In collaboration with Presca, the world's first climate-positive sportswear brand.

If our last Edition, Abundance, celebrated the adventure world, Stewardship explores how we protect what’s good. Given the crossover between adventurers and environmentalists, environmental stewardship predominates. But community is also a vital theme, and no less essential to our future.

Stewardship is our second Edition alongside Presca. To get a feel for how their work is supporting wider change in the outdoor industry, we spoke with the first Presca Repair Ambassador, David Starley. He’s helping to build a sustainable running movement through The Green Runners. Where does repair fit in?

Recalling the roving travels of his teenagehood and twenties, Douglald Hine's essay helps frame the context in which we adventure today. He asks how living in a world of deepening environmental and social crisis affects the possibility of what he calls ‘the onward journey’. What has really become harder, he argues, is the moment at which journeying onwards might be embedded into life beyond: returning home.

Sam Knights' essay, a departure from adventure in the literal sense, similarly sets the scene by reflecting on the journey of the climate movement. Mourning the lost momentum in 2019, with its wave of mass mobilisation, he asks how the movement might rediscover its impetus amidst deepening crises.

Oliver Cassidy, during filming for Franklin (credit, Luke Tscharke)

As we threaten to push our natural home over the brink, returning home requires taking better care of it. Franklin, a new film following Oliver Cassidy’s raft descent of Tasmania’s Franklin River, offers one perspective on how to do this by celebrating the thousands of Australians who campaigned to save the Franklin in the early 1980s - particularly the pioneering environmentalists who bravely blockaded the proposed dam site. We spoke with Cassidy and producer Chris Kamen.

Two other pieces explicitly honour people stewarding well. Photographer Jim Johnston reflects on his time among the Bahnar Jo Long, an animist hill-tribe group of Vietnam’s Central Highlands living in deeply respectful harmony with the forest. And Trisha Mukherjee profiles Maryland Riverkeeper Frederick Tutman, who is defending nature and community against corporate bully tactics.

Corporate capitalism is entwined with environmental issues and almost every other facet of life. This has been a debate in the couchsurfing community for years, and recently came to a head when Couchsurfing.org, long synonymous with couchsurfing, imposed a paywall. Couchers.org has since emerged as an alternative, so we asked Co-Founder Itsi Weinstock about the platform’s alternative vision.

The coastline near Sarn Bach, featured in Emily Alice Spivey's piece (credit, Emily Alive Spivey)

The passing of a baton is liable to encourage the reconsiderations of stewardship. In the wake of her grandmother’s death, Emily Alice Spivey feels this on a personal level as she returns to Sarn Bach to process her grief and ponder what the future holds for the land and the family connected to it.

We wish you much adventure as autumn ushers the world from abundance to darkness. And, as you go, we hope this Edition prompts fruitful thoughts about the stewardship of nature and community on your patch.

The Adventure Uncovered Team.