Campfire Conversations: Understanding the Sociopolitical Implications of Camping with Dr. Phoebe Young

Do you ever ponder over the evolution and multifaceted nature of camping, its sociopolitical significance, and how it mirrors societal inequalities? Join us and our esteemed guest, Dr. Phoebe Young, professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of the book Camping Grounds: Public Nation in American Life from the Civil to the Occupy Movement, as we embark on an enlightening journey into the complex world of camping. From its origins as a family leisure activity post-Civil War to its transformation into a form of political protest, the subtle intricacies and unexpected controversies of camping are revealed.

This is an insightful, thought-provoking exploration of camping's evolution. It's a history lesson and societal commentary all rolled into one. The intersection of camping and politics is examined, tracing the trend back to the Civil War era. Can you believe camping has been used as a form of lobbying, too? We address the tension between recreational campers and political campers and investigate the role of camping as a platform for political expression. We also highlight the nuanced issues of diversity and inclusion in outdoor spaces.

Finally, we turn our attention to the changing social contract associated with camping and how it has shaped the camping experience. Public amenities, government involvement, and the emergence of alternative camping forms such as glamping are discussed. We even contemplate a new form of social contract that may be emerging in the camping world. So, tune in for an enlightening discussion that not only explores camping but also navigates its profound connection with politics, society, and the social contract.

Recommended:
Reservation Dogs
Anything by Rebecca Solnit
Merchants of Doubt: Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

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**Music: Joystock

Transcript

Dr. Young: 0:00

if we double down on that biology of saying this is universal, that everybody should react to the outdoors in the same way, it really doesn't help explain the differences that we see in terms of how welcome some people feel in those spaces and how surveilled or uncomfortable other people feel in those spaces. And if we're going to address a really key issue in outdoor recreation today, it has to do about inclusion, diversity, and saying that we all have the same reaction to these spaces doesn't help us understand the problem right and how we might actually address it that there might be different routes and different ways of being in the outdoors that are not all just responsive to a genetic coding for a need to be outdoors.

Shawn: 0:53

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. So I'm going to say one word to you, and I want you to pay attention to the image it evokes, and that word is camping. I'm going to guess that for most of you, the image you get is the one that I get some natural setting, campfire tent, maybe s'mores, maybe some card games, probably some wine or beer or maybe some pot. And so when I picked up the book Camping Grounds Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe Young, I was kind of like, how much can you say about camping? And it turned out to be like whale watching. If you've ever seen a humpback whale, when it comes up for a breath, it just reveals its blowhole and you're kind of like, well, that's not so big. But then it jumps out of the water and it's like, okay, well, that could swallow my house. In both her book and here today in her conversation with me, dr Young, professor of History at the University of Colorado, boulder, explains the history and evolution of camping and camping grounds. Why it is that in the contemporary world it evokes the images I mentioned a moment ago families packed into cars hauling tents and supplies to state parks and national forests, for a weekend trip, eating s'mores around the campfire under starlit skies, and less so about the other, less visible but politically significant forms of camping.

Shawn: 2:15

In recent years we've seen the rise of protest camps from Occupy Wall Street to the Dakota Access Pipeline, when opponents camped out near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, seeking to raise awareness of social, economic and environmental justice causes. These frequently controversial political camps are exercising the democratic right to free speech and assembly, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience with their bodies and physical presence in public space. At the same time, the recent increase in homeless camps, filled with those unable to afford or secure stable housing, are an indictment of failures in our society's social safety net. The visibility of homeless camps reveals the widening gaps in equality and access to the basic necessity of shelter. Their presence is awkward for those in power because it makes it impossible to ignore those left out of traditional political and economic systems. In our discussion exploring the phenomenon of camping yesterday, today and even how it's evolving into the future, Dr Young and I unpacked the implications of how we perceive camping and camping spaces. We examined themes of privilege and disenfranchisement, access to public lands and resources and who has it, the friction between activism, leisure and authority and, ultimately, what vision of the public with rights to space we collectively deem acceptable.

Shawn: 3:40

If you like this episode, or any episode, please give it a like on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive, dr Young. Thanks for being here. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Shawn. Absolutely, I'm excited to have you here.

Shawn: 4:09

So if you ask someone to describe camping, I think the initial thought is that it seems pretty simple. I think most people have probably slight variations on the same image, which is like packing up some of your stuff, heading into nature, staking out a location, eating and sleeping out there for a while. That's camping. Then I read your book Camping Grounds and it really is, when you think about it, more complicated than how I've just described it. What constitutes camping, who is a camper, what's the utility of camping grounds, who can use them, who can't use them, etc. So I'm really excited to have you here to help me unravel all of this and set us on the right path.

Shawn: 4:43

All right, let's go. Yep, let's do it. So let's start with, I don't know, seems like maybe a dumb question, but, like I said, the more time I spend thinking about it, the deeper the rabbit hole. So, what is camping? And then I guess an extension of that question is and I think this gets at the heart of the conflict in the concept of camping and something you take direct aim at in camping grounds is who is a camper?

