Hopeful By Nature

Outdoor equity is about more than rides and snacks. Mary McKean of Rising Routes explains why belonging, choice, and collaboration are the real keys to outdoor access in Colorado.

Mary McKean is part of the team at Rising Routes, a Colorado nonprofit that acts as a "backbone organization" for the outdoor education and recreation providers who take kids, families, and communities outside. In this episode she shares what a statewide survey of more than 80 providers revealed about funding, access, workforce development, and fragmented collaboration, and how the PEAK program is turning that research into advocacy.

You'll hear why "disenchanted" may describe many communities better than "disconnected," how technical assistance and shared services can lift small providers, and an idea from Mary's MBA about compounding access that reframes what it means to invest in kids and communities.

This episode is for outdoor and environmental educators, program directors, nonprofit leaders, funders, and anyone who wants nature to be a real choice for everyone.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Welcome and what's ahead

1:50 Meet Mary McKean and Rising Routes

2:34 Why outdoor access became her focus

5:08 Beyond rides and snacks: trust, families, and pace

7:49 Redefining outdoor equity: choice and belonging

10:52 Assumptions about who is "disconnected"

13:47 What 80+ Colorado providers said: four barriers

16:16 From research to action: the PEAK program

20:24 Systems change, slowly

25:53 Untold stories on public lands

27:43 Technical assistance and shared services

31:58 What a backbone organization really does

35:22 Keystone organizations: sea otters and beavers

37:21 Compounding access

40:45 Where Rising Routes is headed

42:54 How to get involved

45:20 The one thing to do after listening

LINKS

Rising Routes: https://www.risingroutes.org

Report: A Roadmap for Colorado's Outdoor Access Ecosystem: https://www.risingroutes.org/rising-routes-delivers-roadmap-for-colorados-outdoor-access-ecosystem/

Free resources, including Fund and Launch Your Outdoor Program: https://www.wildwardinstitute.net/resources

Show notes and newsletter: https://www.wildwardinstitute.net/hopefulbynature

Free 15-minute call: https://calendly.com/scottshepherdconsulting/15min

Mary McKean appears on behalf of Rising Routes. She also works for the National Park Service, and her views here are her own.

Hopeful by Nature: stories of kids, community, and the natural world. Subscribe and leave a review if this conversation helped you.

Climate change is not an oil change. Matt Baker-White, executive director of the Wild Rockies Field Institute, joins Scott Shepherd to talk about teaching college students to grapple with problems that adapt to whatever you do to them.

A student starts a 630-mile bike course across Montana sure she knows the answer to climate change. She finishes it with better questions. Matt shares the wind farm town hall that got her there, and why he thinks that is exactly what a good course should do.

In this episode:

• The difference between technical and adaptive problems

• Why Matt kind of hates the phrase "experiential education"

• Place-based learning with a dying whitebark pine grove and the Clark's nutcracker

• Building belonging in outdoor programs through scholarships, cohorts, and multiple narratives

• Two pieces of advice for aspiring outdoor educators: go live in a truck in Utah, and go learn to read a balance sheet

• Why advocating for public lands starts with knowing their histories

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and wildfire smoke

03:11 Matt's origin story

07:34 What is the Wild Rockies Field Institute?

19:41 Technical vs. adaptive problems

22:54 What alumni do next

28:49 Why Matt kind of hates "experiential education"

36:02 Access and belonging

43:15 Two pieces of advice

51:00 Why land history comes first

Guest: Matt Baker-White, Executive Director, Wild Rockies Field Institute, https://www.wrfi.net

Episode page and links: https://www.wildwardinstitute.net/hopefulbynature

Hopeful by Nature: Stories of Kids, Community & the Natural World.

Three of Brandon Moffitt's former wilderness therapy students still reach out to him, fifteen years later. He remembers all of their faces, and the same question each of them asked near the end of their time in his program: do I have to leave?

