The Wild Minds Podcast

In this episode, Marina looks back at the questions that came up at the *Outside for Everyone* webinar and asks why we adults find it so hard to take learning outdoors, and what we can do about it.

In this episode:

• Why experiential learning sticks, and why we still find it so hard to take education outside
• "Backlinking": Juliet Robertson's idea of offering hands-on outdoor activities and linking them to the curriculum afterwards
• How outdoor learning fits the early years, primary and secondary curriculum, from mud kitchens and story stones to measuring trees with trigonometry
• Climate education in practice: soil tests, watching the weather with the Beaufort scale, plant surveys and growing food
• Tool use, vocational skills and confidence, and why hands-on skills matter for future careers
• Contribution as a core part of belonging and wellbeing
• What research on autistic children at Forest School tells us: the adults' attitudes can make or break a session
• Why our practice is about relationship, not activity: consent-based practice, mutual dignity and humility
• Do you need a qualification to take learning outdoors? (No, but you do need to be competent, reflect on your practice and carry out risk-benefit assessments)
• Worried about losing control? How routines, rituals and clear boundaries help, and how to help children explain their thinking
• Shaping the session around the learner, not the learner around the session, with nature as the "third actor"
• Starting small with five-minute activities, managing large class ratios and giving teenagers real-life experiences (including the new Natural History GCSE)

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-101-the-children-are-ready-are-we

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this 100th episode of The Wild Minds Podcast, I'm in discussion with Michael James and Stefania Donzelli. We explore what Forest School and autism can teach us about difference, belonging, relationship and the ways we create environments where people can genuinely be themselves.

We discuss:

• Why autism is far more than a diagnostic category, and what changes when we listen to autistic people’s own experiences and perspectives.
• Moving beyond the deficit model and questioning the assumptions of neuro-normativity.
• Forest School as a micro-community where relationships, trust, autonomy and belonging can create different possibilities.
• The triangle of trust between practitioner, participant and environment and why all three matter.
• The social model of disability and how barriers can sometimes sit in our environments, communication and expectations rather than in the individual.
• Sensory differences and the outdoor environment, including why nature itself may need to be adapted rather than treated as something fixed and untouchable.
• The importance of flexibility, communication and listening - recognising that the participant may be the greatest expert in their own experience.
• Power and authority in Forest School, and what happens when we create spaces where people can question, negotiate and do things differently.
• Intersectionality and Universal Design for Learning, and the value of anticipating different ways of participating, communicating and expressing ourselves.
• Nature as an active participant, including a beautiful story about a non-speaking child, a wisteria and the possibility of seeing behaviour differently.
• The importance of place, repeated encounters and embodied experience, and what the woods can offer beyond a prescribed programme of activities.
• Curiosity, disagreement and connection in a polarised world, and why sometimes the answer might be to go to the woods, light a fire, have a cuppa and talk.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-100-forest-school-and-autism/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!

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Welcome to episode 99 which was recorded in the middle of a sleepless night.

A quiet, unscripted reflection on gratitude, grief, wildness and the autumn question of what needs pruning and what is ready to be harvested.

In this episode:

• Begins with a gratitude practice for the stillness of the night, for time, and for simply being present.
• Reads Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese and reflects on letting “the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
• Marina sits with grief and unease about the climate crisis, noticing dry ground, stressed trees and early leaf-drop in the woods.
• Explores the autumn equinox as a moment of balance between light and dark, and what that might mirror in our own lives.
• Shares a simple woodland practice using rowan berries to notice where life feels in balance and where it does not.
• Reflects on grounding through the senses, including getting to know the soil while imagining a future forest garden.
• Uses the image of pruning an apple tree to ask what habits, patterns or inherited ways of being may need cutting back.
• Considers wildness not as chaos, but as something that can liberate us while still asking for care, attention and tending.
• Looks ahead to Episode 100, a conversation with Michael and Stefania on inclusion, neurodivergence and autism in Forest School practice.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-99-what-needs-pruning/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Ralph Mortimer-Roome, a GP based in Brighton and Chair of the Kent, Surrey and Sussex regional group of Greener Practice.

