Well, I can tell you that research in forest ecology will certainly do that for you. I’d say the same thing about many other fields of evolution, ecology, and behavioral ecology research. But you’d have to go back to school for any of those, I think. Besides, you probably wouldn’t be outside all the time. Most ecology people have “field seasons”–i.e., times of the year when they’re outside doing their work. My field season is from late spring through early fall. After that, I’m often indoors, sorting through all the specimens I collected while the field season was running. I’ll spend a lot of this winter indoors, bent over my desk space, picking through the insect specimens sitting in the freezer from this summer.
When you say you want to work outside, keep in mind that you should be careful what you wish for. An anthropologist friend of mine has spent many hours working outside as an expert during excavations. She doesn’t like the outside work she has to do at all. She says it’s grueling, achingly slow, and almost completely thankless. When she started her career, she was eager to be out in the sun. Now she’d be thrilled if she could find good technicians to take over the outdoors grunt work for her.
You could be a naturalist for a park. But that pays almost nothing. Of course, foresters, rangers, and wildlife management people do a lot of their jobs outside, and they have to be both creative and intelligent to do their work well.
IPM (Integrated Pest Management) people spend a lot of time outside. Their job is to come up with ways to control pest species, using a maximum of bio-friendly techniques and a minimum of chemical pesticides. First, they go into the areas where they work to catch pest insects and other critters. They estimate how many of the pest thingies are out there. (That, by itself, can be pretty tough. Sampling in such a way that your results are accurate, and then interpereting them in a way that is even a little useful in predicting pest population events–like, say, epidemics of locusts–is definitely not for the simple-minded.) Then they come up with programs for controlling pest species. IPM people often have pretty intellectually challenging jobs. Ma Nature is pretty sharp, and even coming to a draw in a game against natural selection demands that you keep coming up with new ways (or new combinations of ways) to stave off pest species damage to crops or other plants you want to save.
Many cultural anthropologists end up spending a lot of their time outdoors while they’re living with the people they study.
Many epidemiologists–at least those who collect data, rather than those who design and run massive computer programs to help make sense of data someone else collects–do a lot of running around from place to place. They don’t necessarily work in rustically scenic places, but they’re often not deskbound.
If I think of any others, I’ll post them here.
–Scribble.