Dr. Young: 5:04

Yeah, and that's a great pair to the who. What is camping? Which is the central question of my book, and I think I didn't have a simple answer for that, which is partly, as you mentioned, what makes it so interesting. I also agree that on one level, it's pretty easy to conjure up an image of what we think about when you say camping, the kind of classic you know sleeping out under the stars, tent firing picnic table, right. All of that brings these images of exactly what camping is.

Dr. Young: 5:38

But when you start to dig down a little bit, it depends really. I mean, you can define camping by the materials Are you using a tent or a sleeping bag? Or by the motivation Are you camping for recreation? Are you camping for survival? Are you camping to make a point? Or for some people, it's about the place, right, camping seems to really go along with our national parks, right, the great outdoors, out in nature, right? Or camping can have a very different meaning if you think about camping in urban spaces. So it's that sense of that it depends, and that it's also an evolving definition of our history that allows that question what is camping? Not to have a single answer, even if we have a kind of classic image.

Shawn: 6:24

It's also interesting that you know, the more complicated that camping is or at least, the more clear it becomes that camping is more complicated than simply packing up some of your things and going to sleep under the stars, it also evokes an emotion. The emotion is maybe nostalgic and exciting and adventurous, right, but then we use camping in other contexts as well. You mentioned survival, and I want to talk a little bit about that in a minute. But there are other ways that we now conceptualize camping, and that's things like homelessness, right, right, and that evokes a very different, well, image, but also emotion. I guess I'm wondering if this complicated idea of camping has always existed or if this is something that's like expanding territory in the contemporary world.

Dr. Young: 7:13

That's a great question. And to the issue of emotions right, emotions are hard to track historically and I think there are certainly some continuities in the recreational vein, as you mentioned, of kind of the excitement of getting outdoors, of leaving behind the cares of the modern world. Right, we can see that in camping for more than a century, expressed by campers and I think the sense of seeing camping as tragic right of a loss of a home, that is, we can also see that in various ways, continuously or at least periodically over the last century century and a half. So if you look back though, earlier in the history, and I'm gonna just pick out the middle of the 19th century, camping had a more, we might say, restricted definition because it Was more practical. Sure, you could camp out for practical reasons and you might enjoy it or not, or not like it. Right, bring different emotions to the experience.

Dr. Young: 8:21

But camping as a goal unto itself is something different and that's something that evolves in the post-civil war, late 19th century. At least in my research that's what I see by that. But even from that get-go right from if you take that moment of the post-civil war era, it was absolutely fraught that it didn't start out as simple for everybody in that evolution out of a kind of more Purely practical endeavor of what you did if you were traveling and you found yourself in between Indoor lodgings, camped out you might not think that much of it but sort of evolving into something that had meaning positive or negative. Right from from the beginning there were real contests over what is that meaning? Who should be camping right, the some of the same questions that we ask today.

Shawn: 9:17

Right, you can see that in the mid to late 19th century I think this is inherent in your response, but also it's something that you mentioned earlier and that is camping, as you know, survival or a way of life, and that, standing in you know, let's say that's one kind of extreme of camping. The other is, you know, as a recreational pastime, which I think is probably the more traditional way that we now think about camping. Mm-hmm, it strikes me that we even do it as something enjoyable, not if you're, you know, just ancillary thinking about camping, especially if that's part of your family tradition or something. Reading your book, it really struck me.

Shawn: 9:50

So you start essentially right around about the civil war and you talk a lot about how veterans Established groups that would essentially mimic the camping environment that they lived under during the war, and minus all the bad parts, minus all that yeah, yeah, but I mean I think just that, reading that, I was thinking it's fascinating that we evolved Into seeing camping as something recreational and you also just mentioned, you know, as this being something you just Necessarily had to do it a certain point in time in our history when you were moving from place to place, right, you just had to camp.

Shawn: 10:25

And at that time, I don't know, I mean people would talk maybe about striking camp or putting up camp, but they weren't talking about we're putting up camp because we're gonna have a great time tonight, you know, like we're putting up camp because we have to, you know, secure ourselves and we have to rest for the night, etc. And so I find it fascinating that we now kind of romanticize that and we see this as something Exciting and adventurous, like I would imagine that what could equally happen is that we evolve into a society that absolutely Eschews, like camping has anything we ever want to revisit if that were our history. And so the question here is how, and I suppose, when and why did it evolve into a recreational pastime?

