
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood (2009) - taylorbuley
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/07/16/manhood-for-amateurs-the-wilderness-of-childhood/
======
slv77
When my grandfather was a child (age 11) he took his 10 year old brother to
the state fair by train a distance of about 40 miles. They spent their
remaining funds on ice cream and then hitchhiked back home.

The trains were gone by the time my father was a child and he wandered as far
as a bike could take him and back in a day. He would play at Army Dumps that
dotted the landscape in the 50's.

When I was a kid the freeways and major thoroughfares created islands that
couldn't be crossed by a kid on a bike. The farmland and riparian areas around
creeks created walking corridors and I would spend time watching tadpoles and
building forts.

For my kids the farmland was developed and the creeks tightly fenced off by an
interlocking thicket of HOAs. They wandered virtual worlds.

~~~
noonespecial
>They wandered virtual worlds.

That's fairly insightful right there. I'm juust old enough that my childhood
contained some of the last years of "the woods" and juust young enough that
when I started WOW, I recognized the feeling. Logging on in those early days
had the same essential flavor as grabbing the bike and heading out.

~~~
curtfoo
Seconded. A very insightful comment. Your comment rings true as well. I spent
quite a bit of time in "the woods" as a boy but also plenty of time in front
of computer screens. You're right - the feeling is the same whether it's
outdoors, a virtual world, or even the inner world of my thoughts when I would
read a book with a fully realized world.

------
macandcheese
An even more relevant and striking article 7 years later. I truly worry for
the kind of world my children may grow up in, filled with manufactured fears
and helicopter parents buzzing about trying to prevent the world from getting
in.

At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our
history. No cell phone, not much supervision, just a couple of friends and a
forest that felt the size of the world. I wonder how long until true childhood
adventure is lost for good - marginalized to after-school curriculums and
playdates planned on "Tinder for Tots".

Go outside, get cuts and scrapes, and you'll turn out all the stronger and
more knowledgable from it.

~~~
justinator
I've architected my life so that adventure in the woods is still a quick bike
ride to the trailhead.If I have more time acailable, There's the National
Forest, Wilderness and a National Park, all a few hours by bike. I can bring
along a sleeping back and stay out indefinetly.

Without this access, yeah I'd feel a little dead inside.

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital
to our lives as water and good bread. May your trails be crooked, winding,
lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise
into and above the clouds. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of
the cancer cell." \- E. Abbey

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"The wilderness once offered a plausible way of life. Now it functions as a
psychological refuge. Soon there will be no more wilderness. Then the madness
becomes universal. And the universe goes mad." \- E. Abbey

~~~
macandcheese
While we're on Abbey quotes...

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” - EA

This quote has always been a source of debate for me. Does the idea of
wilderness need no defense? Must we create heavily managed spaces simply to
prevent the tragedy of the commons from occurring? Does the fact that
wilderness is a political designation mean that it is not truly "wild"?

I'm of the mind that because societal negligence of our natural world leads to
its destruction in one form or another almost certainly, then yes, the idea of
wilderness needs no defense, but one can argue that the designation itself
leads to a place losing its "wildness"...

~~~
justinator
There could be a good argument that nothing is Wilderness, and that Wilderness
itself - in the US at least, is a 18th-sh century construct, created by a
European-leaning philosophy that didn't understand the relationship between
the land and the people that were there before them, but were instead bound by
the God and Relgion on the idea of almost a second Eden and a Manifest Destiny
to take the land which belonged to on one.

In reality all those forests that the original author writes so daringly about
were manicured and well-cared for woods, engineered to provide food in the
form of nuts and berries, as well as prime hunting ground for big game, say
nothing for easily passageway between villages for trade and seasonal
migration.

In this perspective man has for a very long time held the spot of curator of
so-called, "Wild Lands". It's my opinion that we continue to do so. Not for
monetary gain (although there is - the Outdoor Industry isn't that small), but
because without it, we all commit suicide, in a very real way.

~~~
solipsism
There's no evidence Native Americans managed the land to this degree. In fact
it's clear there weren't enough of them to do so.

The population in all of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, was somewhere
around 50 million. All of Canada had about 500,000 people. Do you know how
much forest there is in Canada?

There's a theory that early man had widespread effects on the environment
using purposeful burning, but even if that's true (it's hard to tell the
difference between lightning strikes and purposeful burns), it hardly amounts
to "manicured and well cared for woods". Unless you are willing to give
beavers an equal designation.

~~~
justinator
There's a lot of compelling theories in the book, 1491 [0] about how forests
were modified in ways in which I elude to, and how the population of the
Americas was much, much higher than just 50 million, and how the were
civilization much earlier than what we had first thought.

If we just take east coast of Maryland, where the author grew up, the first
explorers talk about villages that interconnected across the coastline,
Chestnut and walnut trees everywhere, and established hunting grounds. Burning
was an immensely useful tool to do this. Everyone had a fire starter.

Later on, early settlers saw something drastically different - a dying off
population from diseases brought by Europeans that they had no defense
towards. And that is why our estimates on the population of the Americas, and
the level of which they modified the land could be really off.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-
Colu...](https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-
Columbus/dp/1400032059)

~~~
solipsism
"much, much higher"? In that book Mann argues that the higher counts are more
likely to be right. 50 million _is_ among the higher counts. The highest count
reasonably argued for being just double that, so we're not talking about
orders of magnitude difference.