Brandon is a clinical mental health counselor at Black Mountain Academy and Intrepid Young Adults in North Carolina, and the founder of the Autism Symposium, an annual gathering for professionals who work with autistic youth. He grew up with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia himself, and has spent over twenty years building teams around neurodivergent young people.

In this conversation, Brandon talks candidly about real criticism of the wilderness therapy field, what it actually takes to build a support team around one young person, and why he still believes hope and joy belong in even the hardest parts of this work.

In this episode:

•

The formative question — “do I have to leave?” — behind his approach to care

•

An honest look at criticism of wilderness therapy, then and now

•

Growing up with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia

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The false dichotomy of parental credit and blame

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What a weekly “core team” meeting looks like in practice

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Why he founded the Autism Symposium to train other professionals

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One small, concrete way to reconnect with nature today

ABOUT BRANDON MOFFITT

Clinical mental health counselor, Black Mountain Academy & Intrepid Young Adults; founder, Autism Symposium. 🌲 The Black Mountain Academy & Intrepid Young Adults

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A four-year-old in Zimbabwe watches a VHS tape of David Attenborough narrating a wildlife documentary shot in Kenya. She watches it again. She starts rescuing millipedes off the ant trail in her yard. Years later, she's running an organization trying to give that same jolt of recognition to kids growing up minutes from elephants they've never seen.

Vimbainashe “Nicky” Chitauro is the Founder & Executive Director of WildEd Zim, a conservation education organization in Zimbabwe working with children, teens, and young adults to close what she calls the “urban wild gap” — the disconnect between kids who live alongside biodiversity and kids in cities who only encounter it on a screen.

For years her programs followed a familiar pattern: build a curriculum, hand it to a teacher, run it for a funding cycle, move on. It worked in the sense that clubs got started. It didn't hold. So she rebuilt the model as a system — one that reaches district officials, school administrators, teachers, students, and whole communities before a single club session runs.

In this episode:

• Why proximity to nature isn't the same as connection to it

• How one VHS tape shaped a career in conservation

• What it takes to build trust as a first-time founder

• The district-to-community system behind every WildEd Zim eco-club

• What kids actually say when asked how to fix pollution — and why it matters

• An international video exchange connecting students in Zimbabwe and Florida

• Why WildEd Zim hands ownership of its clubs back to the schools

• Her pitch to corporate funders who treat conservation as an afterthought

ABOUT VIMBAI CHITAURO

Founder & Executive Director, WildEd Zim.

🌍 https://www.linkedin.com/company/wilded-zim/posts/?feedView=all

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Most people haven't connected the proposed Meta settlement of up to $17 billion to outdoor learning yet. In Part 2 of this conversation, Karen Cowe and Craig Strang of Ten Strands make the case for what "responsible optimism" actually means when the stakes are this high — and answer a harder question: does hope actually work as a motivator, or do we need fear instead?

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Part 1 covers AB 2158, now in Senate Appropriations with a hearing scheduled for September 28 — listen to that one first if you haven't.

In this episode:

•

What the proposed multistate Meta settlement of up to $17 billion would fund if approved

•

What it could mean for outdoor learning, and what it doesn't guarantee

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Karen's line for the whole conversation: "less screen time, more green time"

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The global movement toward outdoor learning — the UK, Maine, and beyond

•

A real answer to whether hope or fear better motivates climate-era kids

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How to plug into this work, wherever you live

ABOUT KAREN COWE Founding CEO of Ten Strands. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT CRAIG STRANG Consultant; Associate Director Emeritus, Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Craig Strang almost didn't take the class that set his entire career in motion — he thought "five units for a beach field trip" had to be a scam. Fifty years later, he and Karen Cowe are behind a California bill that passed every committee unanimously and still didn't make it through.

Karen Cowe is the founding CEO of Ten Strands, the California nonprofit that's spent thirteen years connecting nearly every environmental literacy effort in the state. Craig Strang spent 32 years at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science before going independent, and now co-leads the California Campaign for Outdoor Learning alongside Karen.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation about what it takes to build a coalition of 700+ people across party lines — and what happens when the bill they built together gets held in the Senate Appropriations "suspense file" at the last possible step.

