What's the Matter With "Kids" These Days??

DISCLAIMER: This post kind of turned into a rant and I have to admit that I make a bunch of generalizations and point quite a few fingers here, but I want to make it clear that I am not trying to trivialize any of the issues I bring up here by ignoring their many nuances and specificities. Every issue I mention here brings with it a whole host of its own problems, exceptions, and unique ramifications and I am not pretending to know any answers or exclude myself from any of these things. This is just something I've been thinking about a lot lately within the context of a few of my classes and so here it is!


One passage I found particularly telling in Colvin's report was his discussion of the ADKs as an escape for city-dwellers (a form of the "playground" aspect of the park's trichotomy). Colvin says:

"Anxious to escape, our citizens hasten either to the country, the sea-shore, or the mountains, while those whose avocations will not permit their absence, find a purer air in the semi-rural suburbs, or in those elegant parks which modern culture and civilization have come to consider indispensable in any city" (p. 114).

I think this is a great passage for a few reasons, one being the paradox between "real" wilderness and "re-created" wilderness in non-wild areas. If cities, with all their amenities, structural institutions, jobs, and people, are more conducive to modern, productive work and lifestyles (a big "if"), then it makes sense for people to congregate in these sociocultural hubs. But when so many people flock to the same area, the region is "de-wilded," which seems to leave the city inhabitants in a state of nostalgia for these once-wild expanses. The solution to this problem, as Colvin mentions here, is the building of parks which are now "indispensable in any city" or else, for those who can afford it (impressive socioeconomic implications here!!), a quick trip to the countryside. This use of the wilderness as an escape is fully understandable to me, but it reminds me of all the ways that we in today's society (alert for an only-somewhat-founded, sweeping generalization here!) have a tendency to use our big brains and fancy technology to treat symptoms and alleviate unwanted byproducts of our actions rather than change our actions or analyze the root causes of our problems. This is true of the pharmaceutical industry, low-cost fast food chains, armament legislation, many addendum educational programs, pretty much any economic subsidiary, a lot of the environment impact "mediators" (smokestack scrubbers are a great way to prolong avoiding accountability for air pollution!!), and now, it is true of the wilderness-nostalgia-problem as well.

This brings me to my second point of interest with this passage, namely Colvin's description of city parks as "elegant." I think that the wild should only be described as "elegant" in reference to the beautiful cacophony of nature that somehow works in only seemingly seamless ways. In any other context, the quality of elegance has a very man-made connotation to it, as if something natural has been molded and manipulated to purposefully (and artificially) fulfill a certain role as humans see fit. Amid the busy chaos of city streets, a pared-down, synthetically organized version of nature in the form of city parks, allows a welcome respite for city inhabitants. Thus Central Park, Bryant Park, Prospect Park (the list goes on) all function as elegant-ized solutions to the general nostalgia for fresh air that plagues so many city dwellers. This particular paradox seems especially backwards to me because, once again, it represents a synthetic solution to the unwanted side effects of a complex problem.

It seems to me that when people (myself included) use places like city parks or the Adirondacks as an "escape" then all they're really doing is taking a temporary refuge from whatever plagues them at home. I'm not sure that there is any solution to these root causes that drive the need for artificial wilderness spaces in non-wild places, but I do know that this is something that should be on people's minds. Instead of just jetting off to the countryhouse for a weekend, perhaps people should take on a more Emersonian approach and think about why these natural spaces are so much better at clearing the head and fulfilling a need that metropolises cannot--and then maybe we can work to figure out why we need that respite in the first place and what the role of the wilderness is (and should be) in our modern lives.