Recreation & Leisure - Article Example

Recreation and Leisure The new millennium has brought with it new understandings, new technologies, new attitudes and new abilities. Through technology, people are able to go ever deeper into the wilderness to experience for themselves what they’ve only read or heard about, or that they feel no one else has ever experienced before. They have more time to invest in leisure and recreation activities and they are increasingly turning to the nation’s open spaces as a means of exploring their options. As the following paper will demonstrate, the increasing variety and prevalence of these activities is introducing a new set of challenges for the park manager as he struggles to adjust to the vast shift in attitude regarding the use of public space as compared to previous generations and to facilitate the protection of land and individual pursuits into the future. While no easy solution is in sight, there are some approaches the park manager can take that will facilitate greater ability to manage these changes into whatever the future might hold. Outline Introduction With a stronger global economy and greatly increased communications technology, more and more people are finding themselves free of their desks and able to enjoy more time for recreation and leisure. In addition, the forms of recreation have taken on many new aspects ranging from off-road vehicles of every variety, hiking and walking, camping, fishing, swimming to organized sports, limited use, children’s parks and accessible parks.1 However, this increased demand for parkland, particularly for open spaces, has proven to be a significant challenge, both now and anticipated for the future. According to a report by Russell,2 the management of an increased public demand for open space and resources is among the top twelve major concerns for the future among recreation and park administrators. In a content analysis of the National Issues Forums that were held at NRPA Annual Congresses from 1983 to 1993, space resources (i.e. preventative maintenance, land acquisition and environmentalism) were among the three most frequently discussed topics.3 With a growing trend around the nation to create interconnected parks, trails and open space areas that encourage use and provision for a wide variety of activities, it is necessary to determine what challenges do increasing public recreation pursuits place on natural landscapes and what does this mean for open space management? Parks of the past The idea of a park in the early 19th century was constructed around the concept of an orderly area of town in which people could go to enjoy the outdoors without any of the dangers of the greater wilderness. These parks were designed primarily based on the concept of the picturesque park as it was developed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In developing this type of park, there are several specific principles that work together to achieve a relaxing yet energizing effect upon the viewer or user of the park thanks to a careful blending of the natural and the man-made. The park itself is designed to provide a limited range of possibilities, most geared toward simple enjoyment of nature through the use of trails, greenways and forested regions. The parks combined the manicured and well-defined spaces of the pastoral with the suggestion of the wild open spaces within a limited and confined area. In accomplishing this feat, Olmsted provided perhaps the most succinct breakdown of the important elements based on seven S’s: scenery, suitability, style, subordination, separation, sanitation and service.4 Of particular relevance to the current discussion are the concepts of scenery and service. Scenery refers to the creation of ‘passages of scenery’ which are meant to provide an enhanced sense of space including a perception of indefinite boundaries and the constant opening up of new views.5 It is important to note that this is an impression consciously designed, an illusion of space, rather than the real thing. Service refers to the necessity that the space designed will meet the fundamental social and psychological needs of the people who will be using it.6 Responsible designs, however, incorporated all of the above principles with a careful consideration of how utility can be combined with ornament in such a way as to provide for the safety and maintenance of the space, as well as promote the safety and physical and mental health of the user. Thus, the concept of a park was a carefully maintained and ordered space that was designed with only a few of today’s activities in mind. Changing park settings – from the cultured to the wild While this approach was successful for the early centuries in which transportation was primarily undertaken on foot and people’s principle activities were equally more limited, an evolving society has meant a need for evolving approaches to park and open space management. With increased transportation options, greater resources and more time to travel, Americans have been exploring the greater wilderness of the national parks, and demanding greater access to these open spaces. In addition, with the rise of the cities and the encroaching cement fields, more Americans seem to desire escaping into the wilderness as a means of letting go, a trend in nearly complete opposition to the needs of their forebears, creating in this shift some troubling issues to overcome. As more sites of interest were discovered, such as the geysers and mudpots of Yellowstone, the national parks were established as a means of preserving the nation’s