In this episode:

•

How Ten Strands became the connective tissue for California's environmental education field

•

Karen's path from math textbook publishing to founding a nonprofit

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Craig's origin story: a freshman-year course at Año Nuevo that set a 50-year career in motion

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What AB 2158 actually would have required of California schools

•

The moment the bill got held in the suspense file — and why

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What Karen and Craig are already planning for 2027

ABOUT KAREN COWE Founding CEO of Ten Strands. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT CRAIG STRANG Consultant; Associate Director Emeritus, Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

What if the thing standing between your kid and a national park pass isn't belief — it's a budget line? Jackie Ostfeld has spent 20 years finding out, first as a naturalist teaching thousands of kids directly, then as the policy leader who helped build — and twice had to save — the program that gets every American fourth grader into their public lands for free.

Jackie directs Sierra Club's Outdoors for All campaign and co-founded the Outdoors Alliance for Kids, a coalition of 100+ organizations working to close the nature gap in access to the outdoors.

In this conversation, she and Scott trace her path from a segregated South Carolina classroom to the halls of Congress, and unpack why getting kids outside turns out to be one of the few genuinely bipartisan issues left — and why that still isn't enough to guarantee it gets funded.

In this episode:

•

Why "the nature gap" is measured in zip codes, not attitudes

•

The real story behind the Every Kid Outdoors pass and the fight to save it from being cut

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How a 100+ organization coalition got built out of a single 2010 meeting

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UC Berkeley's research on awe: a 29% drop in PTSD symptoms after a wilderness rafting trip

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Why almost nobody actually disagrees kids need to be outside — and where the real fight is

•

The new One Million Kids Outdoors campaign and how to get involved

•

Simple ways to bring more awe into a 20-minute walk with your own kids

ABOUT JACKIE OSTFELD Director, Sierra Club Outdoors for All campaign; co-founder, Outdoors Alliance for Kids. 🌲 sierraclub.org/outdoors-for-all

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

For years, Odalis Avalos believed that speaking Spanish as her first language was a disadvantage. Then she helped teach a lesson about bees to a room of bilingual elementary kids, and everything about how she saw her own language changed.

Odalis, Christian Trujillo, and Diana are the co-founders of Ciencia Para Todos — Science for Everyone — a volunteer-run organization that trains future STEM educators and teaches science to Spanish-speaking families across California.

What started as an angry flyer at Cal Poly Humboldt in 2019, born out of feeling unwelcome in their own environmental science classrooms, has grown into a statewide movement built on one idea: bilingualism isn't a gap to close. It's a superpower.

In this episode:

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How a single 2019 flyer became a statewide bilingual STEM organization

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Why Spanish went from feeling like a disadvantage to a superpower

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Building science vocabulary in Spanish from scratch, with no formal training

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Partnerships with US Fish and Wildlife, NASA, and Redwood Parks Conservancy

•

Why belonging to a culture doesn't require fluency in its language

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What Ciencia Para Todos needs most right now — and how to help

•

A mid-episode note on Latino Conservation Week, September 12–20

ABOUT CIENCIA PARA TODOS A volunteer-run nonprofit training future STEM educators and teaching science to Spanish-speaking families and students across California. 🌱 https://hsucienciapt.wixsite.com/original

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Jamie Lynn Langley had just finished teaching a room of therapists how to help kids safely assess the risk of climbing a tree — when to stop, how to guide instead of forbid — when they stepped outside and passed a dad doing exactly that with his son. She didn't plan it. This week, Jamie joins Scott to talk about what thirty-seven years of play therapy have taught her about risk, attention, and why she now writes some clients literal prescriptions to go outside.

Jamie is a licensed clinical social worker and instructor at Middle Tennessee State University, and past president of the Tennessee Association for Play Therapy. The first fifteen years of her career were traditional, indoor play therapy; the rest has been built around what she calls nature play therapy, after discovering Richard Louv's work on nature deficit disorder two decades ago.