Dr. Young: 11:03

Right. So that is one of the key questions that I wanted to tackle in the book and it comes exactly from the place you were speaking about, that sort of seeing, something that we we take for granted, and all of a sudden seeing it is strange. Why would we want to do this? And I had a few encounters early in the book talking to, you know, acquaintances who came from More kind of lower class or, you know, grew up in a sort of more poor environment and didn't camp till later in life and wanted, went back to their parents and why didn't we camp as a kid? And they said you know, sleeping on the grounds like that, that means you're poor. I don't want to do that anymore. Now that right, have reached a certain level in life. I want to sleep in a bed, nice bed, king-size bed on my vacation. So it's things like that that all of a sudden made it seem so much strange. Why, why would we want to do this as a recreation Right? Why does the sound appealing? So I looked a lot in the sources and you can find different threads and Origin stories, but the two things that I settled on that really Created what we think about as recreational camping today are number one. This Since in the, as the 19th century was accelerating right, industrialization, modern life, the pace of work was ramping up and people began to be kind of worried about the loss of connection to the land, to nature and to these kind of Non-modern experiences, right of sort of being out making your own fire. And so in this, this moment, camping appealed to people as a way to recapture that, as a temporary experience, not something they were wanted to go back to right, as kind of, you know, life in the wilderness or frontier. There was a nostalgia to it in that way. But as, we'll go do this for a week and then we'll come back to our nice homes, sort of cozy abodes, and this is, goes without saying, a fairly upper-class Endeavour. That is where this form of recreational camping really began was among the wealthier folks who had the leisure both to take the time to camp and to worry about what all that leisure and comfort meant for Themselves and for the nation. So that's one origin point of camping and I think a number of folks read most histories of recreational camping. They will point to that in a similar kind of cast of characters pointing this out, and in a group of folks that are advocating for national parks right for Preserving land and wildlife. The John Muir is the Teddy Roosevelt's right. That in some sense it's. It's there's a lot of truth to it, but it's often pointed to is the soul origin of camping.

Dr. Young: 14:04

The second Part that I found as a kind of compliment to that has to do again with a similar trajectory of this moment, when the Economy and culture and society is shifting from an agricultural one to an industrial one. In the 19th century, I think part of what the sort of feeling of loss or worry came from was that it was really shifting the basis of not just national identity but around what people thought the government was supposed to do. Right early on there was this belief that you could stake out your own property, mix your labor with the land and sort of create this into this little island of civilization, your home, and that government was in the business of Taking land from public property and putting it into private hands in order to do that right. This is, for you know, anglo-american Development right. This is the engine of doing it in the 18th century, 19th century, this is the founders are all about this.

Dr. Young: 15:06

But as I get to the late 19th century.

Dr. Young: 15:08

That route to property ownership is harder and harder, and even the property that you have is a home.

Dr. Young: 15:14

It's not a productive piece of land. Fewer and fewer people are farming in this sense, and so being able to again take that experience and the government providing pieces of public land for you to Recreate on to, as I say, mix your leisure with the land for a short period of time, I think that's part of what made camping not just a fun elite pastime but as part of a broad sense of American democracy kind of how people accessed Not just the government but of expressed their belonging to the nation itself, was from doing this kind of activity and and it it spills out into just visiting national parks or other forms of kind of outdoor recreation. But I think camping is at the root of a lot of that, of why we see Outdoor recreation as as wholesome as American In these ways, and so I think the two of those compliment each other, the kind of worry about modernity, getting away from it all, and the kind of reclaiming of a sense of national belonging and personal property.

Shawn: 16:26

That that was what created this as such a sort of mass popular activity by the time you get to kind of the early 20th century so I grew up poor and we did a lot of camping because that was all we could afford to do, sure, yeah, I remember I grew into enjoying camping. So where I'm going with this is I was like why are we doing this? Like why are we going out into an unsheltered place and I am getting dirty and I can't go too far because an animal might attack me. But I grew into it as something that I now find to be something fun to do.

Shawn: 17:05

There's a handful of things that you touched on, so I want to like throw them out there, because I want to circle back to some of them. You were referencing the social contract, yes, and so I do want to talk about that under the umbrella of something else I want to talk about, which is the, the nexus between camping and politics, mm-hmm. But before we get there, something that I think is maybe a bit inherent in what you were just talking about is Two theories that you outline in the book about the act of camping, and the two theories are some biological need, mm-hmm, and the other is some cultural history, and, as I think is probably true of most theories, very rarely is one the entire answer, and often there's some type of Venn diagram, right. But I'm wondering if you could explain the two theories and then, like I said, you know there's probably, they're probably both at play to some degree. Do you give more credence to one more than the other and how do you think about these theories in present camping, recreational camping.

Dr. Young: 18:02

Absolutely so, and the answer is yes. I do give more credence to one than the other, but we'll get there. So the biological need argument About camping is something that I see as having arose quite recently, and I think it's different than what I outlined, in the sense that these elite folks in the late 19th century are Wanting to get back to nature as a way of addressing some of their worries about where modernity was leading. I think that that is much more of a cultural need that they're spending.

Dr. Young: 18:37

they didn't really get into the idea that that there was a Kind of biological or kind of universal need for nature Grounded in our DNA. Right, that is something that I feel like has come up in the last couple of decades. There was a well-known book I called Last Child in the Woods and could have coined the term nature deficit disorder by a fellow named Richard Louvre. That came out in 2005. And building on that, a lot of folks have begun to foresee the physical and mental health benefits from human contact with nature and in a leisurely way. Most of the studies that have come out about this, whether they're kind of reporters or neuroscientists, are really looking at leisure in nature. They're not studying folks who work outside or who live outside but who spend small bits of time outside. And this argument, I think, has come up recently, both in the sense of trying to do some of this scientific measurement. What does it mean? Right To sort of, can a hike in nature, can three days in nature really help to lower our stress levels, to address a variety of health problems, whether that's obesity or attention deficit disorder? Some of these are things that you can see in the literature, the scientific literature that they're trying to sort out, like what is the actual impact of being outside? My sense is all of that is couched within this more recent way of promoting the outdoors. It's in some way become a new marketing strategy by outdoor retailers, by public lands officials, of saying why should you go outside? You need it, it will be better for your health, this is part of your self-care, and that everybody should have the same kind of response, that it's built into our biologies, our physiology is to have this, that it doesn't matter about history or culture. We should all have a similar kind of response.