most breathtaking vistas and natural oddities for all Americans, current and future. With this viewpoint in mind and in keeping with the concepts of the earlier parks, these wildlife or open space parks were designed to cater to the visiting tourist with little regard to ecological concerns or potential human impact on the region and wildlife. “Current cultural landscapes are products of past perceptions of needs, reactions to conditions and decisions about ways of meeting demands – regardless of whether the landscape in question is urban, agricultural or a development center in a western national park.”7 Understanding how parks were first envisioned as well as how they developed into national open spaces for unstructured use begins to outline the problems managers face as they try to update a system that has been long neglected, but an understanding of just how the recreational uses of the public has changed is also necessary if today’s changes are to address probably future developments and needs. Shifts in public use According to Ewert et al,8 there have been two major trends in outdoor sports that have developed in just the past 30 years. These are designated as adventure sports and wilderness therapy pursuits. While each of these aspects of wilderness usage reflect earlier conceptions of how national parks should be utilized, such as in the broadly based sporting categories or in the general conception of using nature as a therapeutic tool, they have each evolved in recent decades to represent a widespread and fundamental shift in approach that serves to introduce new managerial challenges in protecting the environment and dealing with legislation. Adventure sports Adventure sports, which includes such activities as mountaineering, white-water boating, caving, rock climbing, backcountry skiing and SCUBA diving, have been proven to have ever-increasing enthusiasts with 15.2 million people enjoying backpacking, 9.5 million involved in caving and another 9 million climbing mountains.9 While many of these activities have been pursued in the national parks since prior to their foundation, the number of activities classed within these broad categorizations far outstrips the number of activities pursued in previous years as extreme sports and new technologies increasingly find new ways of achieving adrenaline rushes and various means of utilizing landscapes. By their very nature, these types of activities induce ever more creative approaches to how to use the land as originality and the desire to have a ‘unique’ experience strongly influence the participants. This means not only are the activities in a constant state of change, but so are the rules associated with established sports and the uses to which various items of technology and environment are placed. In addition, the numbers of people participating in these outdoor adventure activities has increased tremendously, with 67 percent of park managers reporting increased use of national parkland by adventure enthusiasts.10 A solid example of this can be seen in the approximate numbers of climbers attempting to summit Mt. Rainier in Washington State. According to Athearn,11 only about 476 people have attempted to climb the mountain from the 1950s to the 1990s, but there have been at least 11,455 climbers’ attempting its slopes in the past ten years. This increase is generally attributed to a number of factors including more time to invest, greater awareness of health issues and the benefits of outdoor recreation, greater technology that makes such pursuits safer and/or possible, media exposure that introduces and drives enthusiasm for various sports and a shift in societal ethics that values leisure higher than work among other things.12 This shift in use represents a tremendous shift from the ways in which the open spaces were used in the past in that people used to use the technology they had available to them to explore the country while they are now using the country to explore their technology, ranging ever further into remote areas as they become more capable to appealing for assistance should it become necessary.13 Wilderness therapy Wilderness therapy, like adventure sports, has seen a tremendous growth and increased attention in recent years as more and more programs begin touting the benefits to be gained through a ‘back to basics’ experience. These programs are typically associated with behavior therapy goals and are frequently administered to adolescents. One report suggests that at least 11,000 adolescents per year circulate through these types of programs.14 These problems usually integrate wilderness and adventure experiences, often using the same types of resources as those used for the previously discussed adventure sports, with psychotherapeutic practice such as building teamwork for adult co-workers or working out connection issues with teenagers. These programs can involve small to large groups of people or even be practiced individually, all under a therapist’s supervision. In addition to the necessity of relying on others in order to survive, forcing connections and cooperation, these programs teach survival skills and thus serve to increase self-confidence, independence, personal and social responsibility. According to Ewert et al,15 these programs usually each serve an average of 110 clients per year for approximately 225 usable days of the year representing about 14,300 wilderness therapy participants on the land annually generating about 615,000 user days in the backcountry. Challenges facing managers Of course, the biggest challenge facing park managers and