The conversation moves through her concept of "hummingbird parenting" — flitting in and out instead of hovering — her research-backed "Big Three" case for getting kids outside, and the simple tools, a magnifying glass, a pair of binoculars, that can turn a child afraid of bugs into a discoverer.

IN THIS EPISODE

•

What play therapy and nature-based therapy actually look like

•

Why kids increasingly don't know how to play without instructions

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Hummingbird parenting vs. helicopter parenting

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The research case for risk: as safe as needed, not as safe as possible

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The "Big Three": focus and mood, cortisol, and long-term wellbeing

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Nature prescriptions, nature play kits, and trading screen time for green time

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Making nature accessible when time, transportation, or safety are real barriers

ABOUT JAMIE LYNN LANGLEY

LCSW and instructor at Middle Tennessee State University, specializing in play, expressive arts, and nature-based therapy. Past president, Tennessee Association for Play Therapy.

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Celeste Royer has retired from environmental education twice — and she’s still working, this time on a bill headed to the California Senate.

Celeste spent over thirty years directing environmental and outdoor education for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education, running the Rancho El Chorro Outdoor School before becoming a consultant with Ten Strands. She’s been in the room for nearly every major piece of California’s environmental literacy infrastructure since 2014 — the state Blueprint, the California Environmental Literacy Initiative, and now AB 2158, the Outdoor Learning and Environmental Literacy Act of 2026, which just passed the State Assembly 77 to 0.

Celeste and host Scott Shepherd talk about what it actually takes to get people who disagree about nearly everything else to agree on kids — and why the bill’s coalition went looking for support from pediatricians and English-language-learner specialists before it ever wrote a page of legislation.

In this episode:

- How AB 2158 passed the California Assembly with unanimous, bipartisan support

- Why “student health” became the unifying frame for the outdoor learning campaign

- The California Environmental Literacy Initiative’s Partner Portal, and how it connects teachers to nearly 700 community-based organizations

- Scott’s own research on field trips and school motivation

- What forty years in one field, and two retirements, actually teaches you about advocacy

ABOUT CELESTE ROYER Celeste Royer is a consultant with Ten Strands, working on the California Environmental Literacy Initiative and the campaign for AB 2158, after more than 30 years directing environmental and outdoor education for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education. 🌿 tenstrands.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A sea otter has no blubber. No fat reserve, no savings account — just fur, and a metabolism that burns through calories almost as fast as it can eat them.

Gena Bentall is the founder, director, and senior scientist of Sea Otter Savvy, a Central Coast California nonprofit that's spent ten years turning marine science into behavior change — for kayakers, wildlife photographers, tribal partners, and the businesses that put people on the water.

We talk through the physiology that makes sea otters uniquely vulnerable to disturbance, the simple "rule of thumb" for judging safe distance, and why calling people in works better than calling them out.

In this episode:

•

Why sea otters have no blubber, and what that costs them energetically

•

The rule of thumb for judging safe wildlife-viewing distance

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"Death by a thousand cuts": how cumulative disturbance adds up

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The "publicity problem" of being the internet's favorite cute animal

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How CAWS certifies kayak outfitters and other Central Coast businesses

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Calling in vs. calling out: changing behavior without alienating people

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Otter 841 and the real cost of viral fame for an individual animal

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Sea Otter Savvy's Northern California recovery work: https://www.seaottersavvy.org/we-were-here-seaotters

ABOUT GENA BENTALL

Founder, Director & Senior Scientist, Sea Otter Savvy.

🦦 seaottersavvy.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Julianna Acuña grew up landlocked in Tucson, Arizona — and fell in love with the ocean anyway, on childhood summer trips to San Diego. One afternoon, swimming out further than she probably should have, a pod of dolphins surfaced close enough to see. She was maybe ten years old. "I think this is my future," she remembers thinking.

