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.
There’s a reasonable distintion to be drawn between tourist areas and areas that are just a bit wilder / grander / less-accessible, surely? The two categories can overlap, sure, but they’re not the same thing
Yeah, I think that the distinction can be drawn. However, when I read OP’s article, I understood it to be about the more tourist-y areas.
Ahh, I see where you’re coming from. I was meaning to reply more to OP’s comments on the in-the-moment experiences of hiking as opposed to the article talking about the ramifications that the hobby can have outside of that
See, I also interpreted OPs comments as being about more popular attractions, haha.
They spoke quite highly of the more wild nature preserve they visit and bemoaned the capitalist urge to take a beautiful and wild area, and turn it into a profitible tourist attraction that pulls the kind of hiker that doesn’t really respect nature.