The Americas were a vast, mostly empty (of humans) land. Except near the
coasts.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
There has been a lot of commentary about us being more paranoid about
children's safety.

I think there are couple of factors that are responsible for this.

1) Couples in general have fewer children than we had in the past. If you have
1 child - a loss leaves you completely childless. If you have 5 children - a
loss leaves with with 4 children.

2) There has been a remarkable drop in childhood disease mortality. In the
past, when it was very likely that one or more of your children would die with
a childhood disease, the 1 in a million chance of abduction is not that big of
a deal. Now, we generally don't expect any of our children to die of infection
or disease in childhood, and so the chance of abduction (while still the same
or smaller than before) becomes comparatively larger.

~~~
wyager
It's not just children's safety. Even as crime rates and violence rates have
decreased monotonically since at least the 1980s, people grow more and more
clamorous about "safety" from essentially negligible causes of death like
terrorism or assault rifles. We've spent billions of dollars on the TSA, which
by all indicators doesn't even do much to prevent (the negligible amount of)
terrorist activity. Similarly, in 2015, only 248 people were killed with
rifles (no idea which percentage of those were homicides, and which percentage
of those were assault rifles). Yet how much legislative time was wasted
arguing about trying to ban them?

"Safety" has become somewhat of a "semantic stopsign" in political discourse.

~~~
paulddraper
I'm curious, where did you get the gun data? Most places I look at don't
differentiate by gun type. (Which is strange, considering how much regulations
differ by gun type.)

Anyway, usually it's roughly 60% suicide, 10% defense, 25% homicide, 5%
accidental.

~~~
wyager
FBI. [https://www.quandl.com/data/FBI/WEAPONS11-US-Murders-by-
Weap...](https://www.quandl.com/data/FBI/WEAPONS11-US-Murders-by-Weapon-Type)

The FBI and BJS usually have pretty good criminology data.

~~~
paulddraper
Wow, Quandl is AWESOME! Graphs, data export, programming language bindings...

------
panglott
The essential question at the end, for parents caught in the bind: "Even if I
do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?"

Free-range children are just rare these days.

~~~
honkhonkpants
My kids are like the Census Bureau: they go down the street knocking on doors,
asking if there are any kids there. But, as much as I encourage them to do it,
there's never anyone home even at the places where we know the kids live.
Their schedules are structured and they spend all their time somewhere else.

My kids don't have any real friends except each other which I find a little
sad.

------
carsongross
It's also worth mentioning the unmentionable[1]: the authors childhood was in
a much more culturally homogenous environment.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/books/about/E_Pluribus_Unum.html?id...](https://books.google.com/books/about/E_Pluribus_Unum.html?id=6VRCMwEACAAJ)

~~~
throwanem
It sounds like you've got a point to make. Why quail at the thought of making
it?

~~~
Torgo
The author of that paper studied the breakdown of community and found (to his
dismay, and among other findings) that social trust diminished with increased
ethnic diversity.

~~~
ivanhoe
I seriously doubt this theory simply because in many countries there was no
increase in ethnic diversity (in ex-Yugoslavia, where I live, there was even a
decrees), and still exactly the same thing happened. It's the consequence of
increased urbanisation of our lives and environment. In many truly rural areas
kids are still as free-range as always.

~~~
douche
In many rural areas, children are in effect pseudo-adults as soon as they can
be put to work. If you can be trusted to drive the tractor with the mowing
machine hitched on, or run the woodsplitter, then you can probably be trusted
to play in the backyard with your BB guns, .22s, knives and lighters without
an adult sitting on your shoulder every second.

------
sauldcosta
At 24, kids are a long way off for me. But when they do come to pass, my hope
is that I can give them a childhood like the one I had: full of rocks, sticks,
mud, and band-aids. Thank you for the reminder of how important that is to
strive for.

~~~
thisone
just teach them safety, and figure out when you can trust them to keep safe.

Even 25 years ago, weirdos existed. As a ~10 year old, walking home one day, a
stranger stopped his car, leaned out, and asked me to go get coffee with him.

~~~
Rotonde
Bizarre, what 10 year old drinks coffee?

~~~
thisone
I know, 10ish year old me just remembers him as an old guy (probably in his
40s).

Quite a small town as well.

------
louprado
Is it that today's children don't value outside activities because it is too
enjoyable to be indoors ? Which leads to obesity that makes outdoor play less
fun and more dangerous. The danger coming from weight variance (e.g., it's
risky for a 60lb 12 year old to play with a 200lb 12 year old).

The streets throughout NYC were depressing and violent when I was growing up.
But those working class homes were even more depressing and there were only a
handful of TV channels. So we had to go outside to keep our sanity. Even if I
wanted to play a video game, I'd have to ride my bike to get a pirated copy or
to commute to a friend's house. So you'd see kids outside at the very least
because they had somewhere to go. Even having a job was common.

Now all those homes have been comfortably remodeled with air-conditioning,
high-speed internet, and countless TV channels.

Coincidentally, the first household to get cable television and a video game
console on my block also had the first notably obese child.

~~~
WalterBright
It's true that life indoors in the 60s was hopelessly boring. TV was 3
channels with bad reception showing soap operas or Jack Lalane exercise shows.

For something to do, you had to go outside and meet up with the other kids
outside, then go looking for trouble (!).

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Yes, I remember when being sent to your bedroom was a punishment, now you
can't get your children out of their rooms.