That moment became a career: a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona, the presidency of the school's Marine Awareness and Conservation Society, and a curatorship of the largest stickleback fish collection in the country — built entirely from a landlocked state.

Right now, Julianna is spending her summer on a Marine and Community Conservation Externship through the National Geographic Society and The Nature Conservancy, researching human-wildlife interactions at La Jolla Cove during peak sea lion pupping season. In this episode, she and Scott talk about what surprised her about the research, why facts alone don't change public behavior, and her plan to build a nonprofit blending mentorship with science communication.

In this episode:

•

A childhood dolphin encounter that set the course for everythingBuilding a marine science career from a landlocked state

•

Curating the largest stickleback fish collection in the country

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Studying human-wildlife interactions during sea lion pupping season at La Jolla Cove

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Why storytelling changes behavior when facts alone don't

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Turning research into a self-guided audio tour and public awareness campaign

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Building a nonprofit around mentorship, science communication, and access

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The "rule of thumb" for safe wildlife viewing distance

ABOUT JULIANNA ACUÑA Marine conservationist, science communicator, and aspiring shark biologist. B.S., Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona. President, Marine Awareness & Conservation Society. Currently a Marine & Community Conservation Extern with the National Geographic Society and The Nature Conservancy. 🌊 Instagram: @monstros_mom

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Aaron Haiman was six years old the first time he met an ornithologist, wandering the East Bay Hills near his childhood home. That was enough. Twenty-some years later, he's built an entire career, and a philosophy of science communication, on the idea that people only protect what they love — and only love what they already understand.

Aaron is a birder, naturalist, and environmental scientist with the California Wildlife Conservation Board, where he manages the state's Stream Flow Enhancement Program. He's also the author of a brand new book, Birds of the California Delta, and has run the blog A Birding Naturalist for thirteen years, born out of frustration that bird scientists and birders — two communities that should have been one — almost never talked to each other.

In this episode, Aaron and Scott talk about the disconnect between people who study nature and the people trying to teach it, what it took to write a field guide that reads like a story instead of a specimen list, and what it's actually like to take national political heat for defending California water policy, a wildlife crossing, and a monthly video series about queerness in the animal kingdom.

In this episode:

•

Growing up in the East Bay Hills and meeting the ornithologist who changed everything

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Why "we protect what we love, we love what we understand" is the whole thesis of his work

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Homeschooling, academic burnout, and "saving up" endurance for an advanced degree

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Starting A Birding Naturalist to bridge bird scientists and birders

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Writing Birds of the California Delta and working with illustrator Martha Espinosa

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What actually gets people to stop scrolling — and why it's garden snails, not evolutionary theory

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Drake's Beach Sanderlings, the longest-running youth bird-a-thon team in the country

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Taking national heat over California water policy and the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing

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Making the case, every June, that queerness is completely natural — and trying to do it without becoming a savior

ABOUT AARON N.K. HAIMAN Environmental Scientist, California Wildlife Conservation Board. Author, Birds of the California Delta (Heyday Books). Founder, A Birding Naturalist. B.A., UC Berkeley; two M.S. degrees, UC Davis (Avian Science, Animal Behavior). 🦅 [link TBD]

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A Cinereous Vulture named Clarence didn't like most people. For sixteen-year-old Marco Wendt, working his first summer job at what's now the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, earning that bird's trust anyway became the first lesson in a career built on one idea: you don't get to skip the part where you earn it.

Marco is now a spokesperson for San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, where he's spent nearly thirty years working with the animals people find hardest to love — cassowaries, vultures, flamingos, cranes, raptors. Not because they're dangerous, though some are, but because nobody projects easy affection onto a cassowary the way they do an elephant or a panda. Closing that gap, animal by animal and person by person, has become his life's work.

That instinct didn't start with animals. Marco grew up first-generation Mexican American in San Diego, one of the only Mexican kids in his classroom, punished for speaking Spanish instead of supported through it. He learned early to hide who he was. A cartoon called Captain Planet — where the Latino character's "lame" power was heart — became the thing that eventually pulled him back out, and it's shaped nearly every program he's built since.

