The September 19th, 2016 New Yorker magazine has a profile on Yvon Chouinard, the rock climber, adventurer, developer of new climbing hardware, and founder of the clothing company Patagonia. The profile captures the conflict between the adventurer and the businessman, and reveals a fundamental split in the agenda of the outdoor community. In keeping with Chouinard's personal values, the company has championed high risk outdoor wilderness adventures, primarily through the photographs in its catalog, while maintaining a strong support for environmental protection. The company has several initiatives to make its products more environmentally friendly and produces them with less environmental impact. (Less than other outdoor clothing manufacturers?) He is personally famous for his climbing exploits and other adventures. And the profile reveals his desire to be an environmentalist in the strongest terms. Along with a few other colleagues of his generation (now 77) his career embodies the dream of people who pursue their favorite activities and are financially rewarded at the same time --- like Hobie Alter developing his beach boats, and the Meistrell brothers who founded Body Glove wet suits.
Chouinard is not happy though. The natural world that he loved to explore and challenge is becoming crowded and overdeveloped. Ski areas to him are "golf courses" of social and real estate development. And climbing has become so popular that major climbs require scheduling by serious climbers. Surfing along the California coast is so crowded that on good days there is competition for waves that sometimes gets ugly. What happened? Success. The adventures of Chouinard and others were so appealing that more and more people were attracted to them, and bought outdoor clothing, and ropes, chock and expansion bolts, surf boards, etc. Outdoor adventure has become a major business. REI of Seattle, once a clubby supplier to hard core outdoorsy people is now a large marketer of the "outdoor lifestyle" with clothing, lessons, trips, and everything you might need to enjoy your adventure. Going outdoors is no longer for an odd group of folks who want to escape the more developed part of the world. Major climbs like Mt. Whitney and Mt. Everest must be scheduled to deal with the high demand. To be sure these are still daunting climbs requiring training and conditioning. But more and more reports indicate that some of the climbers are marginally prepared and in mortal danger if the situation turns against them. Deaths have occurred. There are still wilderness areas in several parts of the Americas, and the Himalayas. But the most desirable of these areas get very busy at the peak times of the year and it is hard to say that you are "alone in the wilderness" at those times.
Chouinard the businessman has succeeded in defining a lifestyle and a premium clothing brand that draws others to fantasize and sometimes populate the outdoors, so he is chipping away at the wilderness he is fond of, and wishes to protect. It makes no sense to focus on him personally: there is now an extensive industry of equipment, clothing, travel planning, and training all designed to make money off people wanting to be outdoors, in relatively wild and unspoiled places. A similar challenge faces the National Park Service every year when it must deal with the seasonal demand for access and utilization of its most popular parks, effectively degrading their "natural" and "wild" qualities into crowded tourist experiences. Even the Sierra Club sponsors guided wilderness trips on the justification that getting people to experience the wilderness will make them stronger advocates for it. There is a long history everywhere in the world of people discovering beautiful natural places and wanting to live around them. Housing developments are built by people wealthy enough to afford multiple homes, and the sites become real estate projects. Yvon's life story is just one poignant example of the incompatibility between the desire for natural experiences and the desire to have some economic benefit from the access.
The solution is elusive. It is possible to restrict the access to wilderness locations and require controlled reservations to enter them. This already occurs in some popular National Parks. And this effectively nullifies that sense of spontaneous wandering into wild places! There are still beautiful unrestricted natural areas in the US and other parts of the world, but the threats of development, including high end tourist development are current challenges along with natural resource development of logging, mining, and drilling. How many ski mountains, once wild places with a few lifts and some rambling shacks, have been transformed into condo cities which flood to overflowing in good snow seasons and otherwise languish. Avid skiers seem to rarely notice that the part of the mountain that is "wild and natural" has poles going up it to carry lift lines, and the base is covered with lodges and resorts that are anything but "wild and natural". Everyone is entitled to enjoy the gifts of nature in their own way, but some ways effectively nullify the benefit for others.
The only solution is changing the public's attitude toward using the natural world. Give up using it to prove what a great climber you are. Give up using it as a party space away from home with all the pleasures of home. Give up making it easy and accessible to large numbers of folks. Encourage visitors to concentrate only on seeing and understanding the natural features and beauty and not any way of exploiting or "using" it. And this includes emphasizing natural means of navigation around the sites and limited access by motorized vehicles. In short, give up trying to make money off of the natural beauty in any aggressive way, and fund access to preserve and protect the natural beauty that people initial claim to care about. One can compare the North and South rim of the Grand Canyon to see how two different ways of developing the same site result in dramatically different experiences. None of this is new. Edward Abbey had the same rants in Desert Solitaire half a century ago. And he did not slow the changes, and neither will this.
No comments:
Post a Comment