Okanagan Institute Express presents Wild Awake: Finding Nature, Fish and Peace in the Near Wilderness on Thursday, March 27.
Veteran outdoorsman Gary McLauglin and fly-fishing expert Savas Koutsantonis will take us on a journey into the wilderness in search of adventure, fish and peace.
Adults as well as children are suffering from lack of exposure to the outdoor world. So argues Richard Louv, the renowned Vancouver author of Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle. “I introduced the term nature-deficit not as a medical disorder but as a way to describe the growing gap between children and nature. When we think of the nature deficit, we usually think of kids spending too much time indoors plugged into an outlet or computer screen. But after the book’s publication, I heard adults speak with heartfelt emotion, even anger, about their own sense of loss.”
Exposure to nature has a myriad of benefits, both to individuals and to the world at large. After all, if you don’t love nature, why would you work to protect it? And can you grow to love something that you don’t know?
Numerous studies have also demonstrated the benefit that even just viewing the living world can have on a person. For example, surgical patients who had a view of a tree from their hospital room had shorter recoveries (and so left the hospital more quickly) and needed fewer pain medications than patients who did not have such a view.
Spring is upon us and many of us are left with not only a nature deficiency but also a sunshine deficiency. Tthose can only be cured by a goodly dose of the great wild outdoors.
It’s time to get out into the sunshine and get off the beaten track, time to enhance and improve our mind and our spirit by embracing nature in all its wonder. We live in an incredible natural area with amazing recreational possibilities, and yet too few of us take advantage of what’s readily available to us in every direction.
Wild Awake: Finding Nature, Fish and Peace in the Near Wilderness
Thursday 27 March 5 p.m.
Bohemian Café, 524 Bernard Ave., Kelowna
$2 at the door. Refreshments available.
Space is limited, so please reserve your seat at http://www.okanaganinstitute.com/register.php
