Our mission is to transform the culture of the outdoor industry from exclusionary, extractive, and predominately white to one that celebrates and learns from the experiences and leadership of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and people of other marginalized identities.
We are working for a world where people of all identities experience joy, feel physical and emotional safety, recreate comfortably, educate others to recreate, and lead in outdoor spaces.
The outdoor industry in the United States is built around the myth that wilderness is “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness Act, 1964). The culture inspired by this narrow concept of “wilderness” dramatically limits our imaginations of who spends time outside, wearing what, with what gear, at what pace, and to what end. Those who do “trammel” are typified by white male explorers on missions to discover and conquer, be it some part of themselves or the land itself.
However, every person on our shared planet has ancestral and cultural connections to the natural world. Nature is healing; therefore, limiting access cuts off healing possibilities we all need. This is a form of oppression we aim to dismantle through our work.
Small is All. We can change a community one person at a time; we can change the world one community at a time.
Slow is steady, steady is fast. We move slowly for emotional processing and learning in order to move quickly in the organizational changes that need to happen.
Balance head & heart. This is intellectual, relational, emotional, and spiritual work.
Racism explicitly, not exclusively. We focus on racism while addressing intersecting forms of identity oppression, recognizing it’s too tangled a knot to follow just one thread.
Inspired by adrienne maree brown, the Racial Reconciliation and Healing Project, and our own experiences outside.
Green wood is alive, growing, bendable without breaking, and hard to burn. Duff is the forest floor, full of mycelium networks that connect the trees and soil in unseen ways. Both are necessary, interdependent parts of an ever-changing, adaptive, healthy and thriving forest.
The cycle of duff to new green wood and back is present in our human ecosystems – sometimes known as organizations, families, or communities – that also rely on composting old ways to fuel new growth. This is how we see our work – holistic, dynamic, and propelled by interconnected learning and adaptation. And joy!
The name was inspired by an essay in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.
“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things — the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this — joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and everything we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”
“‘Joy Is Such a Human Madness’: The Duff Between Us” by Ross Gay
Steph Subdiaz and Ella Hartley were both backpacking instructors for the Colorado Outward Bound School when the 2020 Movement for Black Lives drew them into their work together. Steph had been involved in racial justice and equity advocacy since her high school Cultural Diversity history class and was teaching math at an alternative boarding high school. Ella was halfway through a graduate program focused on racial justice and healing while living and protesting in a locked down New York City. In response to community interest, as well as their own desire to change the culture of outdoor education, they created the Racial Justice Weavings.
For three years, Steph and Ella hosted these weekly conversations with their fellow outdoor educators about the role of racism in outdoor education and how they could all work to dismantle it in their own organizations and broader lives.They called these gatherings Weavings as a reminder that they were picking up the work started by many, integrating into everything happening in that cultural moment, and adding to the future of the movement. Over time, Steph and Ella witnessed a ripple of impact across their community that has inspired them to extend their antiracism work to the greater outdoor industry.
Steph and Ella now offer their shared expertise and experience in racial justice work and the outdoor industry as Green Wood & Duff.
