I am working on an essay comparing wilderness education in the 1970s to that of today and came across the first article I ever had published. It is interesting to look at this and see where I predicted the future fairly accurately, (the need for more wilderness education programs) and were I missed the mark (the work week and the average per capita income). Not bad though for a 27 year old struggling outdoor leader.

Journal of the New York State Outdoor Education Association
Spring/Summer 1977
Wilderness Recreation Education By Jack Drury

What is Wilderness Recreation Education? Today’s accepted definition of wilderness comes from the 1964 Wilderness Act in which Congress used the definition, an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”1 Recreation is often defined as the wise use of one’s leisure time. If this is the case, then Wilderness Recreation Education could be defined as instruction in the wise use of one’s leisure time in an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man. Or, in a more condensed form, it could be the instruction in leisure activities in the natural environment that has not suffered from the impact of man.

The basic objectives in offering a Wilderness Recreation Education program are: (1) to offer students an opportunity to be involved with direct learning in the outdoors; (2) to instill an understanding of ways to exist within and enjoy the wilderness environment; and (3) to develop an awareness of and appreciation for the need to conserve and maintain the wilderness environment for generations to come.

As the length of the work week decreases in our nation and the efficiency of our productivity increases, people are finding more and more leisure time in their lives. The average per capita income is rising, just as the number of working hours is decreasing. In meeting the special problems related to increasing incomes and increasing amounts of leisure time, there is a growing responsibility for our society through educational institutions to provide for the development of recreational skills in all individuals. Millions of people have turned to our wilderness environment to spend their leisure time, thus putting increased pressure on our limited wilderness resources. Since 1940, the U.S. population has increased 63 %, while trail use in many wilderness areas has increased by 1000%! 2

Recreation Equipment Inc., one of the largest outlets for wilderness recreation equipment, has pointed out that in 1971 their increase in sales over the previous year was more than its total sales in 1967. This would seen to indicate that there were more people using wilderness areas for the first time than the total number of people using such areas in 1967. 3

Future demands on our wilderness resources will increase. The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation conservatively estimates that hiking will increase 78% from 1965 to 1980. Wilderness camping has more than doubled since 1970 in our National Parks. Today, there are an estimated 10 million hikers trying to use a limited amount of wilderness.6 The result is a series of related problems, the most serious one being safety. Many individuals swept away by the popularity of wilderness recreation, have not had any formal education in the ways of the wilderness. The result has often been accidents and tragedy. In the Adirondack Mountains alone, there were over 100 search-and-rescue missions conducted during the last two years with several deaths reported. Two deaths were attributed directly to a lack of knowledge about the outdoors. The individuals were ill prepared, lacked basic knowledge, and in one ease, had poor leadership. Two individuals died of hypothermia also known as the ‘Killer of the Unprepared.”

This past winter there were a number of spectacular rescues which fortunately avoided tragedy. Senseless tragedy was avoided only because of the greater responsibility assumed by State Rangers who have increased their surveillance of individuals using wilderness areas. Tragedy was not avoided, however, when Stephen Thomas became lost in the Adirondack High Peaks last April never to be seen again. One week later, Michael Caruso drowned on the Raquette River. In both incidents basic rules of wilderness travel were broken.

Injury and loss of life are one result of lack of Wilderness Recreation Education, but nearly as important is the growing destruction of our wilderness areas, often unintentionally done, through lack of knowledge. Many wilderness users do not realize the impact they have on the environment. They often unknowingly erode trails and litter and destroy natural vegetation, especially along lakes and streams. These wilderness users consume vast quantities of firewood and pollute wilderness watersheds with detergents and human waste. These careless actions take a high toll on the environment and take away from the great values inherent in the experience.

The past winter I spent 21 days cross-country skiing and snowshoeing across a large section of our Adirondack wilderness. It was depressing to travel through beautiful woods only to come upon a lean-to in which someone had torn up a portion of the floor to start a fire or to see someone’s garbage strewn around the campsite. Other’s thoughtlessness detracted from my own wilderness experience.