We discuss what changes when we stop seeing health as something that sits only inside the individual body, and begin to include climate, community, relationship and the living world in how we understand healing.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why the climate crisis is also a health crisis — and why solutions for planetary health can also support human health.
• What older medical traditions can teach us about health as balance, rather than simply the absence of disease.
• The idea that illness has not only biological causes, but also social, political and environmental dimensions.
• The tension between the transactional and relational sides of medicine — treating illness while also helping people feel heard and understood.
• David Abram’s influence on Ralph’s thinking, particularly the idea of the healer as an intermediary between the human and more-than-human world.
• Why mental distress can be understood through multiple lenses — biomedical, psychological, social, trauma-informed and spiritual.
• How loneliness and social isolation can contribute to ill health, and whether nature disconnection may operate in a similar way.
• Why doctors may need to recognise their own relationship with nature before they can notice nature disconnection in others.
• What a green prescription can actually look like — from signposting and access to green spaces, to walking groups and supported outdoor care.
• Why simply moving healthcare outdoors is not enough — and the difference between being outside and developing a relationship with nature.
• What a more embedded nature-based care pathway in Sussex could look like, including outdoor consultations, local sites, social prescribing and primary care.
• Ralph’s closing idea of nature as a gift rather than something to consume — rooted in reciprocity, care and the possibility of healing.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-98-what-if-nature-is-part-of-medicine/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!

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For this episode, I’m joined by my husband Geoff Robb - musician, composer and co-director of The Outdoor Teacher, to explore his lifelong relationship with music and nature, and the story behind The Music of Trees.

We discuss....

• Geoff’s journey from classical guitar and years of busking to becoming a professional musician, composer and creator of The Music of Trees.
• How his early experiences with Reiki and healing opened questions about music, creativity and where inspiration might come from.
• Geoff’s lifelong relationship with the outdoors, from Forest School Camps as a teenager to the deeper nature-connection practices we later explored together.
• What it means to listen to nature, ask permission and build a relationship with individual trees - without needing to claim certainty about what is happening.
• How the willow became a turning point in Geoff’s composing, and how music sometimes seems to arrive unexpectedly rather than being consciously created.
• The story behind The Music of Trees - combining original guitar music with folklore, ecology, storytelling and the remarkable lives of trees.
• Ancient yews, tree protectors, Julia Butterfly Hill and the people who have stood up for trees when trees cannot speak for themselves.
• How COVID brought Geoff’s work as a musician almost to a standstill, but also gave him time in the woods to write more music than he had written in the previous several years - much of which became Music of Trees.
• How that period also brought Geoff into The Outdoor Teacher, combining his technical and business experience with our shared commitment to helping more people access nature.
• The changing reality of being a musician in the age of Spotify, streaming and AI and why supporting live music and independent artists matters more than ever.

Shownotes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/97-the-music-of-trees

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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As I record this onthe Summer Solstice - a moment when nature stands in its fullest expression, it feels like the perfect time to reflect on a season of conversations that, in different ways, have all pointed towards one essential human need: belonging.

• At the Summer Solstice, when the light reaches its fullest expression, we are invited to pause and ask what has ripened in us, what is ready to bear fruit, and what kind of power we wish to carry into the darker half of the year.
• The shift from Oak King to Holly King reminds us that true strength is not domination but stewardship - how can the warrior within us create the conditions for feeling, tenderness and relationship?
• Belonging begins with safety. Before we can feel deeply, we need to feel held. Yet the natural world offers a remarkable invitation: trees, rivers, birds and plants ask nothing of us before we speak.
• Angela Hanscom reminded us that children belong through their bodies first. Movement, risk, balance, play and sensory experience are not extras; they are part of how we come to know ourselves and our place in the world.
• Children often meet the world as a community of living subjects rather than objects. Perhaps part of adulthood is remembering that capacity for relationship with the more-than-human world.
• Jessica Newberry Le Vay challenged the idea that climate anxiety is something to be fixed. Grief, worry, anger and sadness may be healthy responses to a world under pressure - evidence not of pathology, but of care.
• Emotional resilience does not come from avoiding difficult feelings but from learning how to hold them together, in community, with purpose and agency.
• Mo Wilde brought us back to ancient relationships between people, plants, food and seasons, reminding us that health has always been rooted in reciprocity with the living world.
• Many people arrive at the GP with symptoms that cannot be neatly explained or measured. Sometimes what hurts is not simply the body, but loneliness, grief, burnout, disconnection or the absence of belonging.
• Health may not exist solely within the individual. It may also live in relationships, communities, purpose, access to nature, and our connection to something larger than ourselves.
• Outdoor consultations, walking groups, community gardens, shared fires and time in nature are not soft alternatives to healthcare. They may be part of the medicine itself - helping people regulate, connect and remember they are not alone.
• This season has returned again and again to one simple truth: health is more than the absence of illness. It is connection. It is movement. It is meaning. It is relationship. It is belonging.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-96-the-medicine-of-belonging

