My parents were not car campers or backpackers while I was growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s and ’60s, so when my lust for surging outside into more remote nature blossomed in the early 1970s, I launched into it with all the fervor of a recently converted zealot.
Henry David Thoreau’s clarion cry that “in wildness is the preservation of the world” still resonates with me despite becoming clichéd and misunderstood. (True, “wilderness” is almost completely gone today.)
The campground offers one lens or metaphor we can use to understand Americans’ rapidly changing views about nature and unpolluted public regions of North America.
In her book, Camping Grounds — Public Nature in American Life, environmental historian Phoebe Young traces the growth of camping in national parks and U.S. forests from the Civil War period to the Occupy movement (2011-2012).
After finishing the 412-page tome from Oxford University Press, Young contends that we’ve developed a “social contract” between government and the public in which citizens expect that “government” should make affordable campsites available (e.g., at Yosemite or Yellowstone national parks).
By exploring the various meanings of “camping” since 1900, she writes: “This activity (camping) was (and remains) key to how Americans think about their relationship to nature, the nation, and each other.”
Many would agree that the ways we as a country value/protect/exploit/utilize our public lands tell us a lot about ourselves.
Out here in the American West, the federal government owns an enormous percentage of the land (47%), and thus it ends up in hassles with various interest groups. Just look at the controversy involving seven states, including California, over their “share” of the Colorado River’s diminishing water.
Wherever one stands on the controversial “blanket closure” of Los Padres National Forest (and three adjacent forests, scroll down for the 4-1-1), we all need to understand that our varying concepts of “American camping” involve overlapping time-ridden ideas that confuse these discussions.
If we conduct the debate in thoughtful dialogue, we may learn from each other and how to better assist our ailing Mother Planet to heal from human depredations.
For the longest time, I was a hard-core purist and semi-fanatic backpacker who relished longer loop trips up and down the fairly remote Manzana and Sisquoc rivers, and constantly praised an austere wilderness ethic a la John Muir, Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold.
Back in the day, I managed five of the intense “48-mile Manzana-Sisquoc Loop” backpacks through the spectacular San Rafael Wilderness (discussed in chapter one in my book, Trails Into Tomorrow).
Should such ventures be banned since “the foolish 45-year-old packer” might have broken his ankle and died? In that era just 35 years ago, there were no cellphones or emergency beacons available, and yet my life partner had few qualms about my adventure.
“Camping” covers a wide array of favored leisure activities — car camping (with the family) in government campgrounds, beside-the-road camping (e.g. on Bureau of Land Management land), through-hiking and overnighting on major trails such as the Appalachian Trail, kids overnighting in the backyard, glamping, as well as backpacking camping in the dirt in federal “wilderness” areas.
It also includes retirees hauling the Winnebago or Sprinter out, and actually encompasses camping on public areas like we observed in the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011-2012.
Some advocates for the unsheltered often focus on finding ways for people to avoid having to camp (e.g. in the bushes next to the freeway), and there are many examples of urban officials trying to shut down both homeless and Occupy encampments.
Yet, at the same time, federal and state agencies have consistently encouraged Americans to head out on camping vacations and inspire themselves in the great outdoors.
Of course, prolonged camping in urban spaces brings up all sorts of issues, and much of the controversy hinges on our varying definitions of “camping.” Occupy Wall Street was, in fact, a form of camping.
How did we get to this impasse? In the 1930s, a California-born and German-educated forestry scientist named Emilio Meinecke convinced the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service to revamp and redesign most government car-camping sites.
In her book, Young supplies fascinating graphs emphasizing how increased automobile ownership in the early 20th century led to an explosion of car camping: Visitor counts at national parks and monuments rose from 198,000 in 1910 to 1.1 million in 1920 to 3.2 million visitors in 1930.
This spectacular increase directly parallels the growing affordability of car ownership in America, especially with the inexpensive Model T Ford — more than 15 million Tin Lizzies were sold between 1908 and 1926, and by 1925 one cost about $300.
This “universal car” fostered the car-camping craze that led to Meinecke’s success in redesigning most camping sites.
