Outdoor recreation often slips into what I call an achievement-based relationship with nature. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Whether it’s “bagging peaks”, racing to finish the AT, or stamping the land with machines and monuments, the focus shifts from ecology to ego.
Being obsessed with Peak Bagging is not Solarpunk.
Nature is not your personal obstacle to challenge yourself against, it is a shared place of discovery you trample when you only see it as a place to endlessly, exhaustingly conquer.
Not only am I advocating for that but I am saying this is the only actual path to connecting with nature. The western/american idea of “going to the frontier” we insist on reliving over and over again as a fantasy never brings us any closer to nature even though we surround ourselves with the aesthetic experience of it, rather most of the time it distances us from nature even as we trample all over it.
I wouldn’t say “only”, but it’s certainly the most accessible for the largest amount of people.