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Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming offers an engaging approach to the consideration of enduring, current, and emerging issues in the field. Written primarily for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, the text presents 20 issues in a debate format, challenging students to participate in critical discourse concerning these issues as practitioners in the field of adventure programming.
Respected authors Bruce Martin and Mark Wagstaff have assembled a team of more than 50 contributors from around the globe to reassess some of the underlying assumptions on which adventure programming is based. They have critically examined implications of new developments for emerging practice and discussed how best to position the field of adventure programming in addressing broader societal concerns.
To set the stage for the debate, each issue is prefaced with a general overview, including the evolution of the issue and its significance in light of broader social concerns. Then, contributors present the pros and cons of each issue. A debate format helps students develop an understanding of the key points around each issue while also becoming familiar with current research pertinent to these issues. This approach also encourages students to grapple with these issues and begin to develop their own informed, thoughtful perspectives as they prepare for careers in adventure programming.
Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming is divided into two parts. Part I begins by discussing issues of ongoing concern in the field, including the certification debate, motorized versus nonmotorized forms of outdoor recreation, and program accreditation. In part II, contemporary and emerging issues are presented, such as the use of online educational programming in the field of adventure programming.
As a reference for practitioners and policy makers, Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming offers new and updated perspectives on enduring and emerging issues as well as a synthesis of the most recent related scholarly literature. In addition, the text serves as a resource in understanding how the adventure programming industry can contribute to addressing issues of broad concern in society, such as public health, global climate change, stewardship of public lands and waterways, and education reform.
Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming encourages readers to participate in some of the central debates occurring in the field. In particular, this timely resource will help students broaden their understanding of the field as they critically examine and respond to a range of enduring, contemporary, and emerging topics in adventure programming.
Part I.Enduring Issues in Adventure Programming
Issue 1. Do the benefits of adventure programming outweigh the risks?
Issue 2. Should principles of challenge-by-choice be integral to all adventure program experiences?
Issue 3. Does the concept of transfer of learning sufficiently explain the way outcomes of adventure programming are generalized to other areas of participants’ lives?
Issue 4. Should there be a professional certification in outdoor leadership?
Issue 5. Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
Issue 6. Should motorized outdoor adventure pursuits be included in adventure programming?
Issue 7. Should individuals with disabilities be fully accommodated in adventure programming?
Issue 8. Should people of color be encouraged to participate in current outdoor adventure programs?
Issue 9. Can adventure programming make a meaningful difference in promoting health and wellness in society?
Issue 10. Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
Part II.Contemporary and Emerging Issues
Issue 11. Should extreme sports, such as BASE jumping and other high-risk sports, be included in adventure programming?
Issue 12. Should nonprofit and educational programs be required to obtain permits to use public land?
Issue 13. Should Wilderness First Responder be the standard of care for wilderness leadership?
Issue 14. Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
Issue 15. Should transgender youths be encouraged to favor specialized camps over mainstream camps?
Issue 16. Does Leave No Trace make a difference beyond the scope of backcountry environmental practices?
Issue 17. Are educational reform policies that stress standards and accountability compatible with pedagogical aims and practice in outdoor education?
Issue 18. Are rational decision-making models the most effective method to train novice outdoor leaders?
Issue 19. Is it possible to effectively accomplish the goals of outdoor education through online programming?
Issue 20. Is outcomes-based research currently more important than critical research for the field of adventure programming?
Bruce Martin, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of recreation and sport pedagogy at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Before joining the faculty at Ohio University, he taught at the University of Northern Colorado and Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska.
Martin’s teaching and research interests are focused on the practice of outdoor leadership and adventure programming. At Ohio University, Martin teaches courses that help students develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for effective professional practice in the fields of outdoor leadership and adventure programming. He is an author of the text Outdoor Leadership: Theory and Practice (Human Kinetics, 2006) and has authored numerous publications related to the practice of outdoor leadership and adventure programming.