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this conversation, GP Dr Tim Rigg explores how nature, community and healthcare might come together to create a more humane, preventative and scalable model of wellbeing.

• Tim speaks from his experience as a GP, bringing together clinical practice, social prescribing, nature connection and a wider understanding of what helps people become well
• He explains that around 90–95% of healthcare contact happens in primary care, showing just how important GPs are in shaping the first conversation about health, care and prevention
• He suggests that a very large proportion of people coming to GPs are living with chronic disease, stress, anxiety, depression, isolation or other conditions shaped by the environments and systems they live within
• The conversation explores the strengths of Western medicine, especially in acute illness, trauma and emergency care, while also asking whether it is less equipped to address root causes, prevention and the conditions of a healthy life
• Tim shares how the pioneering social prescribing work in Frome helped reveal the importance of community, belonging and purpose in supporting people’s health
• One striking statistic from Frome was a reported 40% relative reduction in hospital admissions compared with a neighbouring area, suggesting that community-based approaches may have a significant role to play in reducing pressure on the system
• The episode looks at green prescribing not as simply telling people to “go for a walk”, but as a structured, supported and clinically credible pathway from the GP consultation room into nature-based wellbeing programmes
• A key part of the emerging model is making it easy and safe for GPs to signpost patients, while trained nature-based practitioners manage screening, safeguarding, delivery and ongoing support
• The conversation explores why nature-based work may help through regulation of the nervous system, sensory connection, beauty, awe, movement, stillness, meaning, community and relationship with the more-than-human world
• Tim’s work is also about collaboration, bringing together GPs, Primary Care Networks, nature-based practitioners, social prescribing link workers, universities, funders and local green providers
• At the heart of the episode is a hopeful question about scale - how do we move from inspiring local projects to a joined-up, evidence-informed, nationally accessible pathway that supports people, practitioners, communities and the NHS?

Shownotes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-95-what-if-your-gp-could-prescribe-nature/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this reflective solo episode, Marina explores how getting to know the plants around us can deepen our sense of connection, belonging and wonder. Drawing on a day spent teaching in the woods, she shares simple ways to slow down, engage the senses and discover the food, medicine, stories and lessons hidden within the plants we often overlook.

Key Takeaways

• Why learning the names and qualities of individual plants changes how we relate to the natural world.
• How simple sensory activities can help us slow down and pay closer attention.
• The powerful "Meet a Tree" exercise and what it reveals about uniqueness and connection.
• Marina's woodland day of foraging, fire-lighting, whittling and plant-based practices.
• The medicinal and nutritional benefits of pine needles, including vitamin C and antioxidants.
• How to make an infused pine and elderflower tea and immunity-supporting syrup.
• The importance of safe foraging, correct identification and awareness of lookalike species.
• Ethical harvesting practices that ensure enough is left for wildlife and future growth.
• Insights from Mo Wilde's foraging work and the impact of wild foods on gut health and the microbiome.
• The remarkable benefits of common plants such as nettles, often dismissed as weeds.
• Creative ways to use plant study across science, geography, history, literacy and art.
• An invitation to choose just one local plant, observe it through the seasons, and discover the richness of relationship it can offer.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-94-getting-to-know-the-plants/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this episode, I’m speaking with Mo Wilde - forager, research herbalist, ethnobotanist, author of The Wilderness Cure, and founder of the Wild Biome Project.

Mo has spent decades learning from plants, fungi, seaweeds, medicine, soil and the seasons. Her relationship with the wild began in childhood, and has grown into a life’s work exploring not only what plants can offer us, but what happens when we remember ourselves as part of the living world.

