John Muir Laws is a scientist, educator, and author whose books and workshops help people forge personal connections with nature. A trained wildlife biologist, John has inspired nature journalers across the globe.
John Muir Laws is a scientist, educator, and author whose books and workshops help people forge personal connections with nature. A trained wildlife biologist, John has inspired nature journalers across the globe.
What generous act launched John's freelance career?
What's the key reason why people don't keep a nature journal?
What is John's next book about?
Let's find out.
LINKS
The Nature Journal Club Public Group | Facebook
Tania Marien: 00:07
Welcome to Talaterra a podcast about freelance educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. Who are these educators? What do they do? Join me and let's find out together. This is your host, Tania Marien.
Tania Marien: 00:32
Today my guest is John Muir Laws. John is a scientist, educator and author who helps people forge a deeper and more personal connection with nature through keeping illustrated nature journals and understanding science. His work intersects science, art and mindfulness. Trained as a wildlife biologist, John observes the world with rigorous attention. He looks for mysteries, plays with ideas, and seeks connections in all he sees. John feels that attention, observation, curiosity, and creative thinking are not gifts, but skills that grow with training and deliberate practice. As an educator and author, John teaches techniques and supports your teams that develop these skills to make them a part of everyday life. What generous act, launched John's freelance career? What's the key reason why people don't keep a nature journal? What is John's next book about? Let's find out.
Tania Marien: 01:43
Thank you John for stopping by to speak about the community that you've built. Your Nature Journal Club and the following that you've developed through your work. I wanted to speak with you because the independent educators who I work with, they each have their own audiences and they're each developing their own communities. And you've done such a spectacular job with your Facebook page and especially with the Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference that you held over the summer. I knew you were on Facebook and we've communicated before for my other website and I know you had a following, but I wasn't aware of just how large the following was. Because I've met people from Oklahoma, there was someone from Japan and-
John Muir Laws: 02:35
People came all the way from Australia. So that's some commitment there.
Tania Marien: 02:42
And so I wanted to talk to you about how you developed that community. I like to begin my conversations with the guests by asking about their personal relationship with nature. So if I may start with the question, what is your earliest memory of enjoying nature?
John Muir Laws: 03:03
I don't really know. Both of my parents were nature people and from a very early age they had me and my brother romping around in the woods together. So what was the first? They all kind of, they all blend together. I do remember though, I've got one story that might be instructive and relevant to nature journaling. I can remember when that all began for me. It was on a botany field trip with one of my mom's dear botany friends she was a professor of biological science and a botanist. And we would regularly go out with her and have these adventures. And on one of those, my mom noticed that a woman had joined us who had a nature journal and she was walking from flower to flower and drawing pictures of every plant that she found. Instead of making a list or just casually walking by and going like, "Oh, that's neat."
John Muir Laws: 04:16
My mom observed that the whole time we were there on that field trip, I was shadowing her and wherever she would stop and sit down and draw a flower, I would plop myself down on the grass next her and watch what she did. Then she'd pick up and move to the next place and I would stand up and do the same thing. And she just quietly observed. And I think that she must have gone and asked the woman, "What tools are you using that really make it easy for you to do this in the field?" Because the next time that we went out as a family to have an adventure in nature, she said, "Jack, honey, I've got something for you here." She opened up a little box and there was exactly the same kind of journal, the exact same kinds of pencils, erasers and all the tools that I had seen being used and I knew just what to do with it.
Tania Marien: 05:16
Wow. And you've been journaling ever since then?
John Muir Laws: 05:19
Ever since, ever since.
Tania Marien: 05:21
Ever since. Wow. When did you realize nature was important to you? Was that the same moment, do you think? Or did nature take on a different importance later on?
John Muir Laws: 05:31 I
think I always knew that I liked it. But it was in high school that I really discovered that I needed it. I was struggling academically. I've got dyslexia and the tasks that you're being asked to do in sort of standard schooling, they're challenging enough as it is, with dyslexia thrown on top of that. I became convinced that sort of intellectually I didn't have anything to offer. And it was sad, it was difficult, it was depressing. And my solace, my kind of way to kind of reground myself is that every day after school I would take a detour through Golden Gate Park. And on my way home I would wander around off trails in the park looking for birds and kind of crawling through the brush, getting close to squirrels, and I had my little journal with me.