The new design is so common now that all readers will recognize Meinecke’s “loop system” whereby a narrow road threaded its way throughout a camping area — think of Sequoia — and provided every family a private parking spot with some trees or brush separating the sites. (This was originally designed to save the trees as well as cram more campers into the campground.)
But Meinecke’s thoughtful design, carried out all over the United States (check out Davy Brown Camp as an example, if our forest is ever opened again), included more than the basic aim to supply “a picnic table, a parking spot for the car and a place for a fire.”
Meinecke believed, as most of us still do today: “Camping on public lands, in specially designed experiences (the loop), strengthened the bonds between government and citizen. … The loop campground modeled an emerging social contract based on leisure and consumption rather than labor and production (Young, p. 136).
How unfortunate that current arguments over forest access and closure have damaged the relations between citizens and government.
Anti-government activist Ammon Bundy and cohorts claimed federal lands for their own in 2016 — I’ve visited the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon that he and his militant followers illegally seized a few years ago.
Accessibility has become a huge issue and, for almost a century, “camping” seemed a special refuge for wealthy and, later, middle-class, white Americans.
In the 1950s and after, African-American campers were not welcomed at the popular national parks, and author Young details the racism and exclusion that existed since the Civil War.
People are now becoming upset that our four local national forests have been closed in a totalitarian “blanket” fashion until mid-March.
As irate members of the Sage Trail Alliance have noted, the feds are aggressive in their draconian closure: On Feb. 1, Los Padres officials wrote, “Federal law enforcement officers and their K-9 partners are actively patrolling and have cited hundreds of violators over the last two weeks.”
As I stressed in my Feb. 3 column, “My Plea to Los Padres National Forest Officials and Chief Ranger Chris Stubbs,” this one-size-fits-all approach is absurd and unsustainable.
Plenty of people are going into Los Padres, and while you may get a ticket up on Gibraltar Road, there are many routes into reasonably safe trails and happy backcountry experiences.
I am not a scofflaw, and I do realize that the Forest Service faces a huge task as a result of these storms. But what about our sacred “social contract”? This goes to the heart of our shared democracy.
Los Padres National Forest’s blanket closure is well-intended but achieves the opposite of the effect Los Padres Supervisor Chris Stubbs and Forest Service officials should want — “to strengthen the bonds between government and citizen,” as Meinecke wrote in the 1930s.
What about building self-reliance and our vaunted “rugged individualism”? How do we foster that when in an overabundance of caution officials shut down the whole shebang?
Look, we have “rough sleepers” and campers living in the oak trees on the Mesa above my Westside home, and there are plenty of safe trails and access points into Los Padres right now, but nanny-state government feels obliged to practice CYA and protect itself from lawsuits by keeping all of us out of every bit of forest.
When an 18-year-old hiker tragically died on the Jesusita Trail last May, authorities didn’t just decide to close the trail for two months!
C’mon, Forest Service and Stubbs — get flexible. Are you planning to extend the outrageous total closure past March 13?
Much of this discussion really is about the role of government in our lives and our interpretations of “camping,” as well as our definition of the social contract between the individual and government. Can “government” save us from ourselves in the forest?
Young’s impressive study stresses how “public nature serves (instead) as a critical forum at the center of American culture and politics.”
So, this controversy isn’t a mere brouhaha about one’s selfish desire to get into Los Padres and hike and camp.
It involves a social contract between the People and the Forest Service, and contains a philosophical query asking whether “government” can save us from ourselves.
Please reopen portions of Los Padres National Forest now, or at least give campers and hikers some hope that the March 13 reopening date is a firm commitment. One hears talk of an extension.
There is no real need for the K-9 dogs, Supervisor Stubbs, and in these actions you weaken the bonds between government and individual: a fraught issue in today’s hotly divided America.
Note: Stay tuned for “American Concepts of ‘Camping’ Intensify our Controversies, Part II.”
4-1-1
Phoebe Young, Camping Grounds — Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement (Oxford, 2021); Angeles, Cleveland and San Bernardino national forests have been closed along with our 2 million-acre Los Padres National Forest; Dan McCaslin, Trails Into Tomorrow — Walking in the Wild Santa Barbara Backcountry (Sisquoc River Press, 2021), pp. 1-10; my plea to the Forest Service to end the closure order:
