That brings back memories of my days in Boy Scouts. Getting out in the outdoors is a wonderful character building exercise and presents opportunities that you won't get so much in city living. And yes, it can be breathtaking beautiful and serene.
That being said, I'm keenly aware that it is a fun diversion for rich people. (The Congressman is probably a good deal wealthier than my family growing up, but either of us are quite rich in comparison to the typical inhabitant of the Marshall Islands.)
Nature can be breathtakingly beautiful and awe inspiring. It can also be terrible and merciless, every inch the avatar of the old pagan gods, and it has a virtually infinite number of ways to kill you. The foundation of human civilization that people enjoy temporarily escaping from so much is minimizing the chance of terrible, brutal death dealt out stochatically by an uncaring world.
This is why while I enjoy the occasional escape to nature (with sensible precautions taken) I feel no particular urge to venerate it per se. The folks who live in uncontrolled nature 365 days out of the year -- the global poor -- live in misery, squalor, and constant fear of death from things the rest of us can scarcely comprehend you can die from. (One well-fed American can survive on plentiful crabs for a week but, then again, he could survive on rainwater for a week. A child in a village full of barely-making-it folks can succumb to diseases exacerbated by famine if the local subsistence food production is just a bit worse than it typically is -- and they don't have a panic button to summon the Coast Guard.)
The foundation of human civilization that people enjoy temporarily escaping from so much is minimizing the chance of terrible, brutal death dealt out stochatically by an uncaring world.
That being said, I'm keenly aware that it is a fun diversion for rich people. (The Congressman is probably a good deal wealthier than my family growing up, but either of us are quite rich in comparison to the typical inhabitant of the Marshall Islands.)
Nature can be breathtakingly beautiful and awe inspiring. It can also be terrible and merciless, every inch the avatar of the old pagan gods, and it has a virtually infinite number of ways to kill you. The foundation of human civilization that people enjoy temporarily escaping from so much is minimizing the chance of terrible, brutal death dealt out stochatically by an uncaring world.
This is why while I enjoy the occasional escape to nature (with sensible precautions taken) I feel no particular urge to venerate it per se. The folks who live in uncontrolled nature 365 days out of the year -- the global poor -- live in misery, squalor, and constant fear of death from things the rest of us can scarcely comprehend you can die from. (One well-fed American can survive on plentiful crabs for a week but, then again, he could survive on rainwater for a week. A child in a village full of barely-making-it folks can succumb to diseases exacerbated by famine if the local subsistence food production is just a bit worse than it typically is -- and they don't have a panic button to summon the Coast Guard.)