There is a definite need to inform people of the proper outdoor procedures so that their negative impact on the environment will be limited. First, we must develop and promote exemplary behavior patterns for wilderness living. Second, we must develop a wilderness ethic through which individuals can appreciate and learn to care for our wilderness resources. Without the development of exemplary behavior patterns and a wilderness ethic, all of the wilderness areas that Congress has set aside for posterity seem doomed. Paul Petzoldt, founder of the National Outdoor Leadership School, has stated, “Classified wilderness regions are not being threatened by mining, timbering, or ranching interests; the destruction is coming from those very people who fought so gallantly to get the (Wilderness) act passed. All the study, thought, and effort was devoted to putting a legislative fence around primitive areas rather than developing techniques for their proper use and conservation.”8

With the increasing number of people interested in taking advantage of our wilderness areas, we have another complex problem. Not only do we have abuse of the wilderness, but we have overuse, with too many people often crowding together to create an urban setting within the wilderness. This not only increases wilderness abuse, but greatly detracts from the value of the wilderness experience. While education alone cannot remedy this problem totally, it is noteworthy to point out that studies have shown that the carrying capacity of a wilderness area (the number of people an area can hold before the wilderness becomes damaged and loses its natural character) is more than doubled if campers have experienced a program in wilderness recreation education!

These are some of the problems in wilderness recreation. A vocational, avocational Wilderness Recreation Education program could help meet these problems head-on. Through wilderness Recreation Education, individuals could acquire the skills necessary to pursue wholesome outdoor recreational activities without overtaxing our wilderness resources; individuals could acquire the leadership skills and knowledge of the dangers often involved in outdoor experiences, how to avoid or how to handle them, should they occur; individuals could learn the exemplary behavior patterns necessary to preserve wilderness areas, thus allowing large numbers of people to make use of our wild outdoors, yet still maintaining the natural wilderness experience. An important by-product will be increasing the carrying capacity of wilderness areas, thus limiting or preventing overuse.

Unfortunately, there are not enough outdoor education programs today that are helping to meet these goals. We have a critical choice - we can work, through education, to prevent the tragedy and destruction occurring within our wilderness areas or we can have government agencies regulate our wilderness resources until they resemble a large Central Park rather than a true wilderness. Restrictive regulatory measures are already being taken by the National Forest Service, National Park Service, and state wilderness management agencies. But these policies are unfortunately, though necessarily, more concerned with controlling numbers of people than with educating the public in wise use of the wilderness areas. The day has already come where we must reserve space in a wilderness camping area and we can only camp in specific locations. Unless we carefully educate, the freedom of wandering through wilderness areas and appreciating their splendid wonders will be lost. No longer will wilderness be, “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man…”

We must not let this happen. Sound programs in Wilderness Recreation Education can no longer be seen as vague, distant options. They are basic and become more of a critical need each year. Our future and that of our children depend on it!

FOOTNOTES 1. Howard Zahniser. 1964 Wilderness Act, quoted by ed. Melville Bell Grosvenor in Wilderness U.S.A. (Washing­ton, D.C., National Geographic Society, 1973), p. 10.

2. Harvey Manning, “Where Did All These Damn Hikers Come From?”, Backpacker, 10 (Spring, 1975), p. 39-

3. Ibid. p. 38. 4. Robert C. Lucas and Robert P. Rinehart, “The Neglected Hiker”, Backpacker, 13 (February, 1976), p. 35.

5. “In His Own Words”, People, (June 7, 1976), p. 54.

6. Maurice H. Pomeranz, “Backpacking Becomes Big Business”, Backpacker, 5 (Spring, 1974), p. 32.

7. “32 Search and Rescue Missions in High Peaks Area Conducted in 1974”, Lake Placid News, (December 5, 1974).