Dr. Young: 20:52

We can think about biological need earlier in the sense of, like we were talking about a survival where camping was like you needed to do that, you needed shelter, you need a fire to keep yourself warm. This was kind of what you did, but there wasn't that layer of argument on why it was good for our bodies and our minds to do so. So then the cultural argument has to do again with what we were talking about before, of kind of well, why do we camp by choice? What meanings do we ascribe to it? And for me, I see the biological need argument is kind of a new meaning that we are ascribing to camping that you don't see really before. We'll just pick the year 2000,. Right, I just don't see that in either popular or scientific literature as a reason for camping or being outdoors.

Dr. Young: 21:47

Now, it may be that they discover some kind of gene that suggests this, but I am fairly skeptical of that in the sense that it's very clear that we don't all react the same way to being outside.

Dr. Young: 22:03

Just like the story that you told you grew into liking camping, it wasn't an automatic response that you had the first time you got to right, go play in the dirt and eat slightly charred food cooked over an open fire, right.

Dr. Young: 22:19

And it's also clear. I think for me the reason why I am skeptical of the biological need argument is both sort of that sense that we know people don't all have the same kind of automatic reaction, but that if we double down on that biology of saying this is universal, that everybody should react to the outdoors in the same way, it really doesn't help explain the differences that we see in terms of how welcome some people feel in those spaces and how surveilled or uncomfortable other people feel in those spaces. And if we're gonna address a really key issue in outdoor recreation today it has to do about inclusion, diversity, and saying that we all have the same reaction to these spaces doesn't help us understand the problem right and how we might actually address it that there might be different routes and different ways of being in the outdoors that are not all just responsive to a genetic coding for a need to be outdoors.

Shawn: 23:22

And I mean you talked a little bit about the diversity of who is camping and how.

Shawn: 23:27

Would biological need impact that, or like some biological impact that?

Shawn: 23:31

And it makes me then think about the intersection between camping and politics, and then democracy as well. If somebody were to mention the camping and politics and these two things share some space together, I think my image is people battling over funding for national parks and what type of land will be set aside for national parks and where that'll be, and, as a result of that, who has access to it, et cetera. That's how I would think about it, right, but I think you build this out a bit more. This becomes actually, I think, a vein throughout camping grounds that speaks to pretty much every era and evolution that you identify of camping in the book in a way that I didn't really think about. And then it's again like a ball of yarn that when you pull at that string you start to see how the politics is kind of interwoven into it in a way that isn't so obvious, and so I guess the first question I have then related to that is how would you characterize camping and American politics as being interrelated?

Dr. Young: 24:26

So the more I ask this question, again on the heels of the Occupy movement, right, and so much of the rhetoric around the Occupy movement was that this was unprecedented, right, which is, for historians, right, a term of suspicion to be investigated right, is this really unprecedented or are there precedents? So I began to look at the various ways of using camping as a form of protest or lobbying or political expression, and I was able to sort of see that again all the way back to the sort of civil war era, the immediate post-civil war, that camping has become or became a mechanism for lobbying, for presenting one's issues right To some body of official government body In this case mostly I talk about the federal government and sort of making camp on the Washington Mall or other iconic spaces to put pressure on the federal government. And it is at the same moment when it's becoming a recreational pastime, right as camping is gathering a kind of cultural, social meaning that recreational is not the only meaning that it acquires, and actually the sort of politics that you mentioned of kind of space for outdoor recreation comes kind of later, right After recreation on public ground is established as a kind of right or expectation of American citizens. Then you start to see the sort of protest and politics around the rights to recreate in the outdoors. But earlier in the post-Civil War era, with these veterans Union Army veterans trying to lobby the federal government for better pensions. You see it in the turn of the century, era of economic unrest and folks that were unemployed or impoverished marching to and camping on the National Mall for relief, for this is well before the New Deal for sort of government infrastructure programs and unemployment relief in the 1890s. You do see it again in the early depression with the bonus army. These are World War I veterans who are again camping on Washington for relief during the Great Depression, from right before Franklin Roosevelt gets into office and sort of begins to help create some of those infrastructures.

Dr. Young: 26:58

And then again right. You see it in later eras, in the 1970s, in anti-Vietnam war protests, in protests around homelessness in the 1980s, and then occupy and then following occupy, places like Standing Rock right and protests against the pipeline. So it's something that it's not. You don't see it all the time, it's periodic, but once you look at it you can see this tradition has been built up, that this has become a relatively common mechanism for some protesters to get themselves seen and heard right If other forms of political expression or dialogue prove to be ineffective, they don't have access to the channels of mainstream media that they can use this technique right, because it seems to A it takes up space right Physically making camp on a place, and, b it violates certain expectations about what you should be doing in that public space and what camping is supposed to be.

