Education & Tracking
Connecting people to nature through the Great African Seaforest and our original language with the wild.
“My dream is to reconnect the children of South Africa with nature.”
Education
Connecting people to nature through the Great African Seaforest and our original language with the wild.
Having a connection to nature is everyone’s birthright. Our love for the Great African Seaforest is built on our daily experiences of diving and tracking in this extraordinary place. Yet for many South Africans who are geographically close to the ocean, there are still many barriers to entry that prevent them from having meaningful access to the sea.
We are committed to sharing our love and knowledge of the Great African Seaforest with as many people as we can reach to grow a nature-based community of ocean and Seaforest ambassadors.
Much of our material is free to download and use, including educational tools and guides around our film My Octopus Teacher. The film itself has been translated into all major South African languages and is available for educational screenings, with several already held in communities around the country. Our Habitat of Hope map, short films on the Great African Seaforest, and all related material are available as free downloads from this website
Tracking
There is an ancient dialogue that once existed between people and the living planet — now kept alive in a small number of indigenous communities worldwide. This is the language of tracking: the oldest language on earth. It enabled humans to survive and thrive in a world where survival depended on the ability to forage and hunt. A wild language written into the ground and the sights and sounds of nature, embedding humans deeply in the ecosystems they were part of.
Our co-founder, Craig Foster, spent years training with San hunter-gatherer master trackers in the Kalahari in his quest to understand and experience this deep sense of belonging. The result was the seminal film The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story. He has since applied that knowledge to create a form of underwater and intertidal tracking, while continuing the practice on land. This has become the foundation of everything we do.
Craig has also worked closely with top paleoarchaeologists and ethnobiologists to better understand our early Homo sapiens ancestors. Here on our southern shores, our early ancestors foraged from the ocean’s bounty, tracked and hunted along the coast, and lived in deep relationship with the seaforest.
Led by Craig Foster, Craig Marais, and Kireon McShane, and built on relationships we have built with local organisations over many years, we have embarked on a tracking programme that works with small groups, exposing them to the lives of our ancestors and the ecology of our coastline through the language of tracking.