Outdoor Industry
It’s sad that the manufacture and marketing of recreational gear and clothing is called The Outdoor Industry.
Commercial fishing is an outdoor industry. Farming is an outdoor industry. So is outer-space, though we may not reap it’s harvest for a lot longer.
The Outdoor Industry is just an offshoot of the fashion industry. Every season, there are new colors and cuts to be made and modeled and marketed. Sure, there are professional guides and search and rescuers that require advanced gear to save lives, but those lives are likely put on the line for recreation.
There’s a lot of energy being wasted.
I’m not arguing the importance of adventure for the health of the human spirit, but we need to take it in a new direction.
I’m grateful that I found the outdoors as a source of adventure during my angsty years. Of course I found less healthy outlets as well, but if I had been limited to mind-altering substances behind closed doors, I don’t think I would have survived.
I'm still angsty, so this is still my main excuse for playing outside. As a dad and a softy, I want to pass along the appreciation of healthy adventure to future generations. It also helps to stay in shape for commercial fishing in the summertime.
I didn’t have many friends in high school who would repeatedly join me in the mountains, but I had “Outside Magazine.” During my study hall in the school library, I would check every day to see if the newest issue was on the shelf. When I should have been doing calculus, I’d soak in an outdoor culture that was alien to my Alaskan hometown. People in those pages wore colors I’d never seen in the woods and mountains before, because they weren’t trying to sneak up on anything to kill it.
I had already been playing plenty in the outdoors, always looking for wilder places to party. Mountaintops, mountaintops by myself in winter, mountaintops on other islands, mountaintops on other islands by myself. All great places to drink beer, smoke weed, chew tobacco, and feel like a badass but not get busted. “Outside Magazine” showed me new exotic places where I could dream of being extreme, and it also showed me what I should be wearing if I wanted to do that. I became a billboard for outdoor brands before I had any of their real gear.
Soon, I was wearing t-shirts branded with logos for Karakoram (snowboard bindings I couldn’t afford, and a mountain range in Pakistan, which you probably didn’t know), and Scarpa (I had a friend who was a senior who had a pair of their climbing shoes, and it’s the Italian word for cliff, in case you were wondering). The backpack I wore to school every day was Dakine (didn’t know what Dakine meant, still don’t, but it sounds German and hardcore). The backpack had a holster for the handle of my avalanche shovel, and a special pocket for the blade, and another special pocket for my probe, and a place for a water bladder and a place for the drinking tube to come out the strap, and an emergency whistle built in to the buckle of the chest strap, and a deployable ice-axe loop. I used all that stuff (except the whistle), but only on the weekends when there was snow, so only about 5% of the time at best. Walking to school, I wore a Mountain Hardwear jacket with a powder skirt and zippers in the armpits, and Vasque lightweight hiking shoes. I had a vague fantasy of a disaster where all my gear would come in handy, while my classmates would be helpless in their popular clothing.
In the decade since, I’ve taken to wearing jeans when I ski. I’m on a rather obsessive kick to not wear synthetic stuff if I can avoid it, so it’s wool for serious outings and cotton for casual stuff. I still have a good amount of Gor-Tex and Thinsulate to go over my wool on long days in the mountains.
What got me on this kick to start with was the garbage gyre in the Pacific Ocean, that small continent of plastic swirling around out there. Plastic is bad for fish, and I like fish, so I’m trying not to use plastic for anything unless it’s far and away the best material for that purpose, and will last a long time.
But, since I spend most of my year far from the ocean or major rivers, the gyre thing doesn’t make much sense. I had to come up with another reason to tell my wife why I was giving away so much clothing a few months back: the septic system. Synthetic fibers are a lot smaller and floatier than natural ones, so they don’t settle in a septic tank like everything else. Instead, from the washing machine they make their way into the leach field, which is only really supposed to disperse water. The skinny little synthetic fibers start to fill in the pore spaces in the dirt of the field, and will eventually plug the whole thing up. That worked on my wife, and it makes me feel a little better that I’m pumping less plastic into the dirt near our house. We get a lot of wildfires around here, too, so I like the idea that if our house burns down, there won’t be quite as much plastic in it sending up nasty black smoke.
My even more morbid fantasy is that when I die, I could be buried under a garden and everything I’m wearing will turn to compost. Or don’t even bury me, just prop me up against a tree in the woods. Take the grandkids on hikes to go say hi to grandpa, my bleached skeleton having been scattered over an acre or more by wild animals.
Ecological fantasies aside, the proliferation of fancy outdoor gear is bad for wild places, because it promotes the idea that only people with plenty of money can go for a hike. Almost all the published imagery of people in natural settings is selling something else, whether it’s a pair of boots or a parks pass. If the only perceived cost was time to spend in the outdoors, many more people would do it.
Let’s see some billboards of people hiking barefoot in old wool sweaters and dress pants from thrift stores (I swear hiking barefoot can be better than being on magic mushrooms). I’d wager that more money could be saved by getting more people outside and keeping them healthy and happy and out of hospitals than is made by the entire Outdoor Industry.
All the advancement in clothing and adventure gear can still be put to use in essential outdoor industries, where people have to be out in the elements to put food on our tables, and tables under our food, and roofs over our tables, and planets under everything. Search and rescue can have it too, because we need a little safety net to make wild places seem welcoming enough.
There will always be souls who crave the freedom of wild adventure, and need to push their physical and mental limits to feel alive. Lou Reed sung about how he wished he lived in the age of sailing ships and exploration, but confined by modern times, he was drawn to heroin. There are athletes like Mark Twight, who admits to using extreme alpinism to forestall suicide.
What a waste of human spirit.
Send these kinds of people into space. Give them the most advanced gear (Mountain Hardware should make a spin-off clothing company: Martian Hardware). The Moon and Mars will be settled permanently, but they’ll still feel pretty edgy for a long time. Humans will be tested like we haven’t been since the age of sail. Leave the dock and it’ll be five years before there’s a chance of getting home. The line between life and death will be only as thick as an airlock, much thinner than the wooden hulls of old. The Outdoor Industry will be eclipsed by the Out-Airlock Industry, but at least there aren’t any fish to get messed up by microfibers on Mars.
In a Martian garden though, where nutrients are harder to come by, my compost-me-in-my-clothes fantasy could be even more useful.