Transformative Nature Treasure Hunts

Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventure for Children and Their Adults

Introduction

In most schools, reading, writing, and arithmetic are considered basic skills. For all non-human living things, all of our ancestors, and many humans today, basic skills are those that enable us to meet basic needs including food and water, and a means of protecting ourselves from environmental conditions like weather and other living beings. The fact that most of us members of the dominant civilization are unable to meet our basic survival needs on our own leaves us, unsurprisingly, insecure and disconnected from our natural way of being, as well as the rest of the natural world. 

Nature treasure hunts are a fixture in outdoor nature programs. Kids love looking for things, and treasure hunts are an activity that synthesizes freedom and structure–giving adults a chance to be a guide on the side. Regardless of the treasures to be found, looking for anything in nature helps folks of any age deepen their relationship with nature. We’ve seen nature treasure hunts for everything from hidden store-bought trinkets to objects that fulfill generic criteria (e.g., find something yellow). From our point of view, these treasure hunts miss a huge opportunity to help kids learn the skills that every other animal on, above, or below the surface of the Earth has and all of our ancestors had: how to find all of the treasures we need to survive and thrive out in nature. In this field trip, you’ll learn how to guide folks on nature treasure hunts that will transform their forest experience from visiting the forest as if it were a museum of natural history to returning home after a long and exhausting road trip.

Activity

Nature Treasure Hunt

The following nature treasure hunt features finding items that fulfill basic needs for food, water, shelter, and safety. Please remind your kids not to eat or drink anything they find without expert approval. Also, note this nature hunt requires some customization based on your location.

• A water source

• A stick that bends that could make a good bow

• A stick that would make a good spindle

• A stick that would make a good fireboard

• Dry small sticks (break with a snap) that would make good tinder

• Standing dead trees you wouldn’t want to build a shelter under

• Dry finger-width sticks (break with a snap) that would make good kindling

• A hammer stone for cracking nuts

• Fibers that could be used to make cordage

• Animal signs (tracks, scat, homes, trails)

• A natural container

• Something that branches and isn’t a tree

• Something shaped like a sheet that could be layered to make good roofing material

• Sap that can be used as food, glue, or fire starter

• A grub

• Good shade

• A spot in the sun

• A spot out of the wind

• A good spot for debris shelter

• Edible nuts or seeds

• Edible roots

• Edible fruit

• Edible flower

• Edible or medicinal Fungi  (e.g., Honey Mushroom)

• Edible or medicinal Lichen (e.g., Usnea)

To customize this transformative treasure hunt you’ll need to be familiar with how to survive and thrive in your local system with a minimum of manufactured products. There is an enormous amount of information about nature skills on the internet. Try Indigenous skills from the communities whose land you’re on, survival skills, and bushcraft as search terms. You’ll also need to get familiar with the children you’ll be guiding. Much of your guidance will come in the form of answering kids’ questions: what kinds of edible berries are around here? What do they look like? Where do they grow? Being familiar with your ecosystem and the kids in your care will help you tailor your answers to the situation.

Pattern Hunt

We’ve included the patterns: layers and branching in the above nature treasure hunt. We describe these and other patterns in the Patterns that Connect field trip. You can use them all as a pattern treasure hunt.

Go out and find at least one example of each of the following patterns:

• Tubes

• Fibers

• Branches

• Grains

• Bundles

• Sheets

• Layers

• Spirals

• Webs

• Cycles

• Edges

While these patterns don’t necessarily fulfill any of our basic needs. Looking for them in nature does enrich our experience of the natural world as deeply interrelated. 

Mixed Nature Treasure Hunt

One way of thinking about nature treasure hunts is that they are a slowed-down game of nature tag that can be used to help kids learn just about everything about the natural world. You’ve already read about how treasure hunts can be used to help kids learn how to meet their needs in the forest and how to see common patterns (e.g., sheets) in nature and use those patterns to meet their needs. As with Nature Tag, treasure hunts can also be used to help kids identify trees and other ecosystem contributors and learn botanical terminology, ecosystem roles, and how needs and contributions are the basis of different kinds of relationships within ecosystems. See Nature Tag - Tree Version and Nature Tag - Make Me One with Everything field trips to learn more about how to integrate these ecosystem features into tag and treasure hunt games. Here are some items to spark your creativity.

