After completing the MSc in 2005, Sam started Open Ground, a business combining  wilderness experiences with personal and social development. Now living in Oban, he also works with the GalGael Trust in Glasgow, and is a part-time PhD student in Outdoor Education at the University of Edinburgh.

Sam writes: The Msc was a fantastic experience for me, bringing together many strands of my life and pushing me forward to start new things. I brought my love of the mountains, my philosophy and academic background, and my personal drive to live and work in a deeper ecological way. Human Ecology allowed me to combine these things, to reflect on them and to work towards a concrete goal. The result of this is my business Open Ground.

Open Ground draws on my training in Human Ecology, my experience and qualifications in the outdoors (climbing, hillwalking, skiing) and the knowledge I have gained through freelance work with various organisations that work on 'personal and social development' in an outdoor situation. I aim to deliver longterm projects for community organisations or businesses with an interest in ecology and sustainablity. These projects will work around the experience of connection to local ecology through discussion and adventures in the hills. I will highlight the information and responsibilities that this brings, and the greater well-being on a personal, community and ecological level that reconnection promotes. More information can be found on www.openground.eu.

Alongside this business I hope to keep my academic brain alive! I am working towards publication of a paper on the need to return to love of wisdom as the central meaning of philosophy, this is part of my WWF scholarship and is a result of my thesis research undertaken with the GalGael Trust. I then hope to research ways of working in the hills, again looking into underlying practical philosophy, and move towards a possible phd in this area. Meanwhile life goes on and the sun is shining...