Dr. Young: 28:08

Camping is supposed to be right, especially by the time you get to the early 20th century, done somewhere out in a beautiful spot of nature for recreational reasons. And so camping in a public space for political reasons kind of violates those expectations and that causes people, including the media, to kind of step up and take notice and have to pay more attention because they're literally right there gumming up the works in the middle of the city. So that to me is kind of how it began to see camping as this kind of mechanism or platform for political expression under certain circumstances.

Shawn: 28:41

So we've talked about recreational camping and we've talked about I mean, I'm just gonna roughly call this like political camping.

Shawn: 28:48

That would include some of the movements that you've just talked about in the protest movements, but also things like homelessness, which I actually don't know. The history of the terminology related to homelessness, so I'm unsure if it's always been referred to as camping. I know that there have been some significant court cases that have referenced homelessness as being essentially akin to camping and that when you use that terminology then that affords a certain or a different lens with which to look through the rights of folks living without homes. But what strikes me is that if you have these two well, no pun intended camps right, you have traditional campers and then political camping. You have then two different types of people, right? So then you have your recreational campers and your political campers. Maybe this is just semantic and I'm overthinking it, but I wonder if that creates a certain friction in not just how we individually and, I suppose, collectively, socially think about camping, but also how we politically think about camping, if there's a tension there and, if so, what that looks like. But maybe it doesn't exist.

Dr. Young: 29:54

There's definitely a friction. I mean, I will say first of all that if we look at Occupy in particular, you have people who are in some circumstances likely to have gone recreationally camping and then we're using the same equipment in their protest camp. So in that sense, sometimes the same person or group of people could be both recreational and political campers, depending on the context right, or depending on the era that they're in. But I think, particularly in that and in all the cases that the friction comes a lot from, again, this sense of political campers violating the expectation of recreational camping which is thought of as right, the not just sort of the highest use right, but kind of the universal well, that is camping. And so what are these people doing? Are they camping right, they can't really be camping because they're not camping the way you're supposed to right, recreationally. And so I think sometimes you see and you see this in congressional debates around Occupy those who are invested in traditional recreational camping, that that's a big part of their identity. They see political protesters as kind of degrading that ideal, right, they're making a mockery of what you're supposed to do with camping or what you're supposed to do in this space. And so I think traditional campers or those who do not camp for political reasons, right, they want their camping to remain in that vein of being the wholesome, family, american thing to do, not to be used for radical or divisive purposes.

Dr. Young: 31:45

And on the other side, I think you know Occupy campers, one of their biggest rejoinders to those people that were really upset about them camping was to say we are not camping, we are petitioning for redress of grievances that, despite the tents and the sleeping bags and everything that looked like camping again, even sometimes with the same equipment, they had to push back against that universal right Because you know the belief that camping is supposed to be this one thing.

Dr. Young: 32:17

So they're saying, well, we're not doing that, we're not recreation, you know we're not interested in recreation, we're not out here for fun, we're out here to make a point, and so therefore we are not camping. However, I think you know, for my purposes and for our purposes, right, that claim is quite interesting because they are in fact camping, right, they are making camp in materially many of the same, similar ways and using some of the same equipment that they would elsewhere. And so, yeah, I think that debate, you know, particularly pitched in Occupy, but you can certainly see pieces of that in the earlier precedents that I mentioned similar kinds of criticisms and discomfort between the two groups about what they're actually doing and what they should or shouldn't be doing.

Shawn: 33:06

You know, when I think about the difference between recreational campers and political campers, as you mentioned, there are people that are both right at different times, but I'm particularly interested in the people that are strictly one or the other, so people that are only recreational campers and people that are only political campers. Whatever you know, it's a huge catch-all and I'm wondering if you've found there's something unique to recreational campers that is very different so solely recreational campers but is very different from solely political campers. That is a particular political interest.

Dr. Young: 33:47

That's a great question and I think we'd need a sociologist to do a survey to answer it more definitively. But I certainly think that if we're talking about recreational campers, who would never camp for political purposes, that would see that as somehow transgressive, that they just simply wouldn't do it. I don't think you can entirely generalize on their, say, partisan affiliation, but I do think that there, if I can, certainly if I can use the folks in Congress who, both during Occupy and some of the earlier camping episodes, who were most bothered by the mechanism of using camping as political protest, wanted people to use other, more traditional mechanisms like marching or riding op-eds and things like that. If I can use them as a representation of this. It's partly partisan, but it's also a commitment to what they see as a kind of orderly style of society and politics, a commitment to well, these things have their place, that political protest should happen in a certain very civilized way and there shouldn't be a kind of radical action that would be opposed to kind of radical political action of many stripes, whether that be kind of, on one end, kind of a real sense of disruption, the way Occupy did, perhaps, the way sort of Black Lives Matter blocked roads, climate activists throwing soup, these seeing as sort of very disruptive kind of actions, but who also might be, on the other hand, opposed to other kinds of we might think of as more far-right, radical actions of, say, the Bundy's taking over public lands, having armed standoffs, et cetera.