Martin has more than 20 years of experience as an outdoor and adventure programming professional. He has worked as a camp counselor, professional river guide, and Outward Bound instructor. He is a member of the Association for Experiential Education (AEE), the Wilderness Education Association (WEA), the American Canoe Association (ACA), and Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics (LNT). He currently holds ACA certifications as a level 4 river kayak instructor trainer and level 4 coastal kayak instructor. He is a certifying instructor for the WEA and a LNT master educator instructor.
Martin earned his PhD in social foundations of education from the University of Virginia. He earned two master’s degrees, one in experiential education from Minnesota State University at Mankato and another in human dimensions of natural resources from Colorado State University at Fort Collins. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history from Virginia Commonwealth University.
In his free time, Martin enjoys helping his daughters develop an appreciation for the wild outdoors. He also enjoys recreational boating and reading. Martin resides in Athens, Ohio.
Mark Wagstaff, EdD, is a professor in the department of recreation, parks, and tourism at Radford University in Radford, Virginia, where he coordinates the outdoor recreation concentration. He is a coauthor of Outdoor Leadership: Theory and Practice (Human Kinetics, 2006); Backcountry Classroom: Lessons, Tools and Activities for Teaching Outdoor Leaders (Globe Pequot Press, 2005); and Technical Skills for Adventure Programming (Human Kinetics, 2009).
In addition to teaching adventure programming at the college level since 1997, Wagstaff has experience as a professional river guide, North Carolina Outward Bound School field instructor, and Wilderness Education Association instructor. He is a member of the Association for Experiential Education, Wilderness Education Association, American Canoe Association, and Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. He is also a certifying instructor for the WEA and a LNT master educator instructor.
Wagstaff received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in recreation from North Carolina State University. He earned his doctorate in education from Oklahoma State University, where he also coordinated the campus outdoor recreation program.
Wagstaff resides in Christiansburg, Virginia. He enjoys whitewater canoeing, fly fishing, and upland bird hunting.
Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
Learn more about Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming.
Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
Learn more about Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming.
Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Learn more about Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming.
Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
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Four issues that negate the purpose and benefits of program accreditation
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999).
Should programs be accredited to ensure that they adhere to industry standards?
NO
Pay to Play: The Price of Accreditation
Whitney Ward,PhD, assistant professor, health education and recreation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
At first glance, it appears that accreditation may be a no-brainer. Literature within the adventure programming industry suggests that the majority of outdoor professionals support the accreditation process (Bassin et al., 1992; Cockrell and Detzel, 1985; Gass, 1999). However, on further investigation, accreditation has serious limitations and some critically question its benefits. Chisholm and Shaw (2004) state,“It is likely that influential organizations within the outdoor industry will benefit from the socially constructed ‘need' for audit and accreditation” (p. 320, emphasis added). Chisholm and Shaw further state that the influential accrediting organizations benefit in terms of both money and power at the expense of the outdoor program provider.
This argument presents a stance against accreditation by outlining four confounding issues that seriously negate the purpose and benefits of accreditation. The first confounding issue is the false notion of added value. Adventure programmers assume that accreditation constitutes a value added by providing a safety guarantee and legal protection. However, the value is questionable given the multiple options for accreditation and the pre-existing government standards. The second confounding issue concerns the associated costs of accreditation. The third issue concerns the unchecked power of accreditation. The final confounding issue concerns the role of accreditation in the overall decline of adventure programming.
Questionable Value
Proponents of accreditation argue that it assures clients, agencies, and the custodians of the lands that a program has clearly defined and appropriate objectives and maintains conditions under which participants can reasonably meet these achievements (Gass, 1999). Additionally, supporters contend that accreditation is an indicator of a commitment to quality and is a seal of approval. Although accreditation does provide objective measures of safety, it can be manipulated to the extent that programs spend more resources pursuing standards than they do delivering the adventure experience itself (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). This can lead to an environment of suspicion. Furthermore, even with this supposed guarantee and the associated benefits, the track record of accreditation within the adventure programming industry is inconsistent and may be of questionable value.