John Muir Laws: 06:37
So that would ride along in my backpack during the school day. And then once school was over bringing that journal into the woods, even though it was fairly, the park is not totally wild, but there's some places that are kind of between the heavy management zones where you can find lots of neat stuff. And that's exactly what I would do. That's where I found that I would walk out of that park feeling calm, feeling grounded, just not knowing what it was, but knowing I liked that state much better. And I've been also keeping myself out in the woods ever since.
Tania Marien: 07:18
Clearly you are known as an educator, a naturalist, and a nature journal instructor and an author. What did you do before you became established in the field that you are now?
John Muir Laws: 07:32
In high school, through a school project towards the end of my time there, I had an opportunity to do environmental education internship at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in Marine County, little bit North of where I live in San Francisco. And in that I learned a few basic skills about how to connect other people with nature. And I just thought it was so much fun to go play in nature myself and to get to share this with other people I realized that's my bag. I love this. So during the summers I would work as a nature counselor at a Boy Scout Camp. Then in college, worked as a ranger in a sort of a student aid I guess I got to wear a ranger uniform. So I felt like a ranger it was fun. You got that the patch on your shoulders, the green pants I could feel it. Even if you were doing a really good job, you got to wear that pine cone belt that they wear in the National Park Service and that was a big deal.
John Muir Laws: 08:44
So in school I was studying, natural history there were certain classes you were required to take, but every time I got an elective I would choose things that would take me on field trips, and get me running around in the woods. And so I discovered that in school you can go play in the woods. So my major allowed me to pick and choose from the whole core course catalog at the University of California at Berkeley. And I'm going to take like, wow, there's a class in the natural history of spiders, I am all in. Those sorts of classes helped me kind of keep my academic focus and also helped train me as a naturalist.
John Muir Laws: 09:30
One of my professors worked at ... Used to be the director of the Teton Science School and helped me make some connections there I started working there in the summers. And so it was academically I get to take classes on spiders and aquatic insects. And then anytime I have weekends or summers off, I would find myself romping around in the woods with a group of kids doing various forms of outdoor and environmental education.
Tania Marien: 10:07
So then straight from school, then you started straight into being an environmental educator. And have you always worked as a freelancer? Or have you been employed at different places?
John Muir Laws: 10:20
No, the shift to freelancing kind of came at a very, very interesting point in my life. Originally I was thinking, "You got to get yourself a job." Because that's what you do. And so I worked for the Walker Creek Outdoor School in Marin County. I worked for the California Academy of Sciences as their environmental educator and then various other sort of outdoor jobs. But that whole time kind of in the back of my head, there was this one thought that had started all the way back in high school. And what that was, is we had taken one of the classes in my high school was to hike the John Muir Trail. And so as a young man, I was tromping down a trail in the High Sierra, my backpack filled with sleeping bags, food, and my backpack was particularly heavy because I have about 10 field guides in it.
John Muir Laws: 11:26
And the whole time I was thinking like, "There's got to be a better way, can you make a sleeping bag lighter? What can you do?" And then I kind of started looking at these books I couldn't put them down. But wouldn't it be nice if someone would please make a field guide to the Sierra Nevada that would make my backpack lighter so it wouldn't be 10 field guides in there. And that project and stayed in my head to the point where I could visualize whole sort of sets of pages and how it would be organized. Being dyslexic, I'm a very visual person and so I wanted colored tabs and colored pictures and little lines pointing to things in cool little nuggets of information about critters that I found. I could see how this book I wanted somebody else to make it. Nobody was doing that.
John Muir Laws: 12:16
And so that project just, it kept percolating in the back of my head saying, "You could be a freelancer, you could be a freelancer." But the time wasn't right. And at that time I was working at the California Academy of Sciences. My grandmother Beatrice Chalice, she was dying at 98 years old. She had been one of my kind of principal, artistic muses. Every drawing that I did, every painting, she would want to see it, she would comment on it. The walls of her kitchen were covered with frame drawings since my infancy.
