I was never a boyscout... my father was too impatient to deal with the bureaucracy of children's clubs. During my childhood, "the woods" referred to two empty lots adjacent to my house on an otherwise completely developed suburban street. Still, I had good formative experiences that little area: splinters and poison ivy, feelings of being lost, and re-enactments of many cruel Lord of the Flies style scenarios with neighborhood kids. I loved that place until I was about eleven years old, around the time when it was finally cleared for new home construction. By that time though I wasn't so interested in it anymore. I didn't spend comparable amount of time anywhere that I found similarly enchanting until my mid 20s, when I became interested in outdoorsy adventure sports.

Those experiences have led me to question what myself and others have come to see in the wilderness? I worry that the term "wild” is hard to take very seriously these days - so few places seem meet the criteria and the experiences individuals have in them are impressively tame. Since it seems that I have spent so very little time in such places, how would I even recognize them? In my entire life, I've never been more than a few miles away from other human beings. Are the woods filled with hikers still wild?

I probably shouldn't belittle myself for my lack of wilderness experience, but sometimes I cannot help but go down this path. Aren't outdoorsmen just more in touch with the world and themselves? That's what the movies would have us believe. There is really nothing uniquely mystical about it the wilderness for me, but I still imagine it to be a special kind of environment in which to contemplate one's existence. It's sort of like free climbing (no rope) by yourself - knowing that any mistake could mean the end of your life.

Anyway, I don't really want to court the wilderness in a traditional sense... think Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire or the cinematic take on Into the Wild. My interest, as usual, lies in doing something completely different with this resource with pragmatic motivation outside of making money. I am no really longer content to just walk on a trail through the woods or even just descend into it's depths for some brief adventure sports excursion. Sadly, that has begun to bore me... the specter of freedom and excitement had me hooked for awhile. My wilderness experiences were just too contrived to sustain the dream - so it died.

Yet I still maintain some sort of defiant belief in the importance of the wild for individuals and human societies. It's partly my belief in the importance of preserving large tracts of the Earth's ecosystems primarily for the sustaining of species other than ourselves. And it's partly because I don't think the ideas of ecopsychology are totally bunk - spending time in natural environments does positive effects on us - hard to quantify as they may be. One of the more easily documented effects is that people who spend more time outside value preserving wilderness more highly than others. Yes, that goes for Dick Cheney and his ilk as well, though they may try to do so more undemocratically, that is, only for more privileged among us.

So, I think we should be doing more to get people involved in outdoor activities. Of course, I'm not the first to propose this, but the nature of the mechanism is what counts. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by providing easy access and more managed outdoor experiences that suit the average motorized American consumer. This makes good business sense, or at least it did when fuel prices were lower. However, it seems supremely ironic that these efforts have served now to make the least artificial thing in our world the most contrived.

This certainly isn't the best wilderness example, but must point out that Yellowstone really is the outdoor Disney. You drive around the park slowly in traffic flowing towards the sites of various "natural wonders." It is a theme park managed in much the same way as Lion Country Safari or the Busch Garden's Savannah. Call me crazy, but I think the heyday of these experiences is over, for reasons both economic and cultural. More people are looking for a truly unmediated experience and it is increasingly hard to come by. It's not necessarily something you can buy, though people are getting flown to remote parts of Alaska are trying to do just that. I'm not trying to push the artificiality concept too far, but it does seem as though it is almost totally encompassing - like the blob. Even if we start from the position that humans did not help create the wilderness found today (a somewhat dubious claim in my opinion), there is still the nagging artificiality of the means through which we access it.

The key to reviving the realness of the wilderness is to keep it deregulated and decommodified. I say "keep" because is that the majority of ours,outside the national parks, already is. We live in a country that probably has the world's largest supply of wilderness, certainly the most interesting and hospitable. My apologies to Russia and Canada, but Alaska has far more frozen tundra that we need. By virtue of this abundance, our mostly unfettered access, and our level of wealth, we should be pioneering policy, business, and science initiatives in these areas. Maybe we are, but sometimes it seems that tiny and impoverished Costa Rica might be ahead of us in some significant ways. Regardless, we need to innovate culturally to get the most out of these public places.

I'm not going to go after the roads into forests across the United States, though those are certainly controversial. It's too late, they are there to stay... let's go ahead and use them more. Still, I'm more interested in what people do when the roads end. I want to make wilderness more social. Some readers, especially deep ecologists and those of you with substantial experience working in the woods (the connoisseurs if you will) will likely exclaim, "Wait, you mean more people!" Yes, that's right, I want to see more people in the woods interacting with each other and the natural world in more meaningful ways. I do not believe that more people necessarily means more degradation of wilderness areas, nor do I believe that there should be any permanent "no-go" zones for humans. We need to learn to live with other living organisms, not cordon ourselves off from them.

Sorry, but the whole idea of seeking contrived solitude in these places is absurd. That's the Dick and friends way. I am tired of hearing people tell me that they hope to see no one else while they are in the woods... that the RV set ruin the experience, that is, their imagined experience. If we value the woods and hope others do too, then it is only natural to expect more people to come experience them. I agree that the way people experience the woods should change, but not that we should hope for limited interest and access.

