Yvon Chouinard says the outdoor life-style thing is leading to the death of the outdoors.
NICK PAUMGARTEN’S PROFILE OF YVON CHOUINARD in the Sept. 19 issue of The New Yorker magazine is being widely circulated and causing quite a stir.
Excerpts: "Chouinard recognizes there are limits to the ethos and pathos of conquest, and while funhoggery can be a medium by which young recreationists are eventually transformed into conservationists, every individual, like it or not, bears personal responsibility to refrain from consuming the rare, finite, and few remaining wild places merely because we can. One does not get a free pass to exploit while one is young, based on the premise that it might conceivably lead one to take up the cause of conservation later.
There is power in self-restraint. Native Americans knew one iteration of its discipline through the act of counting coup—demonstrating warrior bravery and honor not by taking the life of an adversary but by touching the foe and backing away. Often, the lament from mountain bikers and pack rafters is: “Well, why should we have to put up with restrictions if hikers or equestrians or anglers don’t?”
That, of course, isn’t the right question yet it marks the point of separation between recreation and conservation. The right question is what must all users do—what will they give up— to insure the character of wild places remains?
If Greater Yellowstone is going to maintain its wild character, for wild creatures and places that can’t advocate for themselves, what will it take to keep them from ruination, from becoming reflections of Moab or the Front Ranges of Colorado and Utah? What little wildness remains is all there is, but given prevailing attitudes, for how long? How much time it has is up to us."
“Warning: Parts may be unsettling, especially to those who believe that, by merely engaging in outdoor recreation or owning toys, they are, through some kind of strange osmosis, advancing the cause of conservation.”
“But this I know after writing about Greater Yellowstone and environmental issues for 30 years: More than ever before, outdoor recreationists, surrogates for some of the biggest outdoor toy manufacturers, are pressuring land management agencies to force the opening of ever-greater access to wildlands now functioning as refugia for solitude-seeking wildlife and which have not had to cope with many people.” Canyon Zephyr
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