Tania Marien: 12:59
Wow.
John Muir Laws: 13:01
So I went down to Southern California because we were taking turns as a family, just sort of being their bedside and my role was the night shift. Everybody is asleep, the house is dark, sitting up in a room in case she woke up and was more lucid or wanted a drink of water, and I had nothing to do but sit there and sort of watch a busted digital clock, kind of make abstract patterns and try to figure out if I could ... What is the organization behind that. And time to think about my life as well in this very, very poignant, relevant context. And I was thinking about when I'm in that bed, what do I want my life to be about? And would I have any regrets? Would I be looking back and saying, "You know what I really should have done?" And I realized that yeah, I would be saying that.
John Muir Laws: 14:04
I'd say, "You know what, I really should have done. I should have made that book about the Sierra Nevada." And after she died, I came back to San Francisco and I realized that, that was the last gift that she gave me. And I applied to the science illustration program it was then at UC Santa Cruz. Studied science illustration with them for nine months, quit my job and headed out to the mountains with a backpack filled with dehydrated beans and lentils and granola bars and big pad of paper, some drawing supplies, found plant number one and sat down next to it. And for the next six years, that was my world. Just hiking from wildflower to wildflower, from mushroom to mushroom, from tree to tree drawing and painting every living thing that I encountered.
John Muir Laws: 15:20
And when the snows would push me out of the mountains in the winter, I would drop back down to the California Academy of Sciences. I guess I had originally had this idea that they would say, "Oh, that's a wonderful idea, Jack. Why don't you do that as our employee?" But that wasn't to be, but they let me become an associate there, which meant I could have access to all of their wonderful scientific collections. So I would look at the pelts of chipmunks and the patterns in dragonfly wings of species that were in the Sierra Nevada and used those to continue working on my drawings while I was at first burning through my savings. And so you're thinking like, "Well, this sounds great." But the part of this freelancing thing, is you need to be able to buy more lentils.
John Muir Laws: 16:19
And I originally hadn't figured that part out, but I just knew this is what I need to do and one way or another it's going to work out. And then I thought, "Okay, what I'm going to do is, maybe I'm going to write grants. I'm going to write grants and that will solve my problem." And then I discovered that being a dyslexic and writing grants and the very specific convoluted grant writing process, those were two flavors that didn't really go very well together. And I was not a good grant writer and my heart was not in it because I wanted to be drawing butterflies. And a friend of mine, Marilyn Smallings and said, "You know, Jack, what I really think you should do is go over to Berkeley and talk to Malcolm Margolin, the publisher of Heyday Books. He is a very wise man and might have some suggestions."
John Muir Laws: 17:25
At this point I had been shopping my book around with sort of prepress drafts of it, various sections of it to some publishers. And I was thinking, "Oh, you can just get advance. One of these publishers will give you an advance and then you can live on that." Which seemed like a great idea until I discovered that an advance usually means a few thousand dollars. And that's not what I needed to get me through six to seven years of work which I still [inaudible 00:17:55]. But, I went over to Berkeley and I met with Malcolm. And for people who haven't met him, he's one of the most wise men, one of the most wise people that I have ever encountered in my life. And also when you're just in his presence, he's got this just this wonderful stature, kind of a combination of Karl Marx and a bald eagle kind of blended together and it works.
John Muir Laws: 18:37
And piercing eyes and this wonderful big beard. And he looked through the work that I did and he said, "Oh," he said, "Say this, this is wonderful." And he loved, he loved the project. And he said, "You know," after thinking about it a little bit, and I explained to him the problems that I was having and he said, "I've never done this before, but I have an idea, and tell me what you think about this." He says, "We could like any publisher give you an advance, and but that will only carry you a little ways." He said, "What if instead of giving you an advance, we gave your advance to my grant writer and paid her to write grants for you. And so if this works, of course you get even more money and if it doesn't work though, you're still committed to doing this project and you're out your advance." Which is essentially a loan against expected royalties.