Dr. Young: 35:54

So that you see kind of these, those people that oppose those sort of actions, as being out of bounds, right of being committed to a sense of well, this should be an orderly process which in some ways one can understand kind of where they're coming from, of their kind of discomfort with things that disrupt the regular machinery of politics. On the other hand, we can also see how that closes off a certain set of actions that people who don't have a lot of voice or power have access to. Right that camping is pretty simple kind of thing to do and it doesn't require you to have your voice represented at the highest levels of media or political discourse. And that's something I certainly saw come up in some of the discussions of trying to defend camping as a political activity is saying like this is a means for people of lesser means to be able to make an expression and that's the only way they're getting people to pay attention to them. So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but that's the best I can do.

Shawn: 37:07

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's because I this was rattling around in my head reading your book. It gets really dicey, I think, beyond even something like partisanship, when you think about the act of camping and all of the associated things in this respect. So, like when it comes to partisanship, I don't necessarily think about camping as being a more conservative thing to do recreational camping as being a more conservative thing or something that conservatives engage in more than liberals and liberals are maybe more likely to be political campers.

Shawn: 37:40

I don't know that. That's the cleavage that I see when I go camping and this might be I mean, this might be my own prejudice but I definitely, I feel like. I can peg people right. I see maybe a younger couple in a tent.

Dr. Young: 37:54

North Face tent.

Shawn: 37:56

Yeah, I'm like that's probably a progressive and I see a huge RV and a family of five or six. I'm kind of like they might be more conservative. But that's just my own prejudice that I'm seeing that through. So but I do wonder what I do see. More recreational camping is maybe higher socioeconomic status, white, a lot more of the high end fancy kind of gear, and often at least this is how it's portrayed or how I see it political campers tend to be younger, tend to be more diverse and probably are, as you mentioned, a lower socioeconomic status, because protest is a relatively cheap form of engagement, right, at least financially Right. Those are the things that I was thinking about.

Dr. Young: 38:41

Yes, and I think that the research bears those kind of anecdotal impressions out right. I think and it's not a surprise to say that our political affiliations or tendencies can get reflected in the kinds of clothes we wear, the gear we buy, how we self-display right the brand identity and political identity. They're not perfect indicators, but there's a significant amount of overlap right that you can kind of read how people shop, and cultural historians have been working on this for years, right in terms of our consumerism as shaping our not just our personal identities but as displaying our political ones as well, and so that kind of reading is appropriate.

Shawn: 39:29

It's not wildly inappropriate.

Dr. Young: 39:30

No, it's not wildly inappropriate, that's right. And again, I think more research would be needed on contemporary populations to refine that. And I have a colleague at the University of Colorado, denver, rachel Gross, who's working on a book will come out soon, I hope on the history of outdoor gear and clothing and sort of looking really specifically at how we define ourselves through the kinds of you know things we buy, right, whether that's the Patagonia, you know pullover fleece or you know the kinds of other outdoor gear that we might be wearing in or out of the campground, kind of the outdoor gear aesthetic. I live in Boulder, colorado, so it's pretty much formal wear to be wearing REI, anything from REI there.

Shawn: 40:19

True, true.

Dr. Young: 40:20

Yeah. But as to your the more significant question about I think you're right about kind of the class and identity makeup of folks who might be political campers versus, yes, recreational camping, sure it might be less expensive than a cruise vacation or trip to Europe, but camping is not. You know, camping does require an outlay of funds on some level, particularly early on, and so there's a barrier to starting to camp for many folks and families. And so I think it's well documented in the sort of sociological surveys that, like the National Parks, do that, yes, campers tend to be from higher social economic groups. They're definitely whiter than the population at large, and the National Parks is really and other agencies are really trying to, you know, figure out how to address that issue.

Dr. Young: 41:13

You know, earlier in the history and mid-20th century, I think, and into, say, maybe the you know, 1980s or 90s, I think there was a little bit broader sort of socioeconomic spread between in terms of recreational campers than there is today. Again, I don't, I can't point to that in a sort of well refined statistical way, but camping has gotten more expensive over time and there are more choices, I think, for many families than there used to be in terms of taking various kinds of vacations. But in any case I think in broad strokes that's quite right, that most committed recreational campers are going to be slightly better off and whiter than the population at large, whereas protest campers, I think, are the opposite and be slightly less well off and more diverse than the broader population. But again, that's a fairly large generalization. There are going to be exceptions to the rule of absolutely.

Shawn: 42:16

Okay, so we've arrived at the social contract. I said we would, and so this is a total oversimplification. So if you feel like you need to refine this, please feel free to do so. But for the listener that is unaware, you know, the social contract is a theory that the government exists because the people allow it to exist and then, as a result of that, its purpose is to serve the people. And you talk a lot in camping grounds about the social contract, a little bit about how it's evolved as it relates to camping and camping grounds. What I'm particularly interested in is a suggestion you made in the epilogue of camping grounds in which you suggested that there's a possibility of a new social contract that's emerging, and I'm wondering what that might look like.

Dr. Young: 42:58

Well, your guess is as good as mine. I think In this case, it's one of the dangers of being a historian you study the past and people ask you to predict Historians always tell me that.

Dr. Young: 43:10

But let me try to give you a sense of my answer about the future by way of talking a little bit about the past. So partly one of my interests in the question of camping was not just how it became a popular activity, why people might like to do it, but why it became something that the government sponsored. We expect the federal government to provide us with campgrounds, right that it's a public amenity Like a library, right? Not something that is just a sort of private activity. And so I zeroed in on how that came about. In the sense, this particularly happened during the New Deal in the 1930s, as folks in the national parks were grappling with increased popularity of these outdoor spaces and how to deal with the sort of visitors that they were sort of starting to overrun, particularly right after wide automobile ownership, et cetera, that were visiting these places. And so there's a couple of folks that begin to design campgrounds specifically around this concept of that. This is something. This is a place where Americans should be able to come and experience democracy provided by the government.

Dr. Young: 44:36

The fellows got him at EP Meinike, who designed the first loop campground. Basically, every loop campground you've ever been owes its contours to this fellow Meinike. He designed it in order to protect, originally, sequoia trees, to confine visitors to just their own little spots, and he was worried that they'd kind of overrun things. But as the more he did this and designed these campgrounds, he really did see this as an important role the government should play. He said that visitors to the outdoors are the guests of the nation. The nation should host them and allow them to experience, as he said, the pleasure of establishing one's temporary home on ground on which they have the right of part ownership, even if only he said 130 million, 130 million being the population at the time so it's like people to go claim their own ground. And so that I saw as the evocation of that social contract, of the broad 20th century sense of what the government is supposed to provide to its people, and that's the origin of how camping becomes something the government sponsors. And this continues for quite a long time.

Dr. Young: 45:51

But I saw that towards the end of the period, and particularly if you think about some of the claims made by Occupy and others, is that that social contract is eroding Right and that what was coming in its place was more of what tends to be called neoliberal, and I will also do a gross simplification here, but neoliberalism in the sense that government does best when it gets out of the way and that it should empower private actors and corporations to allow people to experience their best life, and that people make individual decisions about return on investment of any given activity, investment, et cetera. And so this sort of more neoliberal, individualist version has and many commentators will say this really began to sort of surpass this older version of the social contract of, you know, the government providing these important infrastructural places to experience democracy. So the question, back to your question of what's emerging, it seems to be that you know neoliberalism has been coming under more fire that this. You know. You look at, you know, union activity of recent months and years, the pandemic which raised up more questions about you know, can those individualist mantras solve these? You know really big. You know social and cultural problems climate change right are proving real challenges to this neoliberal order.

Dr. Young: 47:33

As to what comes after neoliberalism, I'm really not the best person to be able to predict. I don't think we're going to go back, however, to that early 20th century version that I laid out, but that's it's hard to imagine and many people making arguments and here I'm really talking about sort of camping and outdoor recreation, of sort of trying to turn back the clock to that moment, kind of miss. What the sort of non ideal parts of that were, that there was this high rhetoric about this democracy, but it was also pretty exclusionary that it did not, was not built around what we might think of as a more, you know, modern, inclusive society, and so that to turn the clock back to that isn't, isn't, isn't going to solve all our problems either. So I don't, I don't think we're going back to that and I think neoliberalism has come under enough fire at this point. That it's. It's hard to see that it will continue in the same form. And I will, just for the record, say that I see the biological need argument that we talked about at the beginning as an outgrowth of this neoliberal perspective.

Dr. Young: 48:50

Right that this it's about like, okay, you learn that you are supposed to practice self care by going outside and now it's your responsibility to go do that and that, to sort of take this time to invest in outdoor recreation.

Dr. Young: 49:04

That that's going to return to you in terms of your physical and mental health, and that's that's your responsibility, that's not society's responsibility. So that's just kind of shifting the where the locus of responsibility is. So I guess what I was suggesting at the end of the book is one way to begin to see where a new order might emerge is maybe look to see how people are talking about camping. It's been a bellwether in these other moments where you can kind of get a glimpse into how people are thinking about the relationship between citizens in the nation, and so maybe it will be again, and so as discussions around camping, of the young house camping, you know, recreational camping and sort of inclusivity and access, other political demonstrations, that discourse around what that those kinds of camping mean, might give us clues to what a new form of social contract might be.

Shawn: 50:05

So you've spent a lot of time going into kind of the history and the evolution of camping and camping grounds in your book and in your research as well. It's got me thinking about and you mentioned this a little bit in camping grounds alternative forms of camping that are evolving. Now the thing that comes to mind is glamping, but there are other things as well, and I guess I wonder, given the fact that you've done this research, I think sometimes, when you're not a researcher and so I have my kind of established ways of camping that I consider to be traditional, which is probably actually horrifying to my grandparents, right, I see things like glamping crop up and I and I'm immediately like that's not camping, but it does fall into this world, and it makes me wonder if this is just a natural evolution of camping or if this is something that's just crowding that space, I guess. By extension, I also then wonder if this is the evolution of camping. Are we losing something in that or are we gaining something?

Dr. Young: 50:59

So that reaction of, well, that's not camping, that's been around since people started camping and discussions between campers in the 1870s about just the right level of comfort versus roughing it, those have been ongoing right For a century and a half.

