Connecting With Nature Via Technology

A live, interactive video feed can help bridge the disconnect between students and their natural surroundings.

The town of Bella Bella, B.C., is the type of place where everybody acts like old friends. Conversations focus on the Vancouver Canucks and the weather. I spent four days there working on a technology project, an initiative of Pacific Wild, an environmental conservation and education group based in B.C.’s remote Great Bear Rainforest. Bella Bella is situated about 750 kilometres north of Vancouver, a two-hour flight by turbo-prop.

Pacific Wild's remote-control cameras, located throughout the pristine wilderness, unobtrusively observe bears, wolves, cranes, and all kinds of activity in the busy estuaries and river beds. During the last semester of my master's degree in digital media at Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media, I was part of a team working with Pacific Wild to design and develop interactive educational modules using the content from the live cameras for the school on the local reserve. The goal of the trip to Bella Bella was to put the final touches on the project and set up a live-streaming network of the video feed within the school to be used in various classes.

It was the type of trial-and-error work of IP addresses and network settings. We wanted to bring the wild into the classroom and redefine how nature is studied. Even in a town within the heart of the most beautiful natural rural environments, there's a disconnect in the relationship between modern students and their natural surroundings. This initiative was intended to bridge that distance. The use of an interactive medium through which students can document their observations, control the camera, and collaboratively observe from the comfort of the classroom creates a connection to the material beyond anything a text book or nature video could achieve.

It's not about what they may see in the 10 minutes they are watching but rather the excitement around the possibility of what could be seen. It’s about creating an encounter with nature, something uncontrollable and unpredictable. In an age in which we’re accustomed to Googling everything we want and getting the exact information we seek, it’s essential we build the patience and stamina to deal with the randomness of nature.

Using technologies that are increasingly accessible and nimble enough for these rugged environments is a significant realization of the potential of our digital age. Our networked world enables us to transmit digital content with relative ease. It allows us to bridge cultural, educational, and experiential gaps. True, nothing will ever match the experience of trekking through the woods, hearing the calls of a lone loon, smelling fresh rainfall on the old growth trees, and losing your boot in the deep mud, but as youth culture becomes ever more dominated by screens, virtual spaces, and instant feedback to every action, using this same medium to bring the wild to them will hopefully inspire and encourage further investigation and education.

The Pacific Wild project capitalizes on the emotional power of live content and the shared collective experience facilitated by an inherently interactive medium. The interactivity changes the experience to one that focuses on the process of engaging with nature as opposed to the mere product of the nature documentary. In our age of instant, endless, limitless access to information, it’s this appreciation and understanding of process rather than product that will foster a generation that successfully engages with both the complexity of the information age and the simplicity of a hike in the woods.