In this episode:

• The first bond that felt like more than an animal, and what a rescued vulture named Clarence taught him about earning trust
• Growing up as one of the only Mexican kids in the classroom, and getting punished for speaking Spanish
• Captain Planet, representation, and the "lamest power" that turned out to be his life's work
• The Plan to See program: giving lower-income San Diego families a real sense of belonging in zoos and aquariums
• What quality allyship looks like when it isn't performed for credit — "sometimes you just have to listen"
• Mentoring the next generation, and why he's already thinking about who takes his place
• Why the pandemic, for all its grief, reminded people what connection actually feels like
• Tailoring hope differently for a room of executives versus a room of eight-year-olds — and why every talk still has to end somewhere hopeful

ABOUT MARCO WENDT
Spokesperson, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Nearly 30 years in wildlife conservation and education, working with cassowaries, vultures, flamingos, cranes, and raptors. Builder of bilingual programming and access initiatives centered on representation and belonging. 🦅 sdzwa.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST
Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. As a dad, practitioner, educator, and outdoor veteran, Scott helps schools, camps, and nature-based programs make meaningful experiences academically impactful for learners of all ages. Scott's work aims to design programatic leaders who communities stand behind and attract funders to support. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A ladybug landing on a dysregulated child's arm shouldn't be a behavior intervention strategy. For Amy Reyes-Hauff, it worked anyway — one example of what she calls a "balanced sensory diet" that only the outdoors can provide.

Amy is the founder of Get Wild Wyoming, an outdoor learning initiative now serving over 350 classrooms and roughly 6,000 children across the state. She started the program after years of watching kids in "four-wall classrooms" escalate and dysregulate — a pattern she traces to nature deficit disorder, a near-total lack of exposure to the natural world.

Amy grew up poor, sometimes homeless, without toys or a television — and without knowing it at the time, she and her sister taught themselves to self-regulate simply by playing outside. That childhood shaped almost twenty-seven years in early childhood education, from Head Start teacher to Montessori director to founder of a statewide outdoor learning movement.

In this episode:

•

Growing up without a choice but to play outside, and what that taught her about calm

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What nature deficit disorder actually looks like in a classroom

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The ladybug story: a child on a behavioral intervention plan, and the meltdown that never happened

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Why nature provides a "balanced sensory diet" no plastic fidget tool can replace

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How to prepare nervous parents and educators to take kids outdoors safely

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Scaling Get Wild Wyoming to 350+ classrooms and 6,000 children

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The wind chill chart: outdoor learning through a Wyoming winter

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A new micro-credential in place-based education, built with Teton Science School, open to educators nationwide

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Why outdoor learning isn't a recess free-for-all — it's the same curriculum, delivered differently

ABOUT AMY REYES-HAUFF Founder, Get Wild Wyoming. Nearly 27 years in early childhood education, including roles as a Head Start teacher and director and a Montessori director. Partnering with Teton Science School on a new nationwide micro-credential in place-based education. 🌲 https://www.tetonscience.org/programs/wy-place-based-educator-microcredential/

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Scott Shepherd grew up jealous of his cousins, who spoke Spanish at home with their godmother — until the language was deliberately removed from the house out of fear it would hold them back in school. He spent years afterward chasing that language himself, sailing around the world and studying abroad to claim it as his own.

This week's guest grew up the opposite way. Sergio Corona-Munoz's first language was Spanish — and the world around him slowly taught him to feel ashamed of it. A bilingual education specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Sergio talks with Scott about the middle school moment that made him swear off speaking Spanish for over a decade, what it took to reclaim it as an adult, and the conversation with his own mother about coral reefs that changed everything.

