The first time I can remember my wilderness ethic being challenged was on a backpacking trip in high school. I was with a group of students led by some experienced hikers that had completed impressive thru-hikes all over the world. At the beginning of the trip, I was excited. Here was an opportunity to meet people and learn from some expert alpinists. But I soon realized that my expectations about behavior in the outdoors were different from those of the group leaders. The difference stemmed from a difference in motivations for entering the landscape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, every time the trail crossed a stream we were instructed to unbuckle our hip belts so that if we fell into the water we wouldn’t drown under our heavy packs. Ostensibly, this is good advice. But, in practice, over the course of the trip, it started to seem pedantic. Some of these streams were hardly more than a foot deep and a dozen wide. Yet at every one, we were required to unbuckle our packs and slog through the water (no rock-hopping either!). This focus on rule-following extended to every aspect of the trip. And my group resented it. Because our motivations for going on the trip weren’t aligned with those of our group leaders. While our group was interested in unstructured exploration and the opportunity to face and overcome risks and challenges, the group leaders were understandably more motivated by getting everyone safely through the trip and avoiding a lawsuit. Neither of these motivations were wrong, but the differences manifested in contrasting approaches to behavior in the landscape.

Since this trip, I have become more aware of the varying motivations people have for entering the outdoors. This awareness has brought a new appreciation for the nuanced perspective it takes to responsibly assign value judgements to different outdoor behaviors. For example, I imagine most environmentalists would decry adding garbage to a wilderness area. Yet for herpetologists, putting rusty scraps of tin sheeting in the forest is one of the best ways to create habitat for snakes. Modern animal rights activists decry hunting as barbaric. Yet by any measure, killing a deer that has spent its life in the wild is monumentally more humane than purchasing factory farmed pig meat. Uncontacted people groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon routinely commit mass murder against other tribes and go unpunished by the government, which doesn’t want to pollute their culture. And we cannot forget the spiders, millions of which are slowly consumed from the inside every day by parasitoid wasp larvae.

Essentially, it is easy to romanticize wilderness as a clean, harmonious world of beauty and elegance. It makes things simple. But the natural world is also one of unimaginable cruelty. My point being: the outdoors are a complicated space where motivations and behaviors may not be so clear-cut as they appear.

My perspectives on this prompt are borne out of my own experiences in the outdoors throughout my life—hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, paddling. Looking back, many of my most formative experiences growing up were in the outdoors, and they established in me a core ethic for environmentalism. But I think interacting with very different people that experience the outdoors differently than I did growing up has broadened my perspective about what an outdoor landscape means, and how to behave within it.

The family that I lived with on the Galápagos Islands, for one, thought their Pacific backyard was beautiful. But they also depended on its lobster fishery for their livelihood. Thus, they viewed fishing regulations in the Galápagos marine sanctuary quite differently than I did, at least until I got to better understand their motivations.

Or consider the unique community of people called “herpers,”—those folks that like to go out into the woods and find reptiles and amphibians– a group I have been a part of since college. Where a birder might organize a pleasant outing with friends from the Audobon Society to the local park, a herper heads straight into the forest, alone, eschewing trails, trespassing on private land and fording municipal water supplies. My experiences among this crowd has had a big impact on my behavior and decision-making in outdoor spaces, making me more interested in dynamic solo, unprescribed, and perhaps legally dubious experiences. This perspective often puts me at odds with friends whose formative outdoor experiences were in programs like NOLS or Outward Bound.

These experiences, collectively, make up a mosaic of who I am when I am in the outdoors. I try to make responsible environmental stewardship decisions by adhering to LNT principles and considering how my actions are affecting the landscape. But I also think a rote focus on preservation and romantic ideals about the devil of human presence in wilderness gets away from anyone’s honest motivations for going outside. This is a problem, because it’s only by building up a motivated, invested community that we can get broad-scale interest in protecting outdoor spaces.