The American Camp Association (ACA), which has more than 2,400 accredited camps, has been the most successful regarding accreditation (American Camp Association, n.d. a). However, even with their success, only one-quarter of camps in the United States are accredited (Pintas and Mullins Law Firm, 2011). Although the ACA does serve camps that integrate adventure programming into the curricula, their purpose and mission does little to serve the larger adventure programming industry because they focus on organized camping. Even within the organized camping system, large entities such as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) do not submit to ACA standards. BSA supports a national task force that develops camp standards and trains hundreds of visitation teams to conduct inspections each year.
Other accreditation bodies like the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) and National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have not had the same level of success as ACA. AEE provides accreditation in experiential adventure programming, and it has accredited more than 250 programs (Brown, 2007). However, currently only 46 AEE-accredited programs exist in the world (Association for Experiential Education, n.d.). Thus, for whatever reasons, more than 200 programs have decided not to retain AEE accreditation. What may be even more indicative of the value of accreditation is that out of all the adventure organizations, only a few have chosen to pursue accreditation. An AEE board member reflects on AEE's limited growth in the accreditation program: “How long can an organization hang on [to accreditation] with only 40 to 50 organizations? You begin to ask, is this the most effective model?” (A. Bobilya, personal communication, April 11, 2011).
NRPA is the accrediting body for parks and academic programs. Yet, similar to AEE, NRPA has had limited success; only 81 academic programs are NRPA accredited (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. a). Furthermore, even a smaller percentage of NRPA-accredited park districts exist within the thousands of city and county parks districts in the United States. Several states have only one or two accredited parks, and some states do not have any (National Recreation and Park Association, n.d. b). Does this mean that only a few quality parks exist? The answer obviously is no. Several quality academic programs and parks are not NRPA accredited. Larger universities that primarily focus on research and grant funding as opposed to teaching find little value in an accreditation that is practitioner oriented. In addition, the NRPA accreditation supports the Certified Parks and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certificate. Yet, the vast majority of the recreation and parks agencies do not require the CPRP for employment. Organizations must determine whether the benefits and values received outweigh the costs. Based on the limited success of accreditation, most organizations must not see enough value added to justify accreditation.
The U.S. Department of Education, when addressing accreditation, readily admits that there are “programs that elect not to seek accreditation but nevertheless may provide a quality [experience]” (Office of Postsecondary Education, n.d.). A program dedicated to high standards is going to be a quality program regardless of accreditation. If accreditation is indeed valuable, why do so many organizations choose to forgo the process? The answer can be explained with simple cost-benefit analysis: accreditation does not provide enough perceived benefits for organizations to justify the costs.
The Accreditation Safety Guarantee
Accredited programs are often portrayed as meeting various standards and therefore being safe. Accreditation is by no means a guarantee of prescribed outcomes. Incidents can and do happen to even the best-prepared organization. Having an accreditation will not eliminate incidents. Risk is simply an inherent aspect of adventure programming. Although risk can be managed, safety and risk are mutually exclusive (Gregg, 2007). This point is illustrated by the safety director of a predominant outdoor leadership organization (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution), who stated that accreditation has no effect or would not have prevented past incidents from occurring (safety director, personal communication, April 4, 2011).
In one incident, in 2001 two girls became trapped and drowned in a canoeing accident (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). After an extensive investigation, authorities determined that the program had followed all the applicable standards, yet an incident still resulted in two fatalities (Chisholm and Shaw, 2004). Another example includes an ACA-accredited camp that was shut down due to allegations of child abuse by staff members. ACA revoked its accreditation because of the allegations. However, the abuse apparently went on for years while the camp was ACA accredited (WBUR, 2011). Accidents and incidents happen regardless of accreditation. Accreditation cannot and does not guarantee safety.
