Nature First

Bob Henderson of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Nils Vikander of North Troendelag University College in Levanger, Norway, are the co-editors. Both are practitioner-based outdoor educators. Bob Henderson teaches Outdoor Education at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Starting as a camper and canoe tripping staff member at Camp Ahmek in Algonquin Park, he has developed a lifelong interest in Canadian travel heritage and travel guiding. Beginning in 1994, he continues to write a regular heritage travel feature for Kanawa Magazine. In 1995 Bob completed his Ph.D. concerning approaches to travel guiding from the University of Alberta. He takes pride in baking a golden brown bannock and leading a spirited campfire singsong.Bob is the author of Every Trail Has a Story: Heritage Travel in Canada, published by Natural Heritage Books in 2005, and co-editor of the forthcoming Nature First: Outdoor Life the Friluftsliv Way, which will be released in June 2007. Nils Vikander has taught friluftsliv since 1991 at North Troendelag University College in Levanger, Norway. Starting his all-weather explorations of the outdoors as a child in Sweden, he followed his family to Canada where he became an academic roamer from east to west, interspersed with years of work/play in cross-country skiing. The latter took him yet further afield-to the US Midwest and Montana, and to the farthest reaches of the Canadian Arctic. In the late 1980s his curiosity took him back to Scandinavia, this time to Norway, where his teaching and outdoor immersion brought him many deep nature experiences, taking advantage from time to time of the nearness to Sweden and Finland. From 2003 to 2005 he returned to Canada as a visiting scholar at Brock University and found deeply intriguing comparative teaching experiences in the outdoors. Nils delves deeply into the philosophy of the nature experience. His greatest passion is to search familiar or unknown vistas with paddle or ski, simply, intimately and tracelessly.