How did it happen that we—a once proud people, with our hands in the loam and our heads in the clouds—have devolved into a herd of shuffling, hunched wisps of digital consumerism? Why did we cast aside our inheritance—some of the most shockingly beautiful natural landscapes on the planet—to become grotesque, tech-necked screen addicts?
Apologies, but the 2019 Outdoor Participation Report from the Outdoor Foundation (the philanthropic arm of Outdoor Industry Association) is either crushingly sad or infuriating or a mix thereof. If it doesn’t outrage you and then outrage you more, you didn’t pay attention.
The top-line message is stunning: just under half the U.S. population does not participate in outdoor recreation at all. At all. To be clear, outdoor recreation is not defined as rock climbing in Moab or hiking the Appalachian Trail. The foundation actually offered 42 possible options, almost as if they were desperate for respondents to pick one…any one…that would show some interest in the outdoors.
Certainly, some of this can be explained by an aging population that just isn’t as vigorous as it once was. But all the arthritis in the world doesn’t explain why only 17.9 percent of the respondents “recreated outside at least once a week.”
The study also looked at what the researchers called “outdoor outings,” which sound like a jaunty activity involving rucksacks, picnic lunches and hearty singing. In 2018, Americans went on 10.2 billion outdoor outings; this sounds good until you realize that it’s one billion fewer outings than in 2008. And, sadly, kids were not being raised up right: in 2018, they went on 15 percent fewer annual outings than in 2012.
Those seem like big drops and we want to blame the usual villains, which are basically screens and other screens. Kids just want to play video games or watch other kids play video games or scroll through Instagram and text and generally zone out in a bath of dopamine. Which is easy to understand. Dopamine is awesome and you can put yourself on a steady drip of the stuff with a cheap smartphone and an AC outlet. But it still baffles. Head-to-head with the thrill of a ski run, or a hike at altitude, or standing under a waterfall on a scorching summer afternoon, the screen loses. Or should lose.
This report is good information but incomplete. If it is true that kids and able adults would prefer to stay indoors clutching their phones or monitors or TVs instead of going outdoors, we are missing something. There’s more here.
Meanwhile, how is this abrupt decline not a headline in every newspaper?
Image via Flickr, posted by IntelFreePress at https://www.flickr.com/photos/54450095@N05/8047838494
