Forest Educator with Ricardo Sierra | A Podcast for Revolutionary Conversations about Nature-Based Education · Ricardo Sierra

Forest Educator Spotlight: The Problem with Intangible Results

·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

A mother jokes, 'We paid X number of dollars for you to make this,' after her daughter carves a spoon.

Ricardo Sierra frames the episode as part of the Forest Entrepreneur series because the real subject is messaging and how value gets communicated. He argues that the problem is not universal. If a program teaches acorn flour, bow making, or basket weaving, the result can be shown right away. But many nature educators are not selling a finished object. They are offering a kind of value that is harder to point to at first. That makes the story harder to tell. Sierra says there is a gap between what practitioners know, what families hear, and what the market can easily recognize. At one point he notes that people outside the work may wonder why educators are not screaming about the value from the rooftops. He treats that reaction as a clue, not a compliment. The deeper issue is confidence. When educators feel unsure about the intangibles, they can weaken their own story before anyone else has a chance to hear it. Sierra widens the frame by pointing out how small the sector still is relative to the number of school aged children in the United States. He cites a rough scale of 68 million children and says nature based education is still only a tiny blip. That matters, because a partial classroom is not just a statistic. For a program that needs 23, 24, or 25 children to stay healthy, being stuck at 18 can decide whether a car repair gets paid, whether a family vacation happens, or whether braces are manageable. He keeps the focus on the lived economics of the work. He also stresses that the answer is not to force the work into a fake version of tangibility. The better move is to control the narrative with more clarity and more confidence. The episode stays reflective, circling the problem until the shape of the solution becomes visible. It is less about slogans than about ownership. And it lands with a quiet reminder that some educational value has to be described differently if it is going to be understood at all.

As heard by us

A direct case for speaking plainly when nature education does not fit neat metrics.

Ricardo Sierra makes a clear case for how hard it is to sell nature education when the value resists easy measurement. He sets the concrete wins, like acorn flour, basket weaving, or bows and arrows, against the quieter work of programs whose effect is felt more than counted.

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Why you'd press play

When your work is real but hard to measure, this episode helps you explain its value.

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