ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on social movements and their influences on Finnish outdoor education (OE) in youth care systems. It discusses changes in human-nature relationships, describes changes in policies and addresses the expansion of the method and its philosophy. The chapter proposes the accumulated changes, or paradigm shifts, and the influence of social movements on the meaning of the landscapes of Eloand Era. Nature is a cultural metaphor that can mean many things. In different societal situations and developmental stages nature has been given different meanings. When the OE boom started in the beginning of the 1990s in Finland, the main paradigm to be followed was Colin Mortlock’s adventure paradigm, which came with the idea of a radical alternative to normality. The OE–based therapeutic institution organized by the Mannerheim League “Huvitus” is located in the southwest of Finland in Paimio. The chapter examines the romantic history of OE that is reconstructed for the demands of mass education in schools.
