No Child Left Inside

This article appeared in The Economist on Feb 8, 2007. It summarizes the alarming fall in various measures of National Park visitation. This trend, if it continues, threatens the sustainability of the environmental movement and marks, in my view, a significant deterioration in human quality of life. A primary goal of this blog is the exploration of strategies for overcoming this problem.

Feb 8th 2007
SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

Put down that Xbox, young man

TO THE alarm of environmentalists and park managers alike, interest in the great outdoors seems to be tailing off among young Americans. The country's extensive system of national parks includes some of the most photographed and best preserved landscapes on earth—like Yosemite Valley in California, the crenellated Teton Range in Wyoming, Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park or the white edifice of Mount Rainier in Washington state. But attendance at the parks is falling. Between 1995 and 2005, overnight stays in them declined 20% overall, and camping and backcountry stays dropped by 24%, according to statistics compiled by the National Parks Service.

No park, it seems, is immune to the decline: even in Yosemite, one of the system's oldest parks and probably its best known, the number of visitors dropped 17% over the ten-year period. The number of visitors to Death Valley, an easy drive from vigorously growing Las Vegas, went down 28% over the same span. In some of the system's remoter parks, such as Lava Beds National Monument near the California-Oregon border, site of much fighting in an Indian war of 1872-73, the number of daily visitors is down to ten or fewer.

The importance of this decline can hardly be over-estimated for big environmental organisations such as the Sierra Club: they have depended on what one expert calls “a transcendent experience in nature”, usually in childhood, to gain new members and thus remain powerful lobbyists for environmental causes. “The political implications are enormous,” says Richard Louv, a writer whose most recent book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, describes the social, psychological and even spiritual ramifications of a dearth of outdoors experience for a generation raised on electronic, rather than natural, stimulation and entertainment.

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