It Is Scary Out There

Scientific American did a study on Americans and the outdoors. We just do not get out as much. I think part of the problem is the media portraying everything as scary. Although, backpacking is up.

Americans have been visiting national parks and other natural reserves less and less since 1987, new research confirms. Outdoor pursuits, ranging from camping to hunting, have entered a persistent and growing decline.

"Folks are going out into nature much less and decreasingly every year," says conservation ecologist Patricia Zaradic of the Environmental Leadership Program and co-author of the report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. "It would take 80 million more visits this year to get the per capita number back up to the level it was in 1987."

Zaradic and her colleague conservation biologist Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois at Chicago analyzed trends in visits to national parks and forests, state parks, surveys on camping and the number of licenses for activities such as hunting or fishing. All peaked between 1981 and 1991 after 50 years of steady increase and have been declining at roughly 1 percent per year since for an overall drop of as much as 25 percent.