Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood (2009)
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The trains were gone by the time my father was a child and he wandered as far as a bike could take him and back in a day. He would play at Army Dumps that dotted the landscape in the 50's.
When I was a kid the freeways and major thoroughfares created islands that couldn't be crossed by a kid on a bike. The farmland and riparian areas around creeks created walking corridors and I would spend time watching tadpoles and building forts.
For my kids the farmland was developed and the creeks tightly fenced off by an interlocking thicket of HOAs. They wandered virtual worlds.
Seriously, can we get over the idea that life in space is going to be better? The stars are too distant to visit. Elon Musk doesn't have the nous to fix our political problems, just to competently execute engineering tasks.
If freedom and self-determination are the goals, it's surely best to conserve the liberties and territories that already exist or have only recently been lost. Keep the space travel agenda to mining asteroids.
It's in our DNA. We won't stop. We can't stop. A virus can't consider it's host "enough", nor can we consider a valley, a continent, or a planet enough. That's my opinion.
I also think it is both fascinating and noble to attempt to out-live the Sun, and maybe even the Universe as we know it.
We still have to fix our own planet's problems, but we can still colonize others. Some people will work on one and others will work on the other.
That's fairly insightful right there. I'm juust old enough that my childhood contained some of the last years of "the woods" and juust young enough that when I started WOW, I recognized the feeling. Logging on in those early days had the same essential flavor as grabbing the bike and heading out.
I did things my kids will not do, as it is simply not possible to take a train from Nogales to Puerto Vallarta anymore, for example. They will do things that are not possible for their kids to do... and so on. Don't harken back to days gone by as if they (kids) are somehow going to be deficient due to these perceived losses. They are not.
OTOH, I enjoyed building factories and ever more complicated toys and one friend created art pieces everywhere (we gave him creative mode and some other tools and sent him off).
One girl loved to farm almost exclusively for whatever reason; maybe I should have done something to make it more engaging somehow?
And now I've forgotten my point, but I'm reminded just how different everybody is!
At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. No cell phone, not much supervision, just a couple of friends and a forest that felt the size of the world. I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good - marginalized to after-school curriculums and playdates planned on "Tinder for Tots".
Go outside, get cuts and scrapes, and you'll turn out all the stronger and more knowledgable from it.
I'd want the same for my future children, but my greatest fear is a nosy neighbor calling CPS due to my seemingly negligent parenting style. (As inferred from my children having copious amounts of free time, bereft of adult supervision.)
Ditto. My kids are now old enough that they can both ride a bike, so I let them circle around the block on their own. Every time they go, my heart is gripped by terror that some neighbour will report "feral" children.
I grew up in a block of small "working class" flats with large communal gardens and a small park; I could safely ride and play with other kids, and most of them were going to the same school as me. Now I live in middle-class suburbia, in a larger house with a nice private garden; but my kids cannot wander around without risking to be hit by a car, their "parks" are just playgrounds with lawns, and because they attend a "better" school a bit further away, don't really know anyone in the area.
This is the product of an individualist culture, of which I am a prime representative. I don't like conflict, not even the occasional low-intensity friction which is inevitable when you share anything (a block, a garden, a parking lot); so I bought a house where People Shall Leave Me Alone and where Kids Shall Be Safe. This makes it much more difficult for my kids to be social and "explore the wilderness". And no, virtual realities are not a replacement.
Without this access, yeah I'd feel a little dead inside.
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - E. Abbey
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” - EA
This quote has always been a source of debate for me. Does the idea of wilderness need no defense? Must we create heavily managed spaces simply to prevent the tragedy of the commons from occurring? Does the fact that wilderness is a political designation mean that it is not truly "wild"?
I'm of the mind that because societal negligence of our natural world leads to its destruction in one form or another almost certainly, then yes, the idea of wilderness needs no defense, but one can argue that the designation itself leads to a place losing its "wildness"...
In reality all those forests that the original author writes so daringly about were manicured and well-cared for woods, engineered to provide food in the form of nuts and berries, as well as prime hunting ground for big game, say nothing for easily passageway between villages for trade and seasonal migration.
