“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;”

W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
 

Biologist Oliver Pegrams has been doing some number crunching regarding Americans and the outdoors, and the results are predictable: Since the 1980’s, participation in outdoor activities: fishing, camping, hiking and other outdoor pursuits, has declined at a rate of about 1% a year, for a total decline of between 18%-25%. Some bright spots are that hunting has remained relatively steady at about 10% of the American population and backpacking has seen a slight uptick in participants.

The downside of all this is the danger that unless you participate in outdoor sports and activities, and no golf doesn’t count, the appreciation for our wild places and the need to protect them just doesn’t factor in as strongly as it would if you got off the couch and went for a walk in the woods. And what of the next generation? Some kids in the upper stratosphere may be introduced to the “wilderness” through Glamping, and as an aside here’s my favorite quote from that article:

“We’re just not the camping kind of people. We don’t pitch tents. We don’t cook outdoors. We don’t share a bathroom. It’s just not going to happen. This is a kid who has never flown anything but first class or stayed anywhere other than a Four Seasons.”

And saying you learned about the outdoors through luxury camping is kinda like saying you lost your virginity to a hooker in TJ- you were led by the hand and didn’t have to do anything yourself, other than pay.

But what about the other 95% of American kids? Is their sole experience of the outdoors going to be through TV and the internet, the brave new world environmental historian Mark Barrow calls “the era of mediated nature”? Or will their parents actually put the effort in to get them out from behind the Xbox and Myspace and into the outdoors? My subjective observations don’t bode well towards that as I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen kids with their families out hiking or camping in the desert or mountains, and on two hands I can count the number of kids I’ve seen outside in the afternoons, fucking off on homemade bike ramps or playing pick up sandlot games.

If we don’t use it, we’re going to lose it and what maybe worse is that a significant portion of the American population won’t even care.

At least there’s one bright spot out there this week: A school in Vermont is teaching Thoreau completely outdoors, year round.
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under admit it -- it sucks, All that is way fucking wrong, Absolute Horseshit, Dirty Hippies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.