An interesting new study shows that folks are visiting national and state parks in every decreasing numbers, with our dependence on video entertainment as the main culprit.
Here is the full story: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=are-americans-afraid-of-the-outdoors
Here is an excerpt:
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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.
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Is geocaching one of the solutions to this problem? And if so, should not land managers be encouraging the placement of caches in the lands they manage?
zuma
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