With growing awareness of environmental issues, few outdoor educators would deny that the environment deserves greater attention in our daily lives. Most adventure education programs focus on treading lightly on the land for the duration of the program, yet may not discuss skill transference to students’ daily lives.
Through interviews with 9 students and 10 alumnae of an adventure-education program, this qualitative study examines how the local example of leaving no trace can inform living a less resource consumptive lifestyle on a more global scale. Behavior change models and prior research guided the interviews with the goal of exploring: does the environment end at wilderness boundaries for students, or to what extent do they carry home and expand their knowledge of living lightly?
As predicted, all subjects achieved some degree of transfer, with contributing factors including time spent in remote wilderness, explicit discussion of transference, and increased knowledge and skills.