• An oak nut (an acorn)

• A leaf shape like fiber

• Something that gets its energy from the sun

• An annual plant

Focused Nature Treasure Hunts

The spirit of the treasure hunt can also infuse more focused hunting. For example, sometimes we focus on looking for animal signs (e.g., tracks, scat, homes, etc.), food to harvest, or fire-making materials including components of a bow drill (see the Food, Fuel, and Fire field trip for more information on bow drills). I try to always remember to talk with the kids about developing an attitude of gratitude towards the natural world. As sentient beings, we can help and offer thankfulness for everything around us. This attitude of gratitude towards nature permeates many land-based cultures. The Haudenosaunee people codified this attitude in the Thanksgiving Address they recite together; in their schools, they do this every morning, with everyone. They use these words to set the tone for all gatherings and create a space and attitude for all. The address includes many verses of thanks. Here’s one.

We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our mother, we send greetings and thanks.

This attitude of gratitude stands in sharp contrast to the ownership model that characterizes the colonial worldview.

When I harvest from the forest, I take my time assessing and listening: how are you?; are you healthy?; Do you enjoy the morning sun?; Do any critters live in your branches?; Are you available for picking? Depending on the responses, my actions change. If I feel welcomed I gently harvest taking only what I will use, never the first or last item on the plant, and never take more than twenty percent of the fruit from a tree or grasses from a patch. I also thank the being for its gifts and talk with the kids about why I do this and suggest they do the same. I tend to work with the same kids over time and the results of this practice along with our regular gratitude practice during Opening Circle and Check-In are amazing!

Nature Science

The fundamental truth of ecology is that we are all in this together. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was probably referring to humanity when he said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” But, his statement also expresses the fundamental reality for all living beings on Earth. Our planet is a self-regenerating system. Every organism on Earth depends on its ecosystem to survive. We all give and receive matter, energy, and information from each other and, directly or indirectly, interrelate and are interdependent. Relationships in ecosystems tend to minimize harm. Most relationships in ecosystems are mutually beneficial and those that aren’t including competitive, consumptive, predatory, and parasitic relationships still tend to minimize harm; kill the host and you kill yourself. Organisms that destroy their ecosystem are evolutionary dead ends.

There is ample evidence that some of us are driving our species far down this road toward our own extinction. The mounting indications that both our global ecosystem and our social systems are in crisis include global climate change, mass extinctions, peak everything, social upheaval, and supply chain issues. This polycrisis can be traced to a single meta-cause: the ecophobic, colonial, and capitalist culture of the superpowers of the global north and its insatiable hunger for power and resources.

Capitalism is an economic system driven by profit and continuous growth. The three main means of driving market growth are an increasing population, the spread of consumerism to other cultures, and convincing people to buy products they do not need. All three of these forms of market growth are taking place and all of them are killing us and our planet. As discussed in more detail in the Observing Relationships in Nature field trip, those of us living under industrial capitalism are constantly bombarded with messages that nature is something we must protect ourselves from. Nature outside of our bodies is a dangerous place full of death traps. Our homes are fortresses to protect us from the evils that lurk just outside our doors. Nature inside our bodies makes us smell and look bad and age in ways that must be covered up or stopped by beauty and personal hygiene products. Food, in its natural form is gross, dirty, and potentially bloody. Thankfully, we can get all of our food pre-processed and prepared from stores and fast food restaurants that present us with food in pretty, sanitized, packages, and plates with no sign of dirt nor blood. This worldview is a horrible and very profitable lie. 

Here’s the science. Humans are animals. Bigger than some. Smaller than others. We evolved with other life forms in a wide variety of niches where we could meet our survival needs. Up until several thousand years ago, all of our ancestors viewed the natural world as our mother, providing us with resources to meet all of our needs. Many still hold and act in accordance with this point of view. Nature is our evolutionary context. Period. The end. Nature outside of our bodies provides us with all of our needs: air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and ways to stay warm. As beings that have co-evolved with all the life around us, we are remarkably similar to that life and also remarkably interdependent with it. Our homes must be open to the outside world. Our leaky homes allow the carbon dioxide in our out-breaths to return to the atmosphere and oxygen freed from carbon dioxide by plants to leak in, else we’d die of asphyxiation. Our bodies are beautiful natural wonders that can get everything they need from the Earth and our bodies’ byproducts benefit our ecosystems (unless poisoned with factory-produced “foods” and “medicines.”) Our similarity to other life on Earth enables us to get all of our nutrition from the Earth. It is shocking but not surprising that we receive so many messages about how dangerous it is to collect wild food when not having a grocery store within 1 mile of you with fresh food is living under food apartheid. We say food apartheid instead of food desert because this is a capitalist created problem, just like apartheid. Deserts are natural environments and biomes that encourage life that has evolved within it. The biggest lie of them all is the lie of continual growth. Despite the Earth’s incredibly efficient recycling system, the simple scientific fact is that continuous growth in a relatively closed system is impossible. 

