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

Lessons from Bears and Jaguars with John Stokes (Part One)

·39 min·2 clips

A black bear bows back after John Stokes says, 'Good morning grandfather.'

1. Forest Educator with Ricardo Sierra centers this conversation on John Stokes, bears and jaguars, and nature-based education. 2. Ricardo Sierra is the host, and John Stokes is the guest because he brings long field experience, elder teachings, and stories from Mohawk, Iroquois, Hawaii, Sweden, Brazil, and Colombia. 3. The episode asks what it means to listen well and teach through stories, protocols, and outdoor experience. 4. Stokes says a grade-one-to-three school audience and their parents showed low attention, while the Iroquois Confederacy can listen to a story told over nine days. 5. He recalls an elder from the Sierra Nevada in Colombia asking what he had done for 'the mother earth' in the past year. 6. He describes his children treating a five-second pause as a refusal, which becomes his example of how differently people read silence. 7. Carrie Otis asks whether children with 'attention deficit disorder' had ever been told anything worth paying attention to. 8. Stokes says kids became attentive when he told them stories, let them sit quietly in the woods, or shared something they genuinely liked. 9. He tells a Hawaii group of teenagers to keep what they want and 'throw the rest' away, and they say no adult had ever spoken that way to them. 10. He describes feeling shell-shocked in the Nurturing the Roots mentoring program when he sat next to Jake Swamp and then relaxed after Swamp started asking him about volleyball and Tom Brown. 11. Stokes says elders notice how a person sits and listens during opening words or blessings, and he reads that as a sign of training. 12. He points to Aboriginal ideas about keeping the outside simple so a person has more time to develop the inside. 13. He names Carl Henrik Robert and 'The Natural Step' as an example of changing environmental thinking through system conditions. 14. In Sweden, Rolf Olsen holds a burl-birch bowl and asks what if 'sophisticated' meant making, fixing, and returning things to nature. 15. Stokes argues that the world is upside down when a Volvo is more 'primitive' than a handmade cup and when Indigenous stewardship left places like Hawaii and Australia in better condition. 16. Moasir in Manaus brings a film crew to a young-people class and says the forest is already medicine because stress causes 90% of sicknesses. 17. Stokes links that point to schools that know recess and nature help children but still do not act on the data. 18. He describes the Akwesasne Science and Math Pilot Program, where the Thanksgiving Address became a curriculum ordered from people to earth, water, and fish. 19. The tone is conversational, story-driven, and reflective, with long anecdotes, repeated examples, and direct back-and-forth between Ricardo Sierra and John Stokes. 20. People interested in Indigenous education, outdoor skills, and curriculum design will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a short, tightly edited show may skip it.

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