For Jasmin Estrada, nature has always meant more than one thing. It was the summer camp in New England, where she lived, and bathing in sunlight on plastic chairs in her abuela’s hot backyard in Guatemala, waiting for food to be cooked. It was also the scorching sun over a family member’s head as they hid in the back of a truck entering the United States. Nature can be very harsh, she says, but “there’s [also] a harmony and beauty that we all deserve to connect with.”

So when she started studying adventure education at Green Mountain College in Vermont, Estrada couldn’t help but notice how “wilderness” was treated as something untouched and pure. She felt uneasy when her classes “cut folks off by telling them that they have to go through this ‘white explorer’ model to be connected.” This un-nuanced understanding of how race, culture, gender, and class affect how people engage with public lands has contributed to a landscape where most visitors to public lands are white.

Closing the “nature gap”—as some have called the lack of outdoor access people of color and other marginalized groups experience—led Estrada to her current position as community support and training manager at the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts. When The Wilderness Society knocked on the Appalachian Mountain Club door with a new public lands curriculum in 2018, Estrada was elated. It was the first time she’d seen this kind of nuanced understanding of public lands in a curriculum, she said.

The educational material, divided into six modules, incorporates important historical context for conservation efforts, highlighting the stories that are often left out, including from conservationists of color and queer communities, and the segregation and discrimination that have informed national conservation policy. It also includes lessons in climate change and how to advocate for public lands.

“If we are not telling a story about public lands where people feel seen, where people’s experiences are validated, and where we’re being authentic—and just acknowledging some of the atrocious things that happened with regards to how land has been conserved in this country—then people are going to continue to feel alienated by the conservation movement,” says Liz Vogel, education and youth engagement director with The Wilderness Society.

Read the full article about inclusive curricula focusing on public lands at Grist.