Lessons from the Father of Modern Conservation

By Alex Kvanli
April 01, 2025 (comments)

Sigurd Olson is recognized as a driving force behind the protection of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). The renowned writer and environmentalist helped inspire people to care more about protecting wild places. However, his accomplishments were made possible by the work of others who came before him, or as they say, “he stood on the shoulders of giants.” One of Olson’s giants was Aldo Leopold, often called the father of wildlife ecology and modern conservation. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays rooted in observation and deep ecological understanding. The book helped shape the...

Winter Daydreams of Summer Camp Adventures

By Alex Kvanli
January 22, 2024 (comments)

The holi-daze is over. I’m still full of lefse and green bean casserole, but starving for something else. Winter coziness and unlimited streaming are losing their luster. I haven’t seen the sun since it shattered high-temperature records on Minne-Snowta’s snowless Christmas. Did I really just order boots for my dog? And where are the colorful birds by the feeder? I couldn’t tell you– the three-and-a-half walls of my living room have dulled my senses. Scan social media and you may find your friends’ “#ThrowbackThursday” selfies captioned, “Miss this,” featuring bodies of water or high altitude. The seasonal shift to restlessness...

Beyond the Tower

By John Erdmann
February 19, 2021 (comments)

Believe it or not, a few years ago there were no cell phones. Hard wired phones (remember telephone poles) have been around for over a century. At first callers asked an operator to literally patch them through to another telephone. At a central office, she would plug two lines together. When rural houses shared a “party line,” if you picked up the phone to hear people talking, you’d hang up and try when the line was not in use. No biggie, but people preferred a private telephone line, eventually adding multiple telephone sets, some children even got personal land lines....

Bring Nature Indoors

By Alex Kvanli
March 31, 2020 (comments)

Many nature lovers around the world have suddenly been confined to their homes due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nature has a powerful effect on our health and wellbeing, especially on our mood and coping mechanisms. While going outside daily and strolling through a local park or even enjoying a picnic in the backyard provides a healthy dose of nature, it is not always possible. Below are 6 ways to bring small doses of nature indoors.

How to Reset Your Body Clock to Sleep Better

By Hal Holmes
March 17, 2020 (comments)

A good night’s sleep forms the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. The rhythm of life is all around us, but sometimes the pace of our lives can drown it out. In our hyper-connected world, there never seems to be a time when we are not listening to, looking at, or waiting for something that plugs into a wall to speak to us. We go from our connected homes with Alexa and Google Home, to our cars with music, podcasts, and/or audiobooks, and into offices that are cluttered with screens demanding our attention – all the while checking our phones every...

Why Excess Screen Time Damages Your Child's Brain

By Alex Kvanli
January 28, 2020 (comments)

Nature is an environment that often demands awareness and being in the moment. We must be aware of dangers such as wild animals, the weather, obstacles, our location, etc.… In other words, we have to be on the lookout for new occurrences or novelty. When in this state of awareness, we are cognizant and focused on our surroundings. Human evolution was largely driven by the fact that our ancestors spent large amounts of their time outside. Being aware of new occurrences was necessary for survival and we still operate on many of those same genes that allowed our ancestors to...

11 Proven Ways Wilderness Adventure Camps Can Transform Your Kid’s Life

By Alex Kvanli
December 01, 2019 (comments)

Experiential education programs like wilderness adventure camps have ways of inspiring kids in ways that are not possible at home, school, or through traditional sports. Canoeing, hiking, and kayaking with a group through wilderness environments like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) of Northern Minnesota is much more than just fun. It can be a profound experience with lifelong lessons. By banning electronics, detaching participants from their normal patterns and behaviors, and connecting them with nature in a supportive group setting, wilderness adventure camps are designed to cause participants to confront their self-concept and motivate them to explore and...

City-Dwellers: Your Creativity May Be At Risk

By Alex Kvanli
March 27, 2019 (comments)

Could living in a city affect your creativity? Over half of the world’s population is now living in urban areas (UN News Centre, 2014). One result of increased urbanization is that people are spending less time in nature. Furthermore, technology and the ease of access to information may be decreasing our time for contemplative and creative thinking. Research suggests that these implications may have detrimental effects on our health and wellbeing. Unnatural environments’ effect on animals On the surface, some factors that may contribute to the negative health effects of living in a city could be the air pollution, crime...

How Wilderness Adventures Foster Lifelong Success

By Alex Kvanli
March 18, 2019 (comments)

How can we teach children that failure is not the end of the road? Our mindset, or attitude, governs nearly everything in our lives. It determines the way we live, experience the world, and make decisions. Our mindset shapes the way we view ourselves and subsequently what we can accomplish. According to Stanford University psychologists Carol Dweck, there are two types of mindsets: In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and...

Nature's Effect on Our Brains and Well-being

By Alex Kvanli
January 21, 2019 (comments)

Why are we drawn to nature? What makes the great outdoors so great?