To survive, we must counter these lies and transform that culture from ecophobic to ecophilic. Through reconnecting with the ecophilia and ecological living that characterized our ancestors’ and current Indigenous ways of being in this world, we can: 

• Prevent as many extinctions as possible among multicellular beings like us, 

• Slow climate change to allow more time for climate migration, particularly for the slower-moving plant kingdom,

• Take care of our own physical and emotional well-being, 

• Perhaps create a path to a sustainable future, and 

• Go out in style, if we are on the path to extinction.

This is why we have an educational agenda. While modern education largely serves to maintain the status quo, we also see education as a major tool of cultural change!

Educational Ideas

Ecological educators including David Orr (1992), David Sobel (1996), Ruyu Hung (2017), and I (2023) aim to help children first develop a love for the natural world. I use the term ecophilia, first used by David Sobel (1996), and later by Ruyu Hung (2010) to describe this love. The phrase Ecological Education is often used to mean more than just education about what people learn: ecology and ecological living. It is also often associated with how people learn: for example, through community service projects. Some might add that empowering learners to make their own decisions is an aspect of this approach. For others, treating curriculum as a forest to be wandered through, rather than as a strict regimen to be followed might fall within the scope of ecological education.

For us, in addition to being more than education about ecology, ecological education is also more than a laundry list of ways to help us reconnect with our ecophilia and learn how to live ecologically and compassionately amidst our ecocidal colonizer culture. It is a cohesive approach based on the big idea of nurturing educational environments and communities to be more like forests (as a stand-in for ecosystems) and less like factories (as a stand-in for mechanical systems). I believe that the key to creating schools, farms, gardens, communities, health care systems, and other systems to be more like forests and less like factories goes beyond simply picking a mid-point between forest and factory-like patterns. We must synthesize these patterns in a way that allows them to synergistically support each other. These patterns can be characterized in different ways. Here are two sets of patterns and how they are synthesized in ecological learning environments.

Teacher-directed and student-directed activity are synthesized into shared control. In factory-like learning environments, the actions of students, teachers, and even administrators are largely prescribed by others. In forests, organisms act in response to their environments as they seek to fulfill their own needs. Student-directed learning, free schools,  Freire’s Popular Education, and the unschooling movement all emphasize the kind of internal control that typifies the activity of beings in ecosystems. We are huge fans of child-directed activity and we have an agenda for the kids in our care. We want them to become self-directed adults and we want them to be ecological. We see being ecological as including: being aware of our interdependence with each other and our ecosystem, experiencing ourselves as interdependent with each other and our ecosystem, understanding how we are interdependent with each other and ecosystems through an integrated traditional/modern perspective, and acting as if our well-being is inexorably bound up with the well-being of the rest of humanity, all other beings, and our shared ecosystems, because it is.

So, how do we synthesize learners directing their activity and us adult guides supporting them in learning how to be ecological? One way is with activities like nature treasure hunts. This activity synthesizes child-directed and teacher-directed activity in many ways. First, we designed it using knowledge about what kids tend to enjoy. We do this activity only if kids propose it or if we suggest it and they enthusiastically agree to play. Kids also have lots of choices to make while playing the game. And, above all, the game is fun and meaningful for the kids and adults involved in playing it!

Resources flow down and resources circulate are synthesized into educators as guides and resource coordinators. In mechanical systems and human systems designed to work like mechanisms, resources including materials, money, power, and information are distributed through a top-down hierarchy.  In factory-like schools, this plays out as resources flow down from the feds to the state, to the school administration, to teachers, and finally to students. In this kind of system, the teacher’s role is to distribute knowledge, texts, worksheets, and other learning resources and the student’s role is to receive and process those resources, and then prove their absorption of the material through testing. In learning environments that synthesize factory and forest patterns the interests, experiences, and ideas of all participants are resources to be shared and the educator's role is to facilitate and coordinate that sharing. Nature treasure hunts epitomize this kind of activity. As they run around the forest, you can hear the kids sharing knowledge and adult shares feel much more as part of the flow of knowledge rather than top-down instruction.

Wrap Up

Our ultimate goal in supporting peoples’ participation in this kind of nature treasure hunt is to transform their experience of the forest from that of a visitor in a natural history museum to a weary traveler returning home after a long road trip. We want all of us to feel that the forest is our home and our co-habitants are our kin. For the forest to feel like home we have to be secure in our knowledge that the forest can provide for all our needs. Developing a habit of looking for treasures of all kinds in the forest is a huge step in this direction and various forms of nature tag and nature treasure hunts are a wonderful tool for supporting kids in developing this habit.