Legal Protection
Legal protection is often touted as a benefit of accreditation. However, the accreditation process that provides legal protection for an organization is also what makes litigation possible. The standards used to determine accreditation are the exact same standards that are used to show negligence. A recent discussion regarding helmet use illustrates this concept of litigation potential:
As far as standards that affect you folks, there are three organizations that have written standards for helmet use. The ACA, CWA [Climbing Wall Association] and ACCT [Association for Challenge Course Technologies]. All three have standards for helmets around outside programs, some only for minors. Either way it is a perfect opportunity for the plaintiffs [to] find the standard you violated and sue rather than see what you did not screw up. If you are running a program outdoors I would suggest you meet all three standards. The cost of getting the standards is going to bankrupt some of you. (J. Moss, personal communication, April, 6, 2011)
Moss (2011) goes on to say:
According to evidence presented by the plaintiffs, there was also no rehearsal of any safety plan or communication of the plan to counselors, despite the requirement of training or rehearsal in the ACA Standards Manual. See Mosley Decl. Exh. N at OM-14 (ACA Accreditation Standards). Simply put the plaintiff's expert used the ACA standards, adopted by the defendant camp, to convince the judge the camp was negligent. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something. Below that level, if there is an associated injury, someone is negligent. If you do not violate a standard you have not breached the duty of care to someone. No breach, no negligence no matter how bad the injury or how great the damages. Standards are determined by the jury at trial. Normally, the plaintiff and the defendant put witnesses and expert witnesses on the stand to determine what the standard of care is. The jury then decides based on what they've heard. That means the defense has a chance to prove they were not below the standard of care. The defendant loses that chance if your trade association writes standards for you. (paragraphs 22-25)
That is not to say that organizations should not have policies or guidelines that they follow. However, unmet standards that are established by accreditation with the intention of protecting organizations can be used to show negligence.
Accreditation standards can be a double-edged sword: they can protect and they can cut. However, standards become even more legally problematic when they are not mandatory. Each accreditation process has numerous standards. However, accreditation does not require full compliance to the standards, as is seen in the ACA accreditation process: “Accreditation criteria do not require 100 percent compliance with standards. Some nonmandatory requirements, such as shower ratios, can be missed and the camp or conference center can still be accredited” (American Camp Association, n.d. c). Having nonrequired standards begs the question, why have the standard in the first place? Again, an unmet accreditation standard provides an opportunity for litigation against the organization. Rick Curtis, director of Outdoor Action Programs at Princeton University, addresses how standards can cause potential for more liability:
Well, the bad news about protocols is, if you make 'em, you've got to keep 'em. More important in some ways than developing a protocol is seeing to its implementation. Protocols without the necessary structure behind them to see that they are carried through with are only words on paper. From a Risk Management point of view, poorly implemented protocols can create greater liability for an organization than not having a specific protocol. Having a protocol says, ‘we believe that this is the best way to operate.' Ignoring that protocol may leave you more vulnerable for a charge of negligence or even gross negligence. (Curtis, n.d., paragraph 6)
Having nonmandatory standards is equivalent to ignoring protocols and provides the evidence against the organization necessary for it to be found negligent.
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Technology compromises the wilderness experience
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back.
Does technology compromise the wilderness experience?
YES
The Growth of Technology and the End of Wilderness Experience
Howard T. Welser, PhD, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States
Between 1993 and 1998, my climbing friends and I would spend the month of January bouldering and camping at Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas. The warm sun, brilliant problems, supportive climbing culture, and stark desert beauty brought us back. Every year, more climbers made the pilgrimage, inspired by advances in bouldering pad technology, the rapid expansion of indoor climbing gyms, and promotion of the bouldering scene in the popular climbing press. These technological developments helped spur the growth of a worldwide bouldering community, which increased demand for more bouldering, which spurred even more development of technology. Eventually, campsites were always full, the water supply started to dry up, portable toilets overflowed, litter proliferated, and vegetation was trampled. The overuse led the state park to sharply restrict the access of all users, and the locust swarm of winter bouldering shifted elsewhere.
Of course, Hueco Tanks State Park was not a wilderness area, nor were the climbers interested in wilderness experience per se. Climbers came to boulder and camped for comfort in the improved sites with electric space heaters, espresso machines, and automatic bread makers. The wilderness sensibilities of the climbers ranged from urban punk rockers to professional outdoor leaders, and most were appreciative of the natural world. Despite a general desire among climbers to minimize the negative effects of climbing in the park, the collective effect of the uncoordinated actions of all led to crowding, degradation of the resource from overuse, and an inescapable awareness of the presence and impact of people in the natural environment. Beyond the park, suburban El Paso encroached, lowering the aquifer and increasing the desertification of the surrounding plains. In the popular media, photo essays and stories continued to trumpet the virtues of Hueco bouldering even as access was sharply curtailed. The popularity experiment at Hueco Tanks does not simply represent problems of overuse in recreation areas. It highlights how our actions can be unintentionally detrimental to recreation and wilderness and how technology used inside and outside of wilderness spaces can accelerate those losses.
The Hueco Tanks bouldering example is a small part of a much larger trend. In large and small ways, technological development is leading to the unintended yet inevitable degradation of wilderness spaces and the demise of the potential for wilderness experience on Earth. To the extent that technological development continues unabated, this progress will eventually result in the extinction of wilderness spaces and the loss of our collective capacity to enjoy the aesthetic and practical dimensions of wilderness experience. The degradation of our collective capacity for wilderness is a particular example of a large class of situations characterized as “tragedies of the commons” (Hardin, 1968). Such tragedies involve people pursuing individually reasonable courses of action that inadvertently and inexorably lead to negative collective outcomes. The tragic dimension of the phenomenon is that although we might be aware of the negative collective implication, we are unable to prevent it (Kollock, 1998). Use of common pool resources does not always entail tragic ends (Manning, 2005; Ostrom et al., 1999). However, the challenges of preserving wilderness spaces are especially daunting.
This argument highlights four inherent conflicts between the progressive development of technology and the individual and collective capacity for wilderness experience:
1. Nonrecreational technological development is increasing the potential for high-impact instrumental use of wilderness spaces.
2. Technology used in recreation has the potential to expand the range, intensity, and scope of recreational uses.
3. In the larger society, the development of social media and increased communication technology is driving increased interest in and use of unusual wilderness destinations.
4. The increasingly unavoidable use of and access to mobile communication technology in wilderness recreation undermines core dimensions of the wilderness experience.
Defining Wilderness
Wilderness has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. On a practical level, wilderness spaces can be defined as geographic contexts where the processes, conditions, and organisms of the natural world predominate and where the infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of human society are absent or severely minimized. Recreation in wilderness implies reliance on the self for basic needs—food, shelter, and safety—because the external systems we rely on in civilization are largely absent in wilderness. The Antarctic Treaty System (since 1959; Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, 2011) and the Wilderness Act of 1964 contribute notions that wilderness should be untrammeled, that instrumental uses should be curtailed, and that permanent human constructions should be minimized. Although treaties and acts such as these helped establish guidelines for the defense and maintenance of wilderness in a practical sense, they also reinforce the notion that the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness should be valued. Contemporary organizations such as the Wild Foundation advocate for practical and aesthetic values of wilderness as well as the notion that wilderness spaces should be biologically intact (Wild Foundation, 2011). This notion reflects that the survival of the ecological living systems is a value that takes priority.
Somewhat in contrast to that notion, advocates of wilderness recreation are more focused on the impact of human actions on human users of wild spaces. This focus results largely from considering how aesthetic arguments relate to recreation in the wilderness experience (Nash, 1967). Notably, Aldo Leopold (1949) offers several justifications for wilderness, two of which are especially relevant to the aesthetic dimensions of wilderness recreation: recreation in wilderness opens our historical imaginations by giving us a sense of what things used to be like, and, contextually, the physical reality of the wilderness gives us a sense of perspective that transcends the limitations of our current social world. By contrasting with business as usual, wilderness space offers an external perspective on the social reality of civilization, our cultural heritage, our place in the universe, and the potential for a higher purpose. The sense of distance from our historical moment and our social world is a key source of the aesthetic dimension or art (Marcuse, 1978) and potentially of wilderness recreation. One key virtue of that aesthetic dimension is the capacity to view our everyday lives from the outside and develop an independent set of values.