In this perspective man has for a very long time held the spot of curator of so-called, "Wild Lands". It's my opinion that we continue to do so. Not for monetary gain (although there is - the Outdoor Industry isn't that small), but because without it, we all commit suicide, in a very real way.
The population in all of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, was somewhere around 50 million. All of Canada had about 500,000 people. Do you know how much forest there is in Canada?
There's a theory that early man had widespread effects on the environment using purposeful burning, but even if that's true (it's hard to tell the difference between lightning strikes and purposeful burns), it hardly amounts to "manicured and well cared for woods". Unless you are willing to give beavers an equal designation.
If we just take east coast of Maryland, where the author grew up, the first explorers talk about villages that interconnected across the coastline, Chestnut and walnut trees everywhere, and established hunting grounds. Burning was an immensely useful tool to do this. Everyone had a fire starter.
Later on, early settlers saw something drastically different - a dying off population from diseases brought by Europeans that they had no defense towards. And that is why our estimates on the population of the Americas, and the level of which they modified the land could be really off.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...
The Americas were a vast, mostly empty (of humans) land. Except near the coasts.
There are always more people on the hiking trails and in the campgrounds in places designated "wilderness" on maps than places not so described.
These days the best places don't have a lot of publicity, manicured trails, designated camping areas, forest rangers, or puff pieces in glossy magazines. No, I'm not going to share, sorry. Use your imagination and buy some old-fashioned topo maps. (Your phone won't work there, so Google won't be of any use.)
Perhaps whenever something is lost, something else has been gained. And this even when we not able to spot it from each of our unique, and no less important, vantage points.
Free-range children are just rare these days.
My kids don't have any real friends except each other which I find a little sad.
I think there are couple of factors that are responsible for this.
1) Couples in general have fewer children than we had in the past. If you have 1 child - a loss leaves you completely childless. If you have 5 children - a loss leaves with with 4 children.
2) There has been a remarkable drop in childhood disease mortality. In the past, when it was very likely that one or more of your children would die with a childhood disease, the 1 in a million chance of abduction is not that big of a deal. Now, we generally don't expect any of our children to die of infection or disease in childhood, and so the chance of abduction (while still the same or smaller than before) becomes comparatively larger.
"Safety" has become somewhat of a "semantic stopsign" in political discourse.
Anyway, usually it's roughly 60% suicide, 10% defense, 25% homicide, 5% accidental.
The FBI and BJS usually have pretty good criminology data.
[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/E_Pluribus_Unum.html?id...
So instead I found this, and now just to provide another view:
"Does ethnic diversity erode trust?: Putnam’s ‘hunkering-down’ thesis reconsidered"
From the conclusion (page 40):
> Our findings and conclusions contradict the view that the increasing ethnic heterogeneity
> of community life in the 21st Century represents a worrying and corrosive influence on
> trust between citizens. An important limitation to this generalization is that our
> conclusions relate to Britain in the mid-2000s. Failure to corroborate the pattern of
> results that has been observed in the United States does not negate those findings but
> does, we contend, pose a strong challenge to claims of their universalistic nature
[0] http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/15382/2/Sturgis(2011)%20Does%20eth...
Even 25 years ago, weirdos existed. As a ~10 year old, walking home one day, a stranger stopped his car, leaned out, and asked me to go get coffee with him.
Quite a small town as well.
The streets throughout NYC were depressing and violent when I was growing up. But those working class homes were even more depressing and there were only a handful of TV channels. So we had to go outside to keep our sanity. Even if I wanted to play a video game, I'd have to ride my bike to get a pirated copy or to commute to a friend's house. So you'd see kids outside at the very least because they had somewhere to go. Even having a job was common.
Now all those homes have been comfortably remodeled with air-conditioning, high-speed internet, and countless TV channels.
Coincidentally, the first household to get cable television and a video game console on my block also had the first notably obese child.
For something to do, you had to go outside and meet up with the other kids outside, then go looking for trouble (!).