Outdoor Heritagekeeper

Greetings to all members of the Outdoors Blogging community and those who read the blogs found within this community.

O’fieldstream is pleased to site by the fires with this group of bloggers, for we share a very common interest: The Outdoors.

O’fieldstream began as with a different name and more focused on an outdoor activity: Fly-fishing, now over 14 years ago. Then some eight years back, O’fieldstream began as an email communication with a number of individuals back in the early days of the Internet’s beginning popularity with the non-technical world. The discussion topics ranged from all things fly-fishing to how to avoid deer ticks to how to take better photos outdoors. And the focus groups we even wider and broader.

I began blogging - in my technical world - during the early days of the late 90’s; when most folks had no idea what blogging was. I started the first O’fieldstream blog in February of 2002 and played with it for a year or so.

In June of 2003 I made a return to membership in the Outdoor Writes Association of America and at the national meeting, I introduced the concept of blogging to several members who were friends and colleagues.

I had a history with OWAA going back to 1990, where I began as a student member, while in Purdue University’s Fisheries & Aquatic Science program. In 1994 I introduced OWAA to the Internet, when I delivered the first copy of the Mosaic browser on PC and Unix to the University of Maine; where the national conference was being held.

The idea of blogging was received with not much more fanfare or interest that was that of the Internet in 1994. Ah, but a funny thing happened on the way forward in technology: in less than 4 years, blogging has become far more than a fad. Blogging is now a viable form of publication and business model. On that level … it’s wakeup time!

But in late 2002 a serious illness began which by the late fall of 2003 took me totally out of the living, earning, and contact w/humanity scene for the next 3 years. And along with it went all of my outdoor and technology work efforts. I am now better; a long story; however I am just now getting back onto the board. Yet - as best as I could be - I’ve been ‘in-the-game’ the whole time.

The origin - the roots - of O’fieldstream actually go back much farther, back to the days when I was but a wee nub walking the stream banks and forested hills of our western Indiana farm; at the barrier between prairie and woodland. I have always had an interest in, and love for, the outdoors, but never thought I’d one day be communicating about it in so many different mediums, across the face of the planet at near light-speed! But I - and many of you - are.

Most of all I had no idea how important it would become to document, archive and preserve for future generations those little things I took for granted; like so many others around me then … and now.

You will find a read through this blog and my other companion publications, O’fieldstream Outdoor Journal, The O’fieldstream Journals, O’fieldstream’s Bio Blitz, Project HP3, Heritagekeepers and Outdoor Heritagekeeper .. and others on various other outdoor on-line platforms … have a consistent theme.

O’fieldstream and Heritagekeeper promote the notion that in order to retain our connection with the Outdoors we must:

This isn’t some new age thinking or softening of the outdoor experience’. This is the reality of what so many for the past 100 years have slowly lost sight of:

It will ONLY be with the understanding we obtain through our common association with an Outdoor Heritage, passed down from generation-to-generation, that we will be able to continue on - individually and as a society - without reverting to a savage version of the daily reality of survival first, which our ancestors left only a few shorts years past.

Today, however, we find ourselves in a very different predicament than our ancestors. Today we live in a world crowded by humanity. A world with greatly reduced natural resources. And a world where we have grown unaccustomed to the hard manual labor required to remain healthy and alive in a far less civilized station. The fact is, many people today would not survive such a reversal of daily life.

Our society is so fragile that we don’t need a major calamity to occur to thrust us - permanently or even temporarily into such turmoil. We only need look back at the aftermath of hurricane destruction on the Gulf Coast to see the truth in that statement. But we don’t even need to have a natural event like that to cause shock waves of fear and loss.

In August of 2003 a single squirrel, shorting out a conductor line in a substation in Ontario Canada took out nearly the entire eastern electric grid for only 2 days. The financial losses were staggering. And that is not considering the social trauma caused by any number of social ills’ in the affected area: robbery, looting, vandalism, rape, assault, murder.

This is not meant to be a doom-n-gloom commentary, but a reality check to remember that no matter how civilized we become - we still live in a world that is prey to the natural actions of the planet on which we live. And that our electric run society is extremely vulnerable to disruption by the smallest of variables. Thus, we must never loose touch with our understanding of the Outdoor Heritage and its value to us at all times. But -for the most part - we have lost touch.

This is why O’fieldstream raises the issues and evangelizes the importance of Heritage and Heritagekeeping… on a wide array of topics. For this blog and group - this will focus on Outdoor issues.

So, I do hope you all will continue to read, make comments and work with O’fieldstream to raise this and other important issues with others in the Outdoor Community and especially to those who have lost sight of the importance of the Human-Nature interface.

Remember, “The real world is outdoors. Go to it!” ™

O’fieldstream
Outdoor Heritagekeeper

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