In this episode:

— Growing up bilingual, and the institutional and social forces that push kids to abandon one language for another

— The middle school moment that made Sergio stop speaking Spanish outside his home for over a decade

— Leaving a political science major behind to follow a childhood love of animals back to environmental science

— Saying yes to leading Spanish-language science education at the Aquarium of the Pacific, despite the fear

— The conversation with his mother about coral biology that became a healing moment — "son como las piedras"

— What happens in a room when a bilingual student hears marine science explained in their first language, often for the first time

— Bringing ocean access to Central Coast farm labor communities through the Monterey Bay Aquarium's OLAS program

— Breaking cycles — what it means to occupy spaces you didn't believe were available to you as a kid, and keep the door open behind you

— Sergio's advice for finding your relationship with the natural world by starting with what you already love

ABOUT SERGIO CORONA-MUNOZ Bilingual Education Specialist, Monterey Bay Aquarium. M.A. in Agricultural Education, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Leads bilingual programming for early childhood, K-12, and summer camp audiences across California's Central Coast.

- https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/learning-programs/teen-programs

- Sergion on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergio-corona-mu%C3%B1oz-b86370192/

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Scott Shepherd has ADHD, and he didn't have real language for what that meant until he became a teacher and started building accommodations into his own classroom — timers, visual cues, time outside. What he didn't expect: those accommodations helped every student, not just the ones who needed them most.

This week's guest discovered the same principle from the opposite side of the desk. Emily Wishnick is an occupational therapist and creator of the Hundred Languages of Regulation, a framework helping educators understand how children communicate regulatory needs through movement, behavior, play, and interaction. After over a decade visiting classrooms across Philadelphia, Emily saw the same developmentally inappropriate patterns repeat endlessly — until she built a system to fix the root cause instead of treating one child at a time.

In this episode:

— What occupational therapy actually is, and why most people have never heard an accurate description of it

— Sensory processing as the foundation of how children learn, regulate, and develop

— The burnout that led Emily to build the Hundred Languages of Regulation framework

— Why climbing, open-ended play, and time outdoors do more for kids developmentally than most structured lesson plans

— A real example of underfunded schools handing screens to children who can't nap — and why it's developmentally costly

— Research connecting early outdoor access to long-term comfort and reduced fear around natural spaces (Bixler, Carlisle & Hammitt, 1994)

— What policy changes Emily believes every early childhood program needs

— Why your own emotional regulation affects every person you interact with

ABOUT EMILY WISHNICK Occupational therapist (OTR/L) and creator of the Hundred Languages of Regulation. Over a decade of experience across early childhood and K-12 settings in the Philadelphia region. Click here to learn more or contact Emily: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-wishnick-ot-746523a5?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A sigmoid colectomy took nine inches of Scott Shepherd's intestine and nearly a year of his mobility. For twelve months, he was a member of the disability community he'd never thought much about before.

This week's guest has spent her career building access into that community for others. Susie Schroer manages the Youth Empowerment Stewards initiative — YES — placing young adults with disabilities into AmeriCorps conservation careers with the National Park Service. Before that, she built adaptive whitewater rafting, rock climbing, and snowshoeing programs in Utah, engineering each one around the specific person in front of her.

In 2020, Susie was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She's open about it — and about the sentence that anchors this conversation: the disability community is the only community any of us can join at any moment.

In this episode:

— Growing up in a log cabin in rural Missouri and learning to read the woods from her father — What AmeriCorps actually is, and how Susie found it while researching the Peace Corps — Building adaptive outdoor recreation programs — whitewater rafting, rock climbing, snowshoeing — engineered around the individual, not a checklist — The pairing model: matching able-bodied and special education students as field trip buddies, and what both groups learned — The YES Initiative — creating hiring pipelines for young adults with disabilities into National Park Service careers — Living with MS since 2020, and how it changed (and didn't change) her relationship to her work — Person-first vs. identity-first language, and why the distinction matters — What universal design looks like at the smallest possible scale — including a current, urgent opening for a YES position at the Niobrara National Scenic River in Nebraska

ABOUT SUSIE SCHROER Program Coordinator, Stewards Individual Placements / Conservation Legacy, managing the YES Initiative. Former Adaptive Recreation Manager, Salt Lake County Parks and Recreation. B.A. in Journalism and Psychology, Drury University. 🌲 stewardslegacy.org/yes

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes monthly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Ghar Se Bhago. It's a Hindi phrase that means run away from home. But not away from something — toward something. The discomfort of the unfamiliar. The growth that waits just outside your front door.

