America’s Great Outdoors
By Zachary Price
Washington Park Conservancy Intern
At a conservation conference in Chicago’s Field Museum, sophomore Troy Howard asked a short but crucial question: “How should we define the outdoors?” Troy’s question
guided the discussion during August 30th’s America’s Great Outdoors Forum - an event for local Chicago citizens to voice their environmental concerns to White House officials.
So, how should we define the outdoors? For me, the outdoors brings to mind one of my family vacations to Lake Owassa, New York, where while canoeing down the winding banks of Bear Swamp, I would pick fresh blueberries and fall asleep under the afternoon sun. However, these moments in nature took place hundreds of miles from my home and are limited to only a couple of days out of the year. While peaceful, the outdoors is removed from my everyday life in the city.
Troy, however, described how many inner-city kids in impoverished neighborhoods have a much different view of the outdoors. For them, the outdoors is a dangerous zone between their home and school – a place where they are vulnerable to anything from robberies to gang violence.
Whether we define the outdoors as a distant lake or a city street, we must acknowledge the barriers that block us from truly having access to a healthy outdoor life. With 80% of Americans living in cities, our lifestyles are becoming more and more urban, but with this change we are losing our vital connection to nature. Today, busy highways block our recreational rivers, and plasma televisions replace family trips to see breathtaking landscapes.
With kids spending an average of 6-8 hours a day on electronics such as television and computers, it is becoming clearer and clearer that we are being separated the natural world around us – a world that is an essential part of our health and happiness.
Today, there is a strong movement to break through the digital screen and reconnect to the earth. At Monday’s Outdoors Forum, citizens of all sorts, including college students, city architects, and army veterans, flooded the aisles of the museum’s auditorium to fight for a greener Chicago. A group of high school students from Chicago’s South Side spoke out against the many vacant lots that deteriorate the physical landscape and psychological mindset of their community. The students suggested that transforming these vacant lots into green spaces – such as community gardens – would give the community more access to nature, while providing a glimpse into a greener future.
Other community leaders talked about how green spaces, like the proposed community gardens, are needed to provide nutrition to a community. Initiatives such as “know your farmer, know your food” hope to reconnect us not only to the outdoors,
but also to a natural and healthy diet. Neil Nicol, CEO of YMCA of America, spoke about improving nutrition in poorer neighborhoods: “The solution is not in trying to get big supermarkets like Giant, Stop&Shop, and Wal-Mart…to come in.” Rather, successful programs involve establishing local farmer’s markets that can be specialized to a neighborhood’s needs. Mr. Nicol described one such program that encourages farmer’s markets to open at day care centers, so that parents can buy organic fruits and vegetables as they pick up their child. Hand in hand with a healthy diet comes a lifestyle of constant outdoor activity.
An employee of Lincoln Park’s nature center talked about the importance of “planting a seed in the youth.” By exposing them early to activities like soccer at the park, camping in the woods, and fishing on the lake, we can cultivate a lifelong passion for nature in children. However, the lack of accessibility to nature hinders citizens from consistently using green spaces. Not only is transportation unavailable to low-income families, but the cost of equipment itself can stop a family from making a trip to the woods. To relieve the cost of equipment such as hiking boots, kayaks, and tents – which may be hundreds of dollars at outdoor stores such as REI – commentators suggested creating an equipment library, where members can borrow the tools
needed for a trip and return them after use.
While there is certainly a lot of action at the community level, there must also be government programs that motivate professionals to start focusing on conservation. In programs like Park Prescriptions, doctors encourage patients to walk through nature trails as a way to decrease risk of major chronic diseases such as type-2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Similarly, our political representatives need to set up programs encouraging skilled landscape designers to help conservationists make their ideas visible. Training in conservation can also
By the end of the two-day-long America’s Great Outdoors Forum, I had my own crucial questions to ask: could my definition of the outdoors ever exist in an urban setting such as
Chicago? More importantly, could we make everyone’s definition of the outdoors be both a safe and accessible part of this city?
While there is no absolute “yes” to these questions, the spirit and
enthusiasm of the many different people I met at these meetings certainly showed me that we are moving in the right direction.
However, we must be careful not to wait on the future to enjoy outdoor activity today. At the forum, Dr. Susan Hedman talked about how we already have opportunities to interact with wilderness settings even within city limits: “A lot of people dream of the ultimate outdoor adventure as kayaking down the Grand Canyon.” While Chicago’s physical terrain is certainly far from the deserts of the Southwest, Dr. Hedman argued that we could still experience this dream in our urban environment. By kayaking down the Chicago River, the towering buildings echo with the same energy of the canyon’s rocky cliffs, and the feeling of entering the deep blue waters of Lake Michigan rivals even the rapids of the Colorado River.