John Muir Laws: 19:56
But he was willing to take that risk with me and I was willing to take that risk with him. And we decided to give it a try. And a few months later, his grant writer had raised about $75,000 to support me doing the project. And I went in one day from kind of going into a McDonald's and getting some ketchup packets to make my soup, to figuring out which scanner do I want to buy. And it was amazing. And that laid that seed money, laid the groundwork, not just for that book, but for every book after it and my entire freelance career.
Tania Marien: 20:52
That's an amazing story. That is fantastic. And that's very smart, creative, generous thinking.
John Muir Laws: 20:59
It was. And it worked because we both trusted each other. I'd actually known him for a long time through sort of professional channels when actually when I was a student at Berkeley, I loved his books and took a portfolio of my drawings to him and said, "I want to be an illustrator and I want to work for you." And he looked through my stuff, which frankly, at that point was not very good. And he gently encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing, to develop my craft that it wasn't what he was looking for at this time. But he was helpful even then. And in that moment we saw sort of the way which we could come together and the time was right and we did it. It's been an amazing, amazing journey. And I also couldn't think of a better partner to be doing this with.
Tania Marien: 21:51
Yeah. Wow. So you have your guide to the Sierras and now you have your nature journaling book. But before your nature book, you had the curriculum that you co-developed with California Native Plant Society?
John Muir Laws: 22:07
Yes. So back in sort of jumping back a little bit further to when I was working in outdoor education, when I was working at Walker Creek Outdoor School, I discovered that doing nature journaling with my students was much more effective than playing any outdoor education nature game. And that it got students to really authentically slow down and be present in nature much in the same way that I liked to do. And they loved doing it too. So within an outdoor education setting, you've got a new set of kids with you every week. And so it's able to test and retest ideas. If something worked well, I would then do it again. If something wasn't quite right the next week, I could tweak it and reapproach it in a different way.
John Muir Laws: 23:05
So over the course of the years that I was working there, I was able to really refine and develop wonderful set of outdoor education resources. Things that helped teachers to be able to do nature journaling in the field with kids. I wrote that up in those days there was no dissemination that you could do on the web, but at conferences and things I would give that to other teachers and other educators and that curriculum also circulated through a lot of the outdoor education community. Then a few years later I realized that I've got even more ideas on this and worked with the California Native Plant Society to make version two of that with a handful of other educators. And that expanded the program a little bit, adding more language arts things into it.
John Muir Laws: 24:08
Then there was a third version that we developed. That was where my friend and educator, a naturalist and nature journaler, Emilie Lygren participated in. And we really made substantial improvements on that second version. Emilie and I have now finished our work on really sort of the fourth version of this and that will be available for educators everywhere as a both a hardcover book or I don't know, if it will be hardcover, a book that you can pick up as well as a free downloadable materials next year. And we're very excited about that. So that curriculum has become a very important resource for other educators who want to be able to teach nature journaling with their students or their family.
Tania Marien: 25:09
And will that be available through the California Native Plant Society or?
John Muir Laws: 25:13
Oh, no this next version will be it's not in association with CNPS, it will be a book that can be purchased in small independent bookstores near you.
Tania Marien: 25:27
Yes.
John Muir Laws: 25:28
We're also going to have a website dedicated to the project where the book will be available also on my own personal website and I believe on Emilie's website as well. But people will be able to buy it in sort of their regular book venues. But we're also going to have a free download of the entire book for anyone anywhere in the world who just needs to get it in their hands and cannot afford the book or the shipping. And so that will help it get into the hands of a lot more people.
Tania Marien: 26:07
That's wonderful. That's a wonderful initiative. What's the name of this?
John Muir Laws: 26:13
It has the very cryptic title of How to Teach Nature Journaling.
Tania Marien: 26:17
Oh, that's wonderful. Okay. And so all right. From your endeavors which you just shared with us, how did you come to start the Nature Journaling Club?
John Muir Laws: 26:31
When I was at the California Academy of Sciences, this idea of, wouldn't it be fun to get out in the field with other people in nature journaling, journal together began. And it started as a once a month program that I did through the Academy of Sciences. The academy, their priorities changed and that then wasn't what they wanted to be doing. But I kept doing it on my own and just had so much fun with it. It turns out that when you get a bunch of interested naturalists and artists out in the field together at the same time, and we're all nature journaling together, everybody's journal looks completely different and you can mine the journals of other people for all sorts of ideas that help you improve your own work. So when you get to look through somebody else's notebook, you're like, "Oh, that's how you solved that problem. Or I saw that and didn't think I really had time to kind of engage with it, but this, you just did this? Oh of course I could do it that way."
John Muir Laws: 27:34
So it just opens up all these wonderful ideas. And anytime you're out in the woods celebrating the world with other people, it's just a lot of fun. It brought a great group of people together. So it started just an email based list, and that became increasingly unwieldy because then my emails out to people would start to get picked up by spam bots and they would say, "You're sending this to 300 people and you're probably just spamming everybody." So the servers would block my emails. So using other systems to start to get announcements out I began to dabble with that, I wasn't familiar with Facebook at the time, but I gave that a try, and that has ended up being an incredibly useful way of communicating with people.
John Muir Laws: 28:31
Many Facebook pages are all about ... Here's a picture of the croissant that somebody's about to eat or I'm about to drink this cup of coffee and it's not really useful. But what people post on this site is, "Here's my journal page from this last weekend's adventure." And you get the same benefits of looking through other people's journals and you can connect with. Now it's about, I guess 8,000 people all over the world are sharing their observations and their journals in this way. It's delightful. The organization of it just grew organically. I didn't start with any master plan. It was just that I started I kind of start where you are and Oh, it's an email list. Okay, the email list isn't working anymore. What are we going to do then? And as it has grown, we're starting to figure out more resources that help us to be able to get announcements out.
John Muir Laws: 29:44
So I've got a newsletter, the Facebook page, those are two kind of primary ways of doing it. But I'm starting to kind of dabble in other forms of social media and beginning to get savvy with those as well. Oh yeah, and the webpage has been very useful, because I also teach workshops and classes. I can put a class schedule up there, I can put class notes up, drawing tutorials. My general approach is that if I have any good idea, I put it out there for free. And then also have a place where people can make donations if they choose to. And what I've found is that those resources are really useful to a lot of people. And there are people who have resources that they can support this kind of work and they have been really generous to me. So a kind of abundance model has worked very well for taking care of me as I've been engaged with this project.
Tania Marien: 30:56
And you have in-person meetings with your journaling club?
John Muir Laws: 31:03
Absolutely. So every month at seven locations around the San Francisco Bay area I teach a workshop on some aspect of nature journaling. Some months I'll have other people take that over for me if they're artists or naturalists who've got something really cool to bring to the table. This month for instance, I've got workshops by Marley Peifer who is an amazing nature journaler and tracker and he's going to be talking about nature journaling with a tracker's mindset and what can go into your journal. I'm really excited about that because I'm going to get to sit down in those classes and learn from him as well. But what this has does is gets people on a regular basis in bite sized pieces, developing their skills step by step by step.
John Muir Laws: 31:56
And it's not going to be too far away from your home because I've got at least seven locations are spread all over the Bay area. So there's probably going to be a location that is near where people live. And then I also film those workshops and put those workshops up online as a free YouTube video also connected to my website. So if somebody lives in another state, another country, they can also take advantage from those workshops. And I will always post those if my filming technology is working for me and I've had some still working the bugs out of it. So there's number of classes where I realized like, "Oh, the play button, record button wasn't pressed while we did this." But those have been very helpful to people. And then each month we have a day long field trip where we meet at some natural area and hike, explore nature together, a combination of natural history time to journal some techniques. The most recent one we did some workshops on watercolor and I brought a lot of tubes of watercolor and added pigments to people's palettes that I find particularly helpful.
John Muir Laws: 33:17
So just trying to put resources in people's hands and build that kind of fellowship with those field trips its interesting kind of in terms of building community, one of the things that I think has been the most successful with that, one is consistency, the second is potlucks. Potlucks are ... So friends at home take note, if people are eating each other's food, sharing food together, psychologically we are bonded together. The potluck is absolute gold. So if there's any way to like in your programs, turn that into a potluck, do it, and poof, you've got community.
Tania Marien: 33:57
Yes. Your events are wildly successful and you have so many events every month. But with the first time you did it though, who showed up and how many people showed up and were you afraid of being left standing there alone?
John Muir Laws: 34:15
So there was a spell where the Nature Journal Club started with that little list and then there's a few years where it kind of I was doing other things. I had gone away to grad school and was occupied by other things. But then when I started it up again, I was thinking like, "Are people really going to show up for this?" And we had our field trip was going to be down on the California Coast a little bit South of San Francisco. 130 people showed up. So I had the opposite problem. I thought like, "What if nobody shows up?" But actually so many people showed up that it was crazy and pretty unmanageable. Usually on our field trips its around 40 or 50 people and that's a great group you can kind of get around, you can interact with people.
John Muir Laws: 35:13
But that first day I had, I think part of it was that just this, that connecting with nature in this way is something that's authentically makes sense to people. People want to have this as part of their lives and they want to do it and they want to do it together. And in the past, instead of having this program where you can do a little thing, then next month here's a little more, here's the next month a little more. If you're taking the field trip and the workshop, you're least busting your journal out a couple of times a month. And then I'm giving suggested activities in between times and sometimes we suggest things on the Nature Journal Club Facebook page. So it just gets people to start to do it a little bit more.
John Muir Laws: 36:03
That I think is the secret kind of helping people kind of get it into their routines and make it into a habit. We're absolute creatures of habit. Like if you did not exercise yesterday, it's hard to go get yourself to exercise today. But if you exercised yesterday, you feel like, "Oh, hey I think I'm going to go for my walk today." And the same thing is true with journaling or anything that we want to do. So when in the past what I would do is I would teach a class, say in Point Reyes on, on how to draw birds. And people would show up, take the how to draw birds class and at the end of that they would write evaluations and they'd say, "Oh, I love the class and then all these things I've always wanted to do this, and I just took this class I wanted to jumpstart myself with nature journaling and drawing birds. So excited to go do it."
John Muir Laws: 36:48
Well, I felt good about that. But what I discovered was that if I offered the same class one year later in the same location, the same people would show up and not just that they would have the same journal with no more drawings in it. And people were taking these art classes because they wanted to kind of jumpstart themselves to do it. And you think, "If I get some more information, it's going to empower me to do this." But what we don't take into account is that it's not a lack of information that's preventing us from doing it, it's our habits and our routines. And if it wasn't your habit and routine to be nature journaling on a regular basis before you took some class, it's not going to be your habit after you take that class.
John Muir Laws: 37:39
So I went from a model of offering information here and there piece meal, to a program that people could engage with and stay with and you could come in at any point and as long as you continue to do it, you'll be getting new skills, people can see their improvement and I'm able to touch back in with people on a regular basis and that has made it possible for ... I think that's one reason why it's been successful. It's not just here's a class, but here's a community, we're doing this together and here is a framework for having a routine where you do this on a regular basis.
John Muir Laws: 38:23
And when I post the workshops, there are a number of families who are homeschooling. And they'll sort of wait for the monthly workshop, they will do that together. And kind of getting that little bits of training on a regular basis just helps them keep with their practice and develop that. So that consistency that helps the community helps, also just sort of thinking it from the perspective of, "How can I help support people's habits?" I think is a very, very useful strategy.
Tania Marien: 38:58
Yes. And your Nature Journaling Club now has chapters, I'm going to call them chapters, like different franchises, you have people in different areas who have started their own Nature Journal Club.
John Muir Laws: 39:11
Oh yes. And after this conference, a bunch more are popping up and it's really, really exciting to see. Doing this nature journaling in fellowship with other people it's a beautiful experience. And people got a taste of that at the conference and they decided like, "I'm going to set this up in the New York area. I'm going to set this up in the Monterey area. I'm going to set this up all over the place." And it's wonderful for us for that there's no ... I'm not licensing anything, I'm not, it's not like if you buy this package, you can kind of get into the nature journaling brand.
