PSoTD

What the deal about being outside?

If you love outdoor activities, apparently you're in a minority. That's according to Oliver Pergams, a conservation biologist and visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Last week, he published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a fascinating study co-authored with conservation biologist Patricia Zaradic. The study says that since the late 1980s, fewer and fewer Americans have taken advantage of the outdoors.

Participation in nature activities is down a whopping 18 percent to 25 percent since peak levels. Doesn't that bum you out? It bums me out.

This is Pergams' third paper on this subject. The first, published in 2004, looked at the rate at which Americans were visiting U.S. national parks. Back then, Pergams and fellow researchers found that the per capita visits to national parks have declined since 1987. But between 1939 (the earliest year data were available) and 1987 there was a steady increase in visits.

The study analyzed possible factors for the decline and found four primary ones: an increase in gas prices, along with an increase in the hours people were spending on the Internet, playing video games and watching movies.

I suspect that the aging American population is a bigger part of this than understood. I used to go to a lot of state and national parks for outdoor activity when I was younger, but it has reduced considerably. Of course, another part of that is raising small children - they have activities that compete with going to parks, and they also don't have the attention span and stamina for it, either. But our family is quickly getting past that point, and should be entering the prime of our National Park Visitation Years.

I started thinking about where we've been the past five years - not the more indoor national park museum-style properties, but the outdoor ones, and I only came up with two - Great Smoky Mountains, and Grand Canyon. The kids loved both. They were memorable. We should be doing more.

When we first moved to Pennsylvania in 1991, my wife and I made a list of places we wanted to go on the East Coast. We only have one left, and of course, it is a national park - Acadia in Maine. We will have to get there sometime in the next few years.

One of the things that wasn't mentioned in this article would be the promotion budget for the National Park System now, versus what it was when it was at peak. I'd be curious to know the comparison. Disney doesn't rely on the "if you build it, they will come" promotion model, and neither should the United States National Park System.