administrators is how to balance all these various uses with the ecological concerns that such uses necessarily raise. For those individuals engaged in extreme sports, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of these sports are either done singly or in small groups that traditionally scorn rules and regulations, participating partially as a means of escaping the supervision and authority they encounter in their working lives. This is in stark contrast to the goals of the wilderness therapy groups that wish to utilize the land to instruct individuals upon how to foster teamwork and conform to societal expectations. While both adventure sports and therapeutic use of land are increasing, questions emerge regarding just how much use can the land hold, which uses are more important and how are these to be prioritized. At what point should land managers call a halt to the activity to give nature a chance to replenish or attempt to restrict activity so as to preserve a specific resource for future generations? As these questions are grappled with, managers must also balance what is proper for the environment and the various users and their goals with the requirements set forward by legislation and policy. Activity-specific concerns Extreme sports activities rarely take into account the permanent damage they inflict upon the environment as they participate in their activity. For example, the recent emergence of a sport referred to as ‘bouldering’ involves participants’ heavy impact upon the surrounding landscape. These include cultural artifact destruction in the use of the equipment, disturbance of local neighborhood traffic with the increased numbers of sport participants driven even higher by coverage in sporting magazines and the low cost of participation, soil erosion and compaction under this heavy use of prime areas and interruption of privacy patterns in these regions.16 Another sport made possible only as a result of new technology is the scavenger hunt type game called geocaching which utilizes handheld Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to locate cleverly hidden objects in deeply out of the way places based almost exclusively upon reported coordinates. According to Chavez,17 more than 100,000 people have been involved in the sport since its inception in 2000. Because of the locations where these items are hidden, the sport has increasingly been impacting trails, vegetation and wildlife patterns. In addition, the solitary nature of the sport and its utilization of a wide diversity of landscape formations often has this group’s activities interfering and conflicting with the activities of some of the other wilderness users. Similarly, the increased attendance in therapeutic wilderness programs has had its own share of impact upon the environment. Water pollution, vegetation destruction especially in areas where exotic species are maintaining a very delicate balance, introduction of new species, human non-biodegradable waste products, soil compaction and erosion and wildlife disturbance are only a few of the issues managers must consider when working with these groups. Increased legislative supervision and a higher potential for emergency assistance being required also add to the land manager’s concerns regarding this particular usage. Because they often use the same resources as some of the more extreme sports enthusiasts for activities such as the popular sport of ‘bouldering’, these groups also present potential conflict issues that will ultimately fall to the park managers to resolve, frequently without any assistance from policy guidelines or land use maintenance controls. Once it has been determined whether the area is acceptable for the use with environmental and other factors taken in, determining who should have priority in gaining its use is left more or less to individual discretion, at least for the time being. With increased use comes increased conflict which has escalated to a point now where various different activist groups are beginning to form as a means of influencing policy-making and retaining specific usage areas. As is illustrated in the example of determining whether to allow a rocky area to be utilized by a therapeutic wilderness program assisting adolescent boys or by a small group of adventure-seeking urbanites on vacation, questions of priority of use and the installation of safety equipment, such as bolting, in areas designated natural resources preserves become areas of extreme conflict between the users and the managers. However, as is already demonstrated in the overlap of adventure sports like bouldering and geocaching, there are plenty of conflicts also present within the various uses to which a specific landscape might be placed. Extreme sports participants have no issues with bringing a high degree of technology and technology-driven equipment in to assist them in the completion of their sport – such as motorcycles, helicopters or other forms of off-road vehicles. These types of equipment, though, must naturally interfere with those individuals who are engaged in hiking, horsepacking or other non-technologically based activity as an escape from the motorized world of the city. This conflict, then, re-introduces the concept of priority, this time in terms of which type of use should take priority. Finally, an increasing concern regarding the natural environment raised not only by the debate over global warming but also by those nature enthusiasts who have found their more traditional activities interrupted by the activities of the adventure sports enthusiasts introduces yet