Ever since my folks moved to the foothill mountains of Colorado, they've been unable to shake a preternatural fear of predators and wilderness. My dad used to have a situation room dedicated to cougar sightings, and both parents worried that bears lurked on every corner, ready to raid fridges and steal babies. (Never mind that you'll see more Audi SUVs than apex predators in the foothills).They've gotten a little better, but not much — every time they step off a paved road, it's an opportunity for wilderness to swallow you whole. I've always thought a little time spent camping in the wild might help cure them of their phobias, but they've never gone.
But it turns out they're not alone: Recent research shows that backpacking and national park attendance has been steadily on the wane since 1987, and David Biello, of our better-dressed older brother Scientific American, wonders if fear might cause Americans to shy away from recreation in the natural world. When compounded with work and school pressures, the rising cost of park visits and the preponderance of electronic entertainment, the desire to enter and experience the wild falls of sharply.
Patricia Zaradic, of the Environmental Leadership Program and co-author of the report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that it would take 80 million park visits this year to bring per-capita attendance numbers to 1987 levels. Zaradic and University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Oliver Pergams analyzed trends in visits to national parks and forests, state parks, surveys on camping and the number of hunting or fishing licenses to determine the extent of the decline. Every single outdoor pursuit they analyzed peaked between 1981 and 1991 and has declined roughly 1 percent per year since for an overall decline of around 25 percent.
After establishing the decline in overall outdoor pursuits, Pergams and Zaradic next hope to establish that fear plays a major role in American's avoidance of the outdoors:
"If fear is a factor, what kinds of fear?" Pergams asks. "Fear of the unknown, fear of animals, fear of getting lost, fear of crime, fear of disease, all kinds of different fears that might come into play and to what extent they might play into the decline."
Richard Louv, chairman of the Santa Fe, N.Mex.–based Children and Nature Network and author of Last Child in the Woods, wonders if we aren't raising a generation of ninnies scared of bad things happening to them in the woods:
"You didn't have the concept of stranger danger [in the past]," Louv says. "If you are raising a generation under protective house arrest, will they have a joyful experience in nature?"
Not if they're busy inside perfecting DDR moves and watching The Blair Witch Project, that's for sure.
The experts advocate getting kids out into nature with parents and grandparents to ease their fear and foster a love for the biological world, noting that as we spend less time in the wilderness, we forget how we impact the surrounding environment.
Biologist Edward O. Wilson argues that humans are hardwired for biophilia, or a love of wild plants and animals, and that putting them back in touch with the environment could resurrect that feeling. "We undervalue the playing in the mud kind of experience," Zaradic says. "Which, it turns out, provides a lot of education."
For the species, I think getting off the grid is a good thing, but from a selfish perspective, I'm totally fine with the decline in attendance. The screaming kids can stay in cities as far as I'm concerned, and that leaves me with more wilderness in which to backpack alone. And naked.
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