One of the best contemporary examples of extensive wilderness space is Antarctica. The majority of the continent remains unimproved by infrastructure, alterations, or social organizations. In wilderness such as the Antarctic, the conditions and influences of the natural world predominate. The Antarctic Treaty attempts to maintain this condition through prohibiting military, extractive, and proprietary ownership claims and valorizing peaceful and scientific uses while extending environmental protections. The reliance on a treaty to enforce the wilderness state of Antarctica and to restrain parties from unilateral exploitation demonstrates some of the difficulty inherent in maintaining wilderness in general. Without the imposition of formal agreements, social actors tend to use spaces for purposes that undermine the wilderness attributes. Many extant wilderness spaces are also formally designated wilderness areas that prohibit substantial human alteration, restrict the use of particular tools, and limit access.
What are the defining attributes of wilderness experience in outdoor recreation? If a geographic space lacks infrastructure, alterations, and organizations of society, wilderness users will not have access to the advantages those resources normally provide. As wilderness users, we must either forgo or be prepared to provide our own medical care, food, shelter, and security. The act of entering a wilderness space for recreation then entails, to varying extents, both a practical reality of self-reliance and a subjective awareness of the need for such self-reliance. It also entails an aesthetic dimension where we recognize and reflect on the relative absence of human infrastructure, alterations, and organizations. For instance, a telephone booth in the wilderness damages the wilderness experience of hikers on three of these dimensions: it robs us of the necessity for self-reliance, it prevents us from experiencing our connection to “how it used to be,” and it intrudes on the aesthetic of wilderness, which is defined partly by the absence of such alterations (figure 10.1).
Lasting Evidence of Instrumental Uses
Technological development increases incentives for instrumental use of remaining wilderness spaces. Numerous social and corporate actors have strong material interests that motivate them to use wilderness spaces in ways that can seriously compromise the practical and symbolic attributes of existing wilderness spaces. Advances in technologies of resource extraction, communication, energy generation, travel, agriculture, and development will increase the pressure to open more of the landscape to high-impact, instrumental uses.
The aesthetic dimensions of wilderness experience are susceptible to spoilage due to prominent signs of human impact and alteration. For example, not only do oil-covered beaches degrade the environment, they can signify the conflict between the instrumental use of technology for private gain and risk of public loss. Unlike crowding, which can abate, spoilage in the forms of visible infrastructure, waste, and destruction of natural terrain can have long-lasting effects.
The potential for spoilage derives from the meaning of wilderness experience. To the extent that we value aesthetic dimensions that connect us to the historical absence of human impact and that connect us to the capacity to feel nature without the intervention of the impacts of civilization, wilderness experience will remain an extremely fragile type of public good.
The tragic oil spill in Prince William Sound presents a lasting reminder that the largest and most serious technological threats to the preservation of wilderness spaces and to our capacity for wilderness experience come from social actors who do not share wilderness values (figure 10.2). The expansion of human infrastructure and the effects of resource extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation indelibly touch an increasing portion of the globe every year. Increases in technology expand the reach and impact of these endeavors. For instance, on the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,800 oil-drilling platforms are currently active, and many operate in conditions that were technologically prohibitive in earlier decades (see Boland, 2006). Each platform brings immediate localized impacts as well as potential for much broader degradations to the environment. Green power, derived from the wind, rivers, or tides, is not impact-free: technological advance and profit motives bring extensive infrastructure that invades view-sheds and natural systems.
The geographic area that lacks substantial infrastructure, usage, or impacts is constantly decreasing. Technology exaggerates the loss of wilderness space in both a direct sense and an indirect sense in that technology enables population growth and encourages further uses. Organizations apply pressure to open access to wilderness spaces in order to further their interests. The geographic area that combines all formal wilderness areas and informal wilderness spaces represents the maximum size of future wilderness space; this area is likely to continuously shrink as organizations compete for increasingly rare opportunities in our finite world. Even formally designated wilderness areas, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, remain under constant threat of being opened to uses that would bring significant practical and symbolic degradations. Other areas, such as the Everglades, are subject to the inadvertent effects of agriculture and water uses in adjacent territory, which degrade the wilderness attributes of the protected area.
