Nature photographer Dudley Edmondson is comfortable on icy mountains, along white water rivers, in birdy swamps and deep in wilderness woods, and thinks other African-Americans should be, too.

Problem is, many aren't.

"I started realizing that when I'm out in natural settings shooting my pictures I don't see anyone else like me, and I started to try to figure out why," said Mr. Edmondson, a freelance photographer for 17 years. "How is it they're not out here standing shoulder to shoulder with me looking at and experiencing all this beautiful stuff?"

Mr. Edmondson, who will present a photography slide show and lecture addressing that question tomorrow evening at Carnegie Lecture Hall in Oakland, said it's important for people of color to get out and use America's natural landscapes if they are to appreciate those public lands and become a constituency for nature.

"If you ask people in the black and Hispanic communities if they support the Clean Air Act, they say they're for it, but getting them to take a place, an active place, in the conservation movement, in the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Society, is another step that few make," said Mr. Edmondson, 46. "They need a sense of ownership in our public lands before they'll feel they have a role in protecting them."

Figuring out why people of color feel so detached from the natural landscape is a question with complex answers that have roots in slavery, sharecropping, poverty and the northward migration during the industrial revolution, he said.

"From the time of slavery African-Americans didn't recreate in nature. Their time outside was labor related. They worked the land. It wasn't a fun thing," he said. "Hunting and fishing were to put food on the table."

When blacks moved from the South to the North they went to work in urban settings, Mr. Edmondson said, where green space was not plentiful and even the small links they may have had to nature in the South were severed. In the 1960s, blacks were fighting for civil rights when whites were fighting for clean air and clean water.

"We never really felt that was our battle, and now we're so many generations removed from nature that it doesn't even come up in conversation," he said. "Outdoor activities never really became part of our culture, and previous generations didn't pass on those values."

Mr. Edmondson, who discovered the restorative power of nature during excursions outside his boyhood home in Cincinnati as a way to deal with his father's alcoholism, said the larger African-American community could also benefit from a stronger connection to nature.

To promote that connection, he spent four years traveling across the nation to photograph people of color in woodland and wilderness settings for his 2006 book "Black and Brown Faces in America's Wild Places" (Adventure Publications, $15.95).

Now a resident of Duluth, Minn., Mr. Edmondson's work was recognized last month when the Wilderness Society gave him its National Faces of Conservation award.

"There are 600 million acres of public land in this country, and we have to figure out how to get everyone, black and brown and white, to realize the land belongs to them," he said.

"I think I can help by creating images and getting organizations and government agencies to pass on the message that there's no reason African-American and Hispanic families shouldn't be taking their children to Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. All those places belong to them. They belong to everyone."

He said the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, among others, have begun programs to educate people of color about the opportunities for and benefits of outdoor recreation.

"We want the nonprofits and agencies to do what McDonald's does, target marketing that says, 'This land, this space is for you,'" he said. "We need to get conservation on their radar."

A panel discussion of the challenges and benefits of expanding minority participation in outdoor recreational activities will follow the slide program.

Joining Mr. Edmondson on the panel will be Bill Strickland, president and founder of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild; Mamie Parker, ecologist and former assistant secretary of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and another recent winner of the Wilderness Society's national Faces of Conservation award; Mario Browne, of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Minority Health; and Sarah Jamella Martin, wilderness educator with the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

The 7 p.m. program titled "In Celebration of Wild Places: Connecting People to Nature," is co-sponsored by Venture Outdoors, the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, Pitt's Center for Minority Health, Three Rivers Birding Club, Recreational Equipment Inc. and the National Aviary.

Tickets for the program are available at the door for $15 for adults and $5 for students under 18.

For additional ticket information see www.alleghenysc.org, and click on the events tab at top of page.