8. Paul Petzoldt, The Wilderness Handbook, (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1974).

This recently appeared in the WEA Journal

The Case for Teaching the Rational Decision Making Process

I occasionally have been asked why, in The Backcountry Classroom, we place all of our emphasis on the rational decision model and don’t give any space to tacit or naturalistic decision making. I don’t have a good response for not giving considerable space to naturalistic decision making and when a third edition of the book is published we will be sure to make up for that shortcoming. On the other hand I have a ready response as to why we place so much emphasis on rational decision making. The rational decision making process is mechanistic in nature. Its steps are visible and transparent thus it is easy to teach, practice and reflect upon unlike naturalistic models. If you want to teach decision making to novices this is where you want to start. Let me make a sport’s analogy. If you want to teach basketball to 13 and 14 year olds do you start by teaching them the triangle offense made famous by Phil Jackson who used it to win 9 NBA championships? Of course not. Why not, it has proven incredibly successful for Phil Jackson. You don’t teach novice basketball players the triangle offense because it is incredibly difficult to learn and takes an incredibly long time to master. Proponents however argue that once learned, this difficult to learn offense becomes very natural and is structured to make sense. I would say the exact same thing regarding naturalistic decision making. Once decision making is mastered it is extremely natural (thus its name) and makes complete sense but to the novice you might as well ask the person to do a triple salchow, it is impossible.

Okay then how do you teach decision making? Well in the perfect world I would start in elementary school and teach learners what decisions are and have them explore the concepts of options, cause and effect, and consequences. I would reinforce these concepts throughout their elementary school years across the curriculum. Hopefully by the time they reached their early teens they would have a good grasp of decision making and at this point I would introduce them to the rational decision making model as outlined in The Backcountry Classroom. I would create an environment similar to competitive athletics; I would introduce the terminology and drill them in the fundamentals. I’d create drills based on these fundamentals; context, what is it, identify the problem to solve, brainstorm options, balance the pros and cons, how would you implement, what does reflection look like etc all the time reinforcing the basic concepts of cause and effect and consequences. I would be providing guided practice for group and individual decision making in a variety of scenarios and gradually more authentic situations.

As learners move into high school I would make their decision making opportunities increasingly more authentic and regularly make them totally authentic. I would also regularly provide opportunities for learners to reflect on decisions made by themselves as well as the decisions they observe being made by others. The reflection would be both individual (journals) and group (debriefs). By the time these youngsters graduate from high school they will have been practicing rational decision making for six or more years. Some will be ready to explore the naturalistic decision making model but just as most basketball players entering college have a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals, most still aren’t ready for the triangle offense. In this case the naturalistic decision making model is as useful to these decision makers as the triangle offensive is to freshman basketball players. Useful to some but beyond the grasp of most.

There is one catch here. There is a growing body of knowledge that demonstrates how as brains develop decision making moves from the amygdala, the more primitive, emotion driven portion of the brain, to the frontal lobes which are more associated with behavioral inhibition. This switch seems to occur in the early twenties and is the reason that young adults have "matured" so much by the time they reach their mid-twenties. What we don’t know is the role our culture plays in this. Do the brains in cultures where youngsters are expected to take on more responsibility at an earlier age develop at a faster rate than in our culture where teens are frequently not allowed to make decisions and even more rarely held accountable for them? Are our efforts to teach decision making for naught because we must patiently wait for the brain to mature? Is decision making largely biological, cultural or a combination of the two? Ahh the nature versus nurture argument rears its head once again.

I had a chance to hear James Howard Kunstler (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/) speak last night at nearby Paul Smith's College. I was slightly familiar with him but wow I'm not sure I was really prepared for what he has to say. He is not for the faint of heart and if you are offended easily don't go to his blog but if you're the type who gives serious thought about where our nation and the world is heading you need to read what he has to say. He isn't very optimistic about our future. I encourage you to find out why.