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Supervision reduces risk in outdoor education activity
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities.
Should wilderness program staff always accompany their participants?
YES
One Question You Don't Want to Hear: Where Were the Instructors?
Ken Kalisch, associate professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry, Montreat College, Montreat, North Carolina, United States
Where were the instructors? The question is appropriate because wilderness program instructors have traditionally varied their roles with a student expedition group. It is typical for instructors to be more engaged with members at the beginning and become less engaged over time. During some programmed components, students might rarely see their instructors.
For the past 40 years, prominent international organizations such as Outward Bound (OB), the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and countless adaptations of them have used these unaccompanied activities. The two traditional unaccompanied events are the solo and final expedition. The OB solo is a one- to three-day separation from instructors during which students camp alone at a specified site with minimal food and equipment. The OB final expedition or NOLS student-led expedition is group travel without direct instructor supervision from one to five days. These two practices have been justified on the basis that they enhance student learning (Bobilya, Kalisch, and Daniel, 2010; Bobilya, McAvoy, and Kalisch, 2005a; Daniel, 2003; Kalisch, Bobilya, and Daniel, in press; Sibthorp et al., 2008). I argue that the absence of direct staff supervision during these expedition components is unnecessarily risky and should no longer be practiced in wilderness education programs.
Time for a Change
Although many wilderness programmers value and utilize these unaccompanied events, it is time to change the manner in which these events are conducted. A history of tragic injuries and deaths surrounds them, even at NOLS and OB. Though few in number, these accidents involved young people who were severely hurt or lost their lives when unaccompanied by their instructors.
- A young woman was raped on her North Carolina OB solo in 1971 (Hunt, 2000).
- In the same year, two young women died from exposure on their Northwest OB final expedition in the Cascade Mountains (Hunt, 2000).
- Three young adults on a Southwest OB final expedition drowned in 1978 while kayaking in the Gulf of California (Morganthau, 1979).
- A young man on his Voyageur OB solo was viciously attacked by a predatory black bear in 1987 (Rogers and Garshelis,
1988). - A young female on a NOLS student-led expedition drowned while crossing a Wyoming river in 1996 (McCarthy, 2009).
- A New Hampshire teenager on a NOLS student-led expedition fell to his death down a deep glacial hole in 1999 (Komarnitsky, 1999).
- A young female on a 2006 OB final expedition died of heatstroke in Utah's canyon country. She leaves behind an anguished brother who asks, “Where were the instructors when (my sister) was dying in Lockhart Canyon?” (Ketcham, 2007).
- Four young men were attacked and mauled by an Alaskan grizzly bear on a student-led expedition at NOLS in 2011 (Grove, 2011).
It is difficult to determine whether similar incidents involving students intentionally separated from their instructors have occurred in smaller and less-recognized programs across the country. Further, little documentation exists of near misses in wilderness programs, especially in these activities. However, Haddock (1999a) suggests that the epic tales and close calls recited by instructors and students after trips provide evidence. Although often unverified, these tales indicate that incidents with a high potential for harm do occur and may be indicators of serious accidents to come. There are stories of solo students who became sick after foraging for food and those who injured themselves due to emotional distress. There are epic tales of student-led expeditions that became lost and ventured over treacherous terrain and those who divided into subgroups due to unresolved conflict. The latter circumstances led to the 2006 death in the Utah wilderness (Ketcham, 2007). Direct supervision by instructors largely prevents such tragic incidents. Davidson (2004), after studying trip accidents in New Zealand and Australia, argues:
While there are many methods employed to assist in managing the risk in outdoor education activities such as providing good equipment, sequencing programs, gaining the most recent weather forecasts, etc., the most powerful tool to reducing the risk in an outdoor education activity is by providing supervision for those taking part in the activity with someone with an assessed level of skill and experience. . . . The duty of the skilled supervisor is to be in a position to intervene if a dangerous situation arises and prevent harm from occurring.