In 2020, Mo began an extraordinary experiment: for a whole year, she ate only wild food. No supermarket food, no farmed food, no quick stops for coffee and cake — just what could be foraged, gathered, hunted, exchanged, preserved, fermented or found within the landscape around her.

But this conversation is not really about survivalism. It is not about going “backwards” or romanticising the past. It is about relationship.

What happens when we begin to notice the green world in detail again? What happens when the body is nourished by wild plants, fungi and microbes? What happens to our gut, our sense of belonging, our imagination, our resilience — when food stops being just a product and becomes a relationship with place?

Together, Mo and I explore foraging, wild food, food security, children’s ecological literacy, the intelligence of plants, the Wildbiome Project, and the deep shift from scarcity into abundance.

This is a conversation about the wilderness cure — and the question at the heart of it is: what happens when we eat the wild?

In this conversation with Mo Wilde, we explore wild food not simply as foraging, but as a way of remembering our place inside the living world.

• Mo begins with gratitude for plants, reminding us that through photosynthesis they transform sunlight into the energy that makes all life on Earth possible.
• She describes a wild plant as one that is not directly tended or controlled by humans, inviting us to think about wildness as relationship rather than separation.
• During her year of eating only wild food, Mo found far more abundance than she expected, with most of her food coming from within 15 miles of her home.
• Her wild diet included hundreds of plant species, seaweed, mushrooms, shellfish, game, and even wasp larvae, revealing the astonishing range of foods still present in the landscape.
• The experiment was not about survivalism or proving toughness, but about asking whether the land around her could truly feed her.
• Mo speaks beautifully about the practical intelligence of preservation, celebrating the jam jar as one of humanity’s great inventions for fermenting, storing, and carrying abundance forward.
• She challenges the idea that foraging requires some rare talent, suggesting that humans already can notice detail - we have simply trained that attention on brands, logos, and consumer culture instead of plants.
• The conversation touches on how children can naturally learn plants when they are shown them, and how much ecological literacy could return if this knowledge was woven through childhood.
• Mo reflects on food insecurity, Brexit, Covid, and her own teenage experience of feeding younger siblings in Malawi, all of which shaped her interest in resilience and local food.
• What begins as a question about food becomes something deeper: Mo describes moving from a mindset of scarcity to an experience of abundance, gratitude, fragility, and being held by the living world.
• As a herbalist, she reminds us that healing is not only something we seek when we are ill, but something that happens daily through nourishment, relationship, and the complex intelligence of plants.
• Through the Wild Biome Project, Mo is exploring how eating wild food changes the gut microbiome, opening up questions about whether health can be understood not by isolating one molecule, but by seeing the larger patterns between bodies, bacteria, plants, soil, and place.

Shownotes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-93-the-wilderness-cure-with-mo-wilde/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

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This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!

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In this week's episode I am discussing how climate anxiety is not the problem. I will explore how we educate, support and practice in a time of climate breakdown without overwhelming young people or asking them to numb themselves to reality.

Topics include:

• Climate anxiety is not the problem; unsupported climate anxiety is.
• Climate education cannot just give young people facts - it has to help them emotionally metabolise what they know.
• Emotional literacy needs to include the body, not just naming feelings.
• Adults and teachers need to do their own emotional work, otherwise they may shut down young people’s grief, anger or fear.
• Climate anxiety can be a sign of care, intelligence and relationship with the world, not pathology.
• The “Goldilocks zone” is really useful: enough feeling to care and act, not so much that people collapse.
• A climate breakdown risk-benefit assessment feels like one of your most original contributions.
• The neutrality/politics section is one of the most interesting: teachers do not need to be party-political, but silence and false balance are not neutral.
• Resilience should be framed as community, belonging and collective capacity, not individual toughness.
• Nature connection is not just a well-being add-on; it is part of repairing the relationship that created the crisis.
• The ending around possible futures, imagination and agency is important because it offers hope without false reassurance.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-92-climate-anxiety-is-not-the-problem/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

If you have enjoyed today's episode, please consider rating and reviewing my show!

This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!

Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then let me know what you loved most about the episode!

Also, if you haven’t done so already, "follow" the podcast, as if you’re not following, there’s a good chance you’ll miss out.