The problem is that huge domestic industries are naturally bent on encouraging and equipping our citizenry to interact with wilderness in more and more sheltered ways. Simplicity simply isn't profitable. Let's turn that aforementioned elitism into action. I dare them to do than whine and avoid, but instead try and convince the camper crowd that they can have more fun with less stuff. Evangelize products for the next iteration of the service economy - the experience economy. This will be less about gear and guides, and more about social imagination. That's really the only way they'll even begin to be able to get where they want to go.

The means of interacting with wilderness are certainly diverse. However, after spending significant time outdoors with a the different activity groups: day hikers, RVers and other motorized retirees, ridiculously well outfitted weekend warriors, adventure sports enthusiasts, and of course the hard core minimalists, I still wanted more. It's not about pioneering another narrow recreational pursuit so much as invent an idea that will change the entire way we look at and interact with the wilds around us.

I'm drawn to some still amorphous idea stemming from my love for the ethos of trying to have a maximum of diverse experiences as efficiently as possible. However, I know that neither reading anthropological accounts of native peoples nor browsing the huge selection of gear at REI will make this idea flourish. There is a key ingredient missing, but I just don't know what it is yet. I'm going to be anti-materialist on this one because I believe that the tech and knowledge is already largely available. The question is no longer what would make average people more able to stay in the wild for longer periods of time, but what would make them more desirous of such experiences in the first place?

This isn't to say I'm a wilderness Luddite... though I do in a way respect the Unabomber's writings. If I could get high speed Internet in the deep woods, I would almost certainly use it. This may well be the devil in disguise, but it is part of the same reason that RVs and yachts encourage long immersion trips. I need to be able to maintain some semblence of my civilized lifestyle in order to be able to spend more time there. When we can load topo maps onto our GPS enabled smartphones, this will enable us to feel much more connected and uncertain in far flung locales.

Perhaps what really bothers me that people so badly want to recreate in the wild... either that or they want to make up contrived ways to challenge nature. I want to work with and against people at complex tasks. Thus, summiting a peak for the sake of saying I did it and saw the view at the top just isn't good enough for me anymore. I can fake it on Flickr! Climbing a tough route for the rush and sense of accomplishment when I finish doesn't cut it either. Maybe you can seen my crazy undeveloped dreams showing through now. I want to do the ecochallenge and special forces training out there on an extended basis! I want to travel with a group of traceless wilderness nomads.

Sure, yuck it up, but I think it's still on the right sort of divergent path. There is something to be said for the feeling you get for a place when you do something other than observe it. The “tour” blinds us to certain key aspects of the place, no matter how hard we try to perceive it in its totality at key vantage points on the trail or roadside. I want to devise a way to infuse enough novelty and more excitement such that they attract people who wouldn't normally be interested in them.

Of course, I come from a very weird background and vantage point on this issue and I don't necessarily want to say that the existing access avenues are helplessly shallow, as much as I might think they are in many cases. Please, go about your business fellow tourists... you should be able to continue almost uninterrupted even if I thought of a new way to revolutionize the experience. However, you should realize that these areas are becoming more expensive more to access and that the knowledge and obtaining equipment needed to really interface with them requires a high initial investment. Although free markets (and military research) have helped quickly advance really cool minimalist outdoor technology, it's still damn expensive to come by, especially if you don't know where to find good deals on it. If we consider multi-day backpacking as an athletic sport, the entry costs seem quite high in comparison to others. I think a system for sharing rides and wilderness equipment would really help to address these issues.

What I find particularly sad about the current state of affairs is that the people who could really benefit most from being out in the woods (read: away from their vices and routines at home) are the ones who will never gain access. I love the organizations that try to improve access for disadvantaged youth, but this doesn't get at the root of the problem. As an extreme example, it has always struck me as odd that we encourage the chronically unemployed, criminal, and mentally ill to stay indefinitely in urban areas. I guess the conventional wisdom is that they need to be under constant surveillance, but keeping them here is both dangerous for their neighbors and likely an exacerbating force for their condition. Still, I wouldn't just want to start sending people off into the woods, either in the Escape from LA sort of way or in a conventional wilderness tourism fashion. Clearly, I think we need to tweak the mystique and sense of purpose surrounding these areas in some meaningful way, but how and by what means exactly?

I can't help but think about Burning Man as an example that helps me make inroads into this blobular dreamscape. I would agree that it has become the counterculture's Disneyland, but there are many useful principles that were solidly in place well before it became more rigidly institutional a decade ago: self-reliance, leave no trace, free thinking playfulness, artistic experimentation, diversity of lifestyle, embrace of technology, and even a little dose of ritual. If the spirit of that event could take hold in wilderness areas with smaller decentralized groups, I think the interesting ideas would start flowing forth fairly quickly.

This leads me to think of a documentary called Rivers and Tides which profiles an artist who makes his works strictly out of non-living elements he finds in the natural world. I can scarcely imagine anything more beautiful than stumbling into a forest in which he did is work. If we can have aesthetic agriculture, we can have aesthetic wilderness as well. I'm fine with nature as is, but there will always be plenty of that. Humans can make places beautiful as well as ugly. Moreover, there are lots of places we have ruined which could use ecological as well as aesthetic restoration. Combine this idea with a healthy dose of athletic competition and strategy... just show me where to sign up.