One might argue that a few serious injuries and deaths are acceptable losses when compared with the positive experiences that thousands of students have had as a result of these two program components. This position advocates the high educative value inherent in legitimate risk taking. It is represented by Willi Unsoeld's classic response to the mother of a prospective OB student who requested a guarantee of safety for her son: “No. We certainly can't, Ma'am. We guarantee you the genuine chance of his death. And if we could guarantee his safety, the program would not be worth running” (cited in Hunt, 1999). A difference exists between guaranteeing safety and trying to provide the safest program possible. Removing the direct supervision of instructors for an extended period of time does not contribute to guarding safety. A more ethical position would argue that the traditional educational strategy used for these trip components is an act of negligence and is unjustified for pedagogical, legal, and moral reasons (Davidson, 2004).
Three Pillars of Support
Three predominant principles support this argument. When aptly considered, they facilitate an understanding of this more ethical position.
Risk Versus Student Competency
First, real risk exists in wilderness programs, and it increases when program instructors do not directly supervise novice students for a lengthy time. A staff trainer for Outward Bound USA describes the risk involved in wilderness programs:
Risk is at the very center of the Outward Bound experience. We lead our students through natural and social environments in which we encounter inherently risky situations. There are the risks that derive from rocky terrain and inclement weather, the risks stemming from the kinds of activities and testing situations we devise to stretch our students physically and mentally, and those that come from the interpersonal dynamic of placing a small and diverse group together in stressful circumstances. . . . Instructors must make frequent decisions as they encounter the myriad risks their course provides, and all without benefit of the resources—the help—of the personnel back at the base; they are quite literally on their own; they are the on-the-scene risk managers. Will they know what to do? Will they have the knowledge, the skills, and the judgment to make good decisions when faced with the challenge of choosing the best course of action in the face of a potentially dangerous situation? (Garrett, 2008)
This concern for the exercise of good judgment by staff is commendable. It has caused OB and NOLS to conduct judgment-training workshops for their instructors in recent years. But what about students left alone on a solo or final expedition? Will they have the knowledge, skills, and judgment to make good decisions?What judgment training do novice students receive before they are sent out alone? Is their preparation by staff sufficient to ensure wise decisions?
Two distinct factors combine to make indirectly supervised students a high-risk event. First, the wilderness is a dynamic environment that includes endless physical challenges and potential threats to the traveler. The wilderness is a world of constant, often unexpected, change. Second, novices in this dynamic environment are challenged to exercise adequate judgment in decision making. It is likely that a novice will not perceive some perils as being high risk. Some rapid rivers look easy to cross, and some rocky slopes look easy to climb down. The reality is that students will potentially make many errors in judgment. According to Udall (1995), it takes much experience to accurately observe the dynamics of wild places, to understand the frailty of humans in it, and to respond wisely in each moment. If students misread the situation, it can result in “a series of seemingly inconsequential decisions . . . that stack up one-on-another until the entire pattern totters and collapses under the weight of the wind or of human fatigue or of an unexpected stumble”.
Research studies have suggested some predictors of serious accidents in wilderness programs. Liddle and Storck (1995) report that “one of the most frequent contributing factors to accidents is lack of knowledge of an environmental hazard, or a lack of appreciation of its danger”. Haddock (1999b) determined that “unsafe acts by students” is the second-highest contributing factor (after weather) in high-potential incidents. Davidson's (2004) analysis of 1,908 incidents indicates “a higher chance of a serious incident occurring if the level of supervision is removed or reduced”. Brookes (2003) concluded that indirectly supervised teenagers on wilderness expeditions presented “a clear fatality risk if . . . the group encountered moving water or steep ground”.
It takes much experience to develop sound judgment that adequately responds to a variety of wilderness hazards. This is the necessary role of competent instructors. For students, there is no substitute for having immediate access to a skilled and knowledgeable leader in high-risk circumstances. Opportunities for independent student decision making might be educational, but they may come with a high cost, even death. And then people will certainly ask, “Where were the instructors?”
Learn more about Controversial Issues in Adventure Programming.
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