Wilderness Deficiency

Wilderness Deficiency

I had half-written a blog post earlier this week, and trashed it, because I was rambling and not making my point. Today, I stumbled across an article that helps focus the issue I wanted to bring attention to: the benefits of being outdoors. I think it can be broader than that, though, a communion with nature, solitude, even meditation in the midst of the natural world can be of enormous benefit to us, regardless of the practice of wilderness skills, which is what I'm mostly focused on here.  But the point is, get outdoors - it's good for you.

From The Nature Conservancy:

I too am scared of nature sometimes. I’m guilty of listening to the stories of one-in-a-million accidents and giving into irrational fears. Heck, my cousin has Lyme disease. What if my daughter, Kareena, got Lyme disease? Or what if the unthinkable happened—a drowning, a broken neck?

But then I realize: No one discusses the successes. Getting up the mountain or through the rapids is not news. But in truth, the risk of a freak accident is, by definition, miniscule, and the benefits of persevering are enormous. Being outside provides a sense of accomplishment, no matter what you’re doing—hiking, looking for bugs, kayaking. And it offers real biological benefits that far outweigh the risks.

Parents and grandparents have intuitively known about these benefits for years. Now, the medical community is getting behind them too.

Full Article 

One thing I've noticed about life in these United States, is that we've made it a challenging experience to actually get outdoors. There's a permit or fee just about everywhere you go. It's not near where we live, since most of us live in cities now. It takes effort to crack time out of our busy schedules. It's temporary, meaning you can only go for a short stay... long treks in true wilderness are getting very rare. Nevermind trying to live out there, unless you've come into enough money to buy yourself a piece of remote land, bought the permits to build a dwelling there, and can afford the taxes and upkeep. The days of going to the mountain to ponder life in a cave for months are unobtainable in this country, in this time. So the best we can hope for is to sample it, get a little taste now and then, and hope it's good enough for our soul in the long term.

I read the article the other day about a woman getting in trouble for letting her kid play in the park unsupervised. Such play-time was a staple for me as a child, as I've written before. It's sad that we seem to be exerting conscious effort in moving away from the very activities that produced generations of rugged people, and now we're finding some really solid reasons to go back to that kind of activity, but our policies and laws try and sell us on the illusion of total safety and control, if only we're willing to deny our kids the freedom of exploration, of risk, and God forbid, discovery of the real world, and not our manufactured artifices we dull them with every day.