Krishna Patel found that phrase on a sticker at a campsite in the Indian Himalayas after her 21-day NOLS backpacking course. She put it on her Nalgene. It became her life motto. And it might be the best framework for outdoor education we've ever discussed on this show.

Krishna is an outdoor educator based in Maharashtra, India. She grew up hiking Sayadri hill forts on alternate weekends with her dad. She went on to work with young people across India, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. She is NOLS-trained, adaptable, and one of the most globally textured thinkers I've had the pleasure of talking with.

In this episode, Scott and Krishna talk about:

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Growing up in Pune — joint families, Sayadri hill forts, and how hikes to 300-year-old ruins became a weekend ritual

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What NOLS changed — from 'get to the top' to 'what did you learn on the way?'

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The phone ban experiment in Thailand — and what happened when Grade 10 students were asked to make films instead

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Ghar Se Bhago — the Himalayan concept of running away from home as a philosophy of growth

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Why kids putting wet clothes in plastic bags instead of drying them in the sun is not a problem — it's information

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The cultural dimensions of outdoor access — why what works in Utah doesn't always work in rural India

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The Gates Millennium Scholar who almost didn't get outside because 'camping is for people with too much time on their hands'

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How to design programs for the community in front of you, not the community you imagined

This episode is for every outdoor educator who has ever taken a program that worked somewhere else and wondered why it fell flat. And for every parent, teacher, and program director who wants to meet the next generation where they actually are.

ABOUT KRISHNA PATEL — Outdoor Educator. NOLS-trained facilitator. Based in Maharashtra, India. Working with young people across four continents. 🌿

ABOUT YOUR HOST — Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 15 years in outdoor and environmental education. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

The beach where Scott Shepherd learned to surf is closed. Not occasionally — up to 300 days a year, Imperial Beach in San Diego County is posted as unsafe for swimming. Decades of inadequately treated sewage from the Tijuana River have contaminated the Pacific Ocean in the southwest corner of the United States. The waves are still there. The water is not safe.

This week on Hopeful by Nature, Scott sits down with two water risk management experts from Sydney, Australia — Dr. Annette Davidson and Sarah Loder of Risk Edge — who have spent their careers protecting communities from exactly this kind of crisis. But what makes this conversation remarkable is what they do when the systems fail and governments don't show up: they go talk to their neighbors.

In this episode:

— What water risk management actually means — and why uncertainty is both the problem and the opportunity

— Purified recycled water, "Day Zero," and how communities are navigating water security in a climate-changed world

— One Street: how a dinner party, a welcome letter, and a creek behind Annette's house became a grassroots conservation framework

— Waters Most Unwanted: turning water contaminants into Western-style rogues gallery wanted posters to make science accessible

— The Foodie Group: eleven years of dinner every six weeks, and why Annette calls it life-saving

— First Nations knowledge and the stewardship of water as identity, not commodity

— The UK sewage crisis and what it means for public trust in water utilities globally

— The Tijuana River — and why cross-border problems require cross-border community

— Why "the science is the easy part" and community storytelling is where the real work lives

— Gratitude as a business meeting agenda item — and why it works

ABOUT DR. ANNETTE DAVIDSON Principal Risk Specialist and co-CEO of Risk Edge. Award-winning water risk manager with 35+ years of experience. 2021 Australian Water Association Water Professional of the Year. 🌊 riskEdge.com.au | watersmostunwanted.com | onestreet.earth

ABOUT SARAH LODER Principal Engineer and co-CEO of Risk Edge. 18 years of experience in water quality risk management across government and private sector clients. 🌊 riskEdge.com.au

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.