Climbing as if you care: rock climbing at Kura Tawhiti/Castle Hill as a place-based approach to sustainability

Abstract

This article explores ways that climbers engage with climbing areas and highlights opportunities that climbing offers to develop, through place-based education approaches, an ethic of care for these places. Challenges include moving people beyond the notion that climbs are resources to be ‘consumed’ by making them aware of the need to engage in culturally and environmentally respectful practices when climbing in natural environments. Opportunities include the revisiting of familiar problems over time to develop ongoing associations, the physicality and sociality of the climbing, and opportunities to experience beauty and spiritual connections. This study focuses on an area in Aotearoa New Zealand called Kura Tawhiti/Castle Hill, famous for its world class bouldering. The article ends with the conclusion that even though climbers connect to places in different ways, setting these connections within the context of place-based education still has the potential to foster the ethic and care that underpins practising sustainability.

Keywords:

• place-based education
• sustainability
• outdoor education
• rock climbing
• bouldering