Can outdoor rec save the world?

Two contrasting examples from rural Arkansas [PLUS: a new story in the Bitter Southerner]

A motel in Jasper, AR / Photo by Rory Doyle for the Bitter Southerner

I have a feature out today in the Bitter Southerner about, among other things, whether going out to have fun in beautiful places is an inherently good thing.

It’s an idea that’s been on my mind lately because next year I’ll launch a print magazine focused on outdoor culture—with the hope that telling more stories about nature in the South will inspire more people to protect our beautiful places. As someone with a background in investigative journalism, this is new territory; I’m accustomed to pinpointing problems, and this magazine will have to be, in part, a bit of gung-ho boosterism. I found I could not help but turn my investigative eye toward the industry I’ll soon, in a way, promote.

I open the piece by discussing the rationale for national parks, as laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in an 1864 report on Yosemite:

the right to the pursuit of happiness . . . required ensuring that the nation’s natural beauty not be monopolized by “a very few, very rich people.” That made parks like Yosemite a political matter “of grave importance.”

Very rich people were buying up more and more of the nation’s most beautiful land; the idea of the parks was that beauty itself was a public good; we had to exempt some lands from capitalism to ensure everyone could experience it. Of course, as I noted in this newsletter last year, that first park at Yosemite managed to serve capitalism nonetheless, since the Northern Pacific Railroad—who helped push for its creation—knew they would earn a whole lot of money if the park was a hit and tourists arrived in their cars.

Yosemite marked the birth of some very American ideas—the idea of a national park; the accompanying idea of “wildness,” and its claim that big empty spaces are beautiful and important. Yosemite was also a key moment in outdoor recreation; it depended on an emerging idea that packing up to go tromping in far-off landscapes was a sensible adult activity.

A hundred and sixty years later, this has become a booming business, as I note in the story:

According to the Outdoor Industry Association, nature offers the “economy of the future”; outdoor recreation accounts for 2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product — $454 billion — and is growing much faster than many other sectors. Dozens of states have created executive offices devoted to growing outdoor tourism.

In general, it’s an industry draped in a veneer of goodness. Patagonia is perhaps the most famous example, with their ads exhorting people not to buy their products. Notably, Patagonia has made significant investments in conservation—including here in the South. But the irony of those ads depends on the obvious fact that consumerism has an impact, that buying too many jackets isn’t great for the world.

I’ll have a piece out next year in Bicycling about how climate change is threatening the sport of mountain biking. I found myself wanting to discuss, too, that story’s inversion, how mountain biking contributes to climate change. There’s a carbon footprint of getting out to our wild places; the presence of hikers and bikers scare off other creatures. Frankly, the sense I got was that most mountain bikers wanted to have fun and didn’t want the downer of thinking about climate change. “To burn calories for fun—it’s a pretty crazy thing,” one of the outfitters I spoke with told me. “Just recreating in general, it’s a very, very privileged thing.” That made him wary of getting too climate-centric as a business owner, for fear of being perceived as hypocritical. Such humility and self-reflection are great—but they’re a bad excuse to become complacent. In this context, Patagonia’s conservation efforts are less a natural outgrowth of outdoor recreation than a kind of mitigation.

The contentious waters of the Buffalo / Photo by Rory Doyle for the Bitter Southerner

Perhaps the best modern place to explore these tensions—the role of capitalism in public lands that Olmsted identified in 1864; the impacts of recreation that have grown and grown—is the Arkansas Ozarks. Once again, commercial interests—in this case, the descendants of Walmart founder Sam Walton, billionaires all—are promoting conservation through a national park designation. And once again, the question arises: who really benefits? That’s what I delve into in my story for the Bitter Southerner: how on the one hand Waltons’ grandsons claim that a park will bring economic revitalization to a struggling region. Many locals, though, claim their beloved local river, the Buffalo, is already too busy. I tend to think they’re right, though as I detail in the piece, old cultural notions of independence may lose locals the fight.

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A better example in the Arkansas Delta?

Bikers at the Birdeye Gravel Festival / Photo by Ramhorn Films for studioDRIFT

As I worked on the story, winding through Ozarkian history, trying to figure how the whole kerfuffle began, I noted several plot points: in the 1990s, the Waltons got involved with building highways and an airport to help improve the area around Bentonville; then came a wonderful, world-class art museum. In the 2000s, Sam Walton’s grandsons struck on a new kind of improvement:

Tom Walton figured all the intense businesspeople moving to Bentonville to work for Walmart and its vendors needed to relieve their stress. His way of doing so had always been cycling, so Tom built first a five-mile trail that has expanded into a network of 70 miles just within the city, and hundreds more in the surrounding region. (The total investment is now over $85 million.)

As it happens, a few weeks back I got a clearer picture of just how firmly bicycling culture has taken hold around Bentonville. A nonprofit called studioDRIFT invited me to read from my book at the third annual Birdeye Gravel Festival—an event in the Arkansas Delta meant to introduce the cycling class to a little-known and struggling region.

The delta is, as Tim Schuler recently noted in Places, a place marked by trauma.¹ studioDRIFT was started by Martin Smith, a landscape architect who grew up in the Arkansas Delta and decided as an adult to come back—and begin to envision how to create a less traumatic future. Their key project, for now, is the Crowley’s Ridge Gravel Trail—a route that connects eight Arkansas counties on “remote, hilly and well-maintained country roads that wind and flow across rolling terrain and beautiful farmland.” The idea is to take existing infrastructure, like roads, add on a few extras—we stopped for lunch in a new, sheltered park in Wynne, for example—and bring more investment to the region through tourism. As I cycled through the Delta, it struck me that any kind of economic win here would a good thing, a first step. This is a group of people who seems to be thinking about how to ensure any new infrastructure is a net good. I’m planning to write more about this effort later, but for now I just want to encourage you to look into the project, and if you’re a biker, head up and check it out.

1. "Trauma has visited its communities in the form of racialized violence and systems of social control. And it has visited the land itself through surface-altering earthquakes and the decimation of long-lived, adaptive ecosystems.”