Posts Tagged ‘Video’
Learn more and get involved at http://foodcorps.org
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A winter yoga festival right in the heart of the Elk Mountains in Crested Butte, Colorado. Come join us! Yoga, Music, Family, Meditation, classes, clinics, celebration, and more! Yoga Rocks the Butte benefits Yoga World Reach, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing yoga outreach to third world countries and underdeveloped areas.
“We are enthusiastic about hosting this inaugural event,” commented Ethan Mueller, vice president, general manager of CBMR. “With its natural beauty, peaceful atmosphere and welcoming spirit, Crested Butte is the perfect location to host a festival of this caliber.”
Yoga Presenters, Workshop Gurus & Musicians For more information visit www.yogarocksthebutte.com.
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With winter comes short days and long, dark evenings. My first few winters as a climber in Colorado were filled with anxiety. When would I get to climb again? Would it ever stop snowing? How can it be SO cold?
It took some time, and some patience, but I’ve finally found my peace with winter. I’ve finally realized that I don’t have to climb every weekend. In fact, it turns out that there are a whole slew of other things that I also love to do. Like skiing, swimming in the hot springs pool, watching football, and hanging out with my non-climbing friends. Most of all I enjoy finding creative ways to use all of the pretty things I save throughout the year.
This past weekend I pulled out some of the prAna shipping bags I’ve been saving for a snowy day and got to work folding origami boxes. I love these boxes. They make perfect treasure chests for all of the little knick-knacks I have lying around my bedroom.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to up-cycle your own prAna shipping bags into fun little boxes.
~Jen Vennon, prAna Ambassador
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“We are Outdoor Nation!” So say thousands of young people in America, a dedicated group of philanthropists from the outdoor industry and now two pilot programs’ worth of inner-city youth and their collegiate guides in Atlanta, GA and Washington, D.C.
My name is Colin Steele, and I’m one of the Outdoor Nation Campus Club Fellows in Washington, DC. Along with three other students from Georgetown University and a half-dozen from Howard University, I’m helping Outdoor Nation to get high school-aged children from D.C.’s underserved neighborhoods into the outdoors.
The elegance of the concept lies in its simplicity and its holistic vision. In both pilot cities, fellows like myself were drawn both from universities with extant outdoor programs (Georgetown and Georgia Tech) and from nearby historically black universities (Howard in D.C. and [the consortium of HBUs] in Atlanta). In that way, the fellows coming from established outdoor programs can help coach the fellows from our partner HBUs — who are eager to start outdoor-education programs at their universities, which have none at present — in the daily workings of a collegiate guiding program.
At the same time, both sets of fellows share the same goal: working together to help instruct under-privileged middle school students outside and instill in them the love of the outdoors that we fellows have developed through 20-some years of playing outside. The students we’re instructing may not have had the same access to the outdoors that we fellows enjoyed while growing up, but it is already clear that their capacity to appreciate the outdoors is no less than our own.
During the first semester of the program, fall 2011, and working with students from a local non-profit partner, Groundwork Anacostia, we helped put together two events: a mid-autumn kayaking trip on the Potomac River and a hike along the Billy Goat Trail in C&O Canal National Historic Park in Maryland. During each trip, the other Georgetown fellows and I tried to show our colleagues from Howard how we handled the planning and logistics for the events as guides, then all of us fellows from both universities set about introducing the participants to the opportunities for outdoor adventure within and just a short way outside of Washington, D.C.
Before anyone got in a boat for the Potomac kayaking trip, we asked all the participants to give us some sense of what kinds of outdoor experience they had and what their favorite activities to do outside were. Although most students had some experience with the outdoors, it was usually minimal: bicycling, walking, running, and so forth. Through their involvement with Groundwork Anacostia, the students who were coming kayaking with us were starting to get more exposure to outdoor recreation than most of their classmates, but I was still struck by the realization that I had grown up taking the outside almost for granted while even these most-interested of high-schoolers from Southeast D.C. (the poorest, most disadvantaged part of the city) had such limited access to and experience with the outdoors.
Just like the socio-economic disparity that marks D.C. in general — the city is more than 50% black, yet you’d hardly know it walking around Georgetown — the dichotomy between my experience and that of the Groundwork students could in some ways hardly be more pronounced. I grew up hiking with my family, vacationed in the Rockies for the first time the summer after seventh grade (the same age or younger than most of the Anacostia students), took a month-long NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) course after my first year of college, and attend a university where I feel cut off from the outdoors yet where North Face clothing is a fashion statement.
In spite of the differences in opportunities and experiences with the outdoors, I also see similarities between myself and the Groundwork students. First, we live in the same city and must bring a certain amount of creativity to bear on our desire to play outside. D.C. is the most urban place I’ve ever lived, which I found quite challenging for the first couple of years as a student here. It took me a while to figure out how to approach my desire for outdoor time creatively: running and bicycling were good; walking through the city and finding hidden and not-so-hidden gems like Rock Creek Park was better; finally becoming a Georgetown Outdoor Education leader was best of all.
From the perspective of seeking outdoor time in D.C., then, my experience has been somewhat similar to the students the other fellows and I are guiding this year. Though I began with experience and interest, it took a while for me to figure out how and where to pursue outdoor activity in a city environment. That – connecting a variety of people to the outdoors, even and especially when the outdoors seems far away – is the most important mission of the Outdoor Nation fellowship program. The National Parks, America’s “best idea” and national birthright, often play host to our fellowship activities. I was blessed with tremendous access to national parks growing up, from the Lexington and Concord battlefields near my home to the huge parks of the West that I visited with my family, and I especially came to treasure them after spending a month living in national wilderness in Wyoming for my NOLS course. If the idea of preserved wildland was not alive, I would not have had the opportunity to take that course.
National parks, conservation and the outdoor ethic in general are not immutable things. Just because President Theodore Roosevelt had a good idea a century ago does not guarantee the survival of the idea. More importantly, it does not secure the idea behind the idea: that conservation is worthwhile for its own sake – that there is something so special about the lands, animals and ecosystems preserved in our national parks that they are worth maintaining relatively untouched for future generations to enjoy. In these days of short-term focus, monetarism and global climate change, then, I think it is vital to the health of both people and the planet that America’s “best idea” get passed on and owned anew by the next generation of Americans.
That’s a lofty goal for the occasional paddle on the Potomac or walk in the woods, to be sure. But I still think it’s worth keeping in mind – Teddy Roosevelt didn’t create the first national parks by thinking small. This program is about fellowship after all: the idea that college students and urban youth who may not have otherwise met might all teach and learn from each other in the common classroom of the outdoors. A fellowship is usually a relatively small thing, but a nation is a much bigger one. With luck, our little Outdoor Nation fellowship may push America towards becoming an “outdoor nation” writ large. And that, as TR might say, would be “bully” indeed.
~Colin Steele, Outdoor Nation Campus Club Fellow
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Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time?
And allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us and our future?
Come with me on a journey through the eye of beauty
Across an ocean of grief and beyond…
The MIDWAY media project is a powerful visual journey into the heart of an astonishingly symbolic environmental tragedy. On one of the remotest islands on our planet, tens of thousands of baby albatrosses lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Returning to the island over several years, our team is witnessing the cycles of life and death of these birds as a multi-layered metaphor for our times. With photographer Chris Jordan as our guide, we walk through the fire of horror and grief, facing the immensity of this tragedy—and our own complicity—head on. And in this process, we find an unexpected route to a transformational experience of beauty, acceptance, and understanding…
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Functional Apparel for the Unconventional Spirit