John Muir Laws: 39:52
Anybody who wants to start this for free I work with them and help them be able to do this in their own area and I encourage them to sort of think about what they can do to kind of make it sustainable for themselves. But yeah it's wonderful to see these little satellites pop up. And then the next Nature Journaling Conference we'll have, I think what we're going to also do is kind of have some opportunities for people who are organizing these groups to kind of get together and share ideas. I think that, that will help us kind of get an even more interesting evolution of this process.
Tania Marien: 40:34
In a 2013 article in Bay Nature Magazine, you mentioned that it's community building and the exchange of conversations and ideas that are key to protecting wild places of the world. And you're out to achieve critical mass behind nature journaling and it certainly sounds like that is where you're going and what you're doing. What's next for you?
John Muir Laws: 40:59
What's next for me? Well, first let me just sort of bounce around that idea of the community and nature journaling and why I think that is important because you're absolutely right. That is my goal. If I have an agenda, you just hit the nail on the head. I want to help people fall more deeply in love with the world around them. And fall in love with nature and to be so moved that they are motivated to become involved as a steward of wild things and wild places. Nature can't vote, and we need to have people who respect it and love it, who have firsthand experience with it to be motivated and empowered to do the work, to protect these places. And for me, nature journaling is the most powerful way to make that happen. I believe that love itself, love is the act of attention, sustained, compassionate attention.
John Muir Laws: 42:08
You think about that in terms of say your relationship with a child, with a place that you know intimately, your love of your partner that has grown over the years, that kind of love it's born from the act of attention is powerful and transformative. I think that nature journaling is the most powerful way that I have encountered to help people learn how to pay attention. Nature journaling is just the act of attention. So when you're out there in the field and you're nature journaling, you are falling in love with the world around you. And that love is what we need to sustain us through the work of being stewards and working to protect and conserve nature around us.
John Muir Laws: 43:02
So then the community part, if we think of ourselves as isolated and separate and divided from each other, we are not effective. We are not able to organize, we are not able to stand up against bigger, more powerful and destructive forces in the world around us. There are lots of I think lots of ways that people in this country are being intensionally divided from each other, and part of it we do it to ourselves. But the more that we can come together and find common ground and community, the more we're able to be able to work effectively to protect nature and wild places. So my hope is that through the experiences that people have in nature journaling, they are falling more deeply in love with the world. And that love both translates into a desire to be a steward, a protector of nature, and forms the relationships that we're going to need to do that work.
Tania Marien: 44:25
Beautifully said, John. And so what is next for you? What's next for you?
John Muir Laws: 44:31
I think in the next few years, I'm probably going to be working at teaching teachers, be those homeschool parents, be those elementary school teachers, high school teachers, college teachers, bringing this kind of observational journaling back into our science classroom and science curriculum. There's a lot of potential for that, and I think we've got some very effective resources that is going to help people who want to do this, be able to do this and make it work.
Tania Marien: 45:00
Oh, that's exciting. And so that's not for another few years.
John Muir Laws: 45:04
Oh, well no, that's my work over the next few years.
Tania Marien: 45:07
Over the next few years. Okay.
John Muir Laws: 45:10
Yes. So the book is going to be out sometime next year so that if you're listening so that is going to be in 2020. And we're working right now to develop websites and all sorts of other ancillary resources for the educators that want to be using this. Also, looking for ways to get educators talking to each other, sharing ideas, sharing inspiration. I think that we can do a lot to help people who are teaching be able to kind of get best practices into their hands.
Tania Marien: 45:53
I hope you've enjoyed my conversation about community building with John Muir Laws. John built his community of nature journalers through his blog, social media accounts and by hosting in-person events. Here's a summary of the community building tips from my conversation with John. Tip number one, don't wait for a master plan to start your community, just begin. Tip number two, be consistent with what you're offering. Tip number three, leverage technology to grow your community. Tip number four, help others become the person they want to become. And lastly, tip number five, don't underestimate the power of potlucks. I'd like to thank John for stopping by and for discussing how he built his community. To learn more about John, his books and his teaching resources, visit the show notes for this episode.
Tania Marien: 46:58 Talaterra is a podcast for and about independent educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues.
Tania Marien: 47:11 Thank you so much for joining us today, this is Tania Marien.