Dr. Young: 51:20

So it's hard for me to look at glamping and see that it's some kind of perversion of some perfect form of camping Because, again, it's been an evolving conversation and shifting debate over decades and there certainly, I think, some of the original forms of camping I think we would classify as glamping If you look at some of these elite campers in the late 19th century, I mean what they are bringing with them out into the wilderness, including rafts of servants and oriental rugs and rocking chairs and things that are quite glamorous in many ways, that different, I think, minus the Wi-Fi in glamping resorts.

Dr. Young: 52:07

So in that sense I think it is a natural evolution right that this versions of camping, that they're just updating previous versions of them and, yes, I think they're definitely responding to different sets of people's needs and desires for how they want to be in the outdoors.

Dr. Young: 52:28

I mean, I think that partly this, as you say, the kind of crowded landscape of types of camping that you can do, suggests that there is no one kind that everybody wants to do or should want to do, that there's quite a range in those experiences that people are interested in. I do think, however, that there is a kind of proliferation of different types that we see more now than in earlier eras, that there are more kind of conveyances, types of tents right, everybody's trying to find a particular niche in the market. That has come with, I think, the explosion of popularity of outdoor recreation, really since the Great Recession, is where we really seem to rebound, and certainly in the pandemic and post-pandemic era, whether it's the hammock tent or the tree tent or any numbers of different kinds of things is quantitatively different than earlier eras. I don't think it's qualitatively different, however.

Shawn: 53:35

Okay, final question Are you ready for it?

Dr. Young: 53:37

Go for it.

Shawn: 53:39

What's something interesting you've been reading, writing, listening to or doing lately.

Dr. Young: 53:43

I'm going to give you three things, none of which are particularly related to camping, but are related to some of my current interests and research and some of my studies. I would say, in terms of watching, I think the most interesting thing I've watched of late is the series Reservation Dogs. It's so good. It's so good, I think, for many of us who I'm not an expert in Indigenous history, but it has been certainly part of my training and my teaching.

Dr. Young: 54:16

For my money, this series does the best job that I've seen of getting across some of the most important insights that many historians and others have had from learning about Indigenous history in terms of the modern life of Indigenous people that it is not something that should be relegated to nostalgic versions of the West, that this is an ongoing facet of culture and there's so much to learn there, to love and to laugh about. It's been really terrific. I would say another thing to read that is something I've read a little bit on my pile to look at is Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's recent book Merchants of Doubt, which is about disinformation and misinformation and, in fact, the difference between those from tobacco to climate change. I think it's really important to look at the way science has entered some of these public discourses around these key issues in trying to think about, particularly in our world.

Dr. Young: 55:36

Climate change, which leads me to the last thing, is basically anything Rebecca Solnit writes is something I always try to read and, particularly on climate change these days, has a new co-edited book called Not Too Late, which I like to share with my undergrads who come into my environmental history classes feeling like all they want to learn, or all they feel like they need to learn, is how we screwed everything up and how it is too late. I use Rebecca Solnit to bring them back to a place of hope and action that it is in fact it's late, but it's not too late.

Shawn: 56:08

I am unfamiliar with her. That's a great suggestion. Thank you, okay.

Dr. Young: 56:12

Yeah, she's fantastic.

Shawn: 56:13

Rebecca Solnit.

Dr. Young: 56:14

She's written on many different things over the years but yeah, her new work on climate change and climate change advocacy, I think, is really. It's important, it's distinct, it's quite well done.

Shawn: 56:27

Dr Young, you've chosen such a fun field. You've written a great book in camping grounds and I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much.

Shawn: 56:41

It might not seem intuitive that camping in all of its forms and democracy share space, that they each influence each other and are reflective of each other. Camping embodies some of the best of democratic ideals providing open access to nature and public lands regardless of status or identity, and millions of people heading outdoors and connecting over shared passions represents democracy as a great equalizer. The campground in a way represents civic communion. Protest camps demonstrate grassroots democratic values of free speech, assembly, participation and self-determination driven by the people themselves rather than bestowed upon or given from authorities on high. Though often controversial, social action camps follow in value-driven democratic traditions like the Freedom Riders or Suffragette Tent Cities. We also have to reconcile with camps arising from systemic exclusions and failure to support marginalized groups. Homeless camps poignantly showcase gaps in opportunities, resources and pathways to representation for the most vulnerable. A truly democratic society strives to be judged on how it treats its least well-off members.

Shawn: 57:53

In exploring this phenomenon of camping yesterday and today, I guess I'm reminded about the ongoing need to nurture, protect and expand real democratic ideals in our communities. Democracy is not just formal governance but a moral compact, a social contract for inclusion, looking out for our fellow citizens, expanding participation and upholding everyone's dignity. More work clearly lies ahead to live up to these ideals, but in camping we see the enduring democratic spirit to gather together. I hope, reflecting on these visible manifestations of camping today, that it makes us think more deeply about what democracy truly asks of us as citizens, if and how we participate and show up, and how we can manifest a truly just society that works for everyone. Something to keep in mind as we head into an election year. Just saying Alright, as always, check back soon for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks.