interruptions were more common, today the supply has become so reliable that people have forgotten how
to manage without water or energy flowing when you turn a tap or flick a switch. The skills you can learn
over the weekend are directly applicable to managing comfortably when the services that we take for
granted are cut-off without warning. In fact, Unit O9 of the handouts deals directly
with this issue.
The greatest experience that we hope to communicate cannot be easily described –
we might call it it beauty, an appreciation of time and space, or just simply slowing
down. But, whichever way you describe it, it's something that cannot be conveyed in a classroom or
community hall; only when you're outside in the middle of nature can you fully understand that sense
of being human that we have lost through the industrialisation of society without any regard to its
spiritual implications.
"Simplicity-based", non-consumerist solutions to the problems of our everyday existence present a vast potential for personal change – if you can accept the need to learn new skills and adopt new patterns of living. However, if you can appreciate the sense of being that natural spaces can give us then it puts the rest of your life into perspective and, by finding a deeper meaning to the problems that confront us today, a powerful motivation for personal change.
The Free Range Weekend, Autumn 2008As noted above, the Free Range Weekend in September 2008 was where the whole 'Great Outdoors' package was put together for the first time.
Here we see Paul Mobbs (right), the developer of the 'Great Outdoors' idea and the writer of the handouts that accompany the workshop weekend, preparing the main meal for ten people over a small fire – and yes, you can use a pressure cooker over an open fire quite easily!
Workshop resources
'Great
Outdoors' (O-Series) Information Sheets- These sheets cover the practical skills related to living simply outdoors, and
have been designed to accompany the various Great Outdoors Project
events.