another conflict. This time, it is concerned more with whether the natural landscape should be preserved in its pristine condition or adapted so as to be useful to the other forms of use to which it has been applied. Legislative concerns Largely because of the conflicts that have arisen between various sporting groups, therapy groups, environmental groups and park managers, a growing number of user organizations have been developed that continue to push for greater accessibility and higher priority ranking in gaining the rights of access. Although some permitting and licensing is now necessary in most states regarding the therapeutic use of land, these policies do not necessarily include such specific details as what portion of the land will be used, when, for how long and for what specific purpose. A failure to adequately juggle the usage, conservation and priority access among the various groups on the part of the park manager can easily lead to more binding and less ecologically-friendly policies being set by legislators well out of touch with the dominant issues involved. “Recreation users, law enforcement officials, land and river managers, as well as landowners, often have differing expectations about appropriate activities and levels of use on public lands. They often hold entirely different views about the law, their rights, duties and protections.”18 Park managers become more concerned with preservation and safe use yet must also contend with policymakers who tend to be more concerned with money and other unrelated interests, user groups each advocating for the benefit of their own preferred use and often to the exclusion of other uses and private landowners who contend with issues of vandalism and littering, livestock endangerment, fire hazards, lawsuits and invasion of privacy. Conclusion A principle cause of contention and subsequent lack of control over the extreme sports enthusiasts, which are often erroneously considered to be the catalyst of the problems being experienced, is often the contentious relationship that develops between themselves and policymakers. This is because policymakers tend to prohibit an activity before considering it and then take lengthy periods of time to consider it. Eventually, they are forced to allow the considered activity with little to no constraints because it cannot be controlled. This type of process, repeated again and again with each new sport devised, tends to undermine any vestige of respect this group as a whole feels toward their authority figures and reduces the ability of the park manager, or anyone else, to constrain activities in a way that offers the least permanent impact upon others or on the environment. One way to reduce the hard feelings created by this lag time is for managers to remain alert regarding the nature of their visitors and begin pushing for consideration of new uses that come into play prior to them being prohibited. Taking a proactive, considered and thoughtful approach to determine how to best reduce the negative consequences of an activity and then working out a mutually acceptable policy rather than instituting an outright ban incites less hostility and opposition among a group already known for a rebellious and adventurous attitude. By encouraging this kind of approach among policymakers, park managers can gain respect and consideration from those sport adventurers who might be temporarily prevented from participation in their activity while the issue is investigated. This respect, consistently earned, may help foster a greater respect for the environment and the authorities managing that environment among this group as well as encourage a more cooperative attitude toward other user groups in the park system. Applying this kind of understanding and willingness to listen to all user groups enables the manager to bring collaborative groups together as a means of reaching mutually compromised agreements and fair and enforceable policies. In addition, being not only aware of, but well informed regarding these many issues involved in new and old uses of public space or interlacing with private lands can help the park manager take a proactive position among legislators in striking a settled balance between the issues involved, whether it is environmental, sports-related (traditional or extreme) or therapeutic considerations even in the face of strongly biased special interest organizations or individuals. However, if the park manager has already established a proactive and cooperative environment, these special interest groups will be more likely to back the park manager in legislative meetings rather than oppose him/her. It is unlikely that managers will see a reduction in the various conflicts and policymaking that will affect them any time soon. Changing uses and prevalence of use for the same landscape area will continue to be a burden, particularly as the concept of extreme sports continues to evolve at rates much faster than policies or considerations can take place. As more and more people gain an understanding of the benefits of the natural environment and gain the time and the finances to experience these benefits for themselves, each with their own conception of how best to do this, the impact on the natural environment will continue to grow. If there is to be any hope of constraining these various uses so as to provide the greatest benefit to all Americans, managers must become strong negotiators, open listeners and non-contentious supporter of the right for all Americans to enjoy the outdoors. 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