Outdoor recreation often slips into what I call an achievement-based relationship with nature. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Whether it’s “bagging peaks”, racing to finish the AT, or stamping the land with machines and monuments, the focus shifts from ecology to ego.
Being obsessed with Peak Bagging is not Solarpunk.
Nature is not your personal obstacle to challenge yourself against, it is a shared place of discovery you trample when you only see it as a place to endlessly, exhaustingly conquer.
There are many people who do not appear to experience ‘runners high’. I am one of those people, I have never experienced any noticeable pleasant side-effects from exercise itself, just a rather unpleasant burning sensation in my lungs. Regardless, I still ride my bike or jog to maintain my health, and I vastly prefer doing so amongst nature if I can.
Claiming the way an entire subset of other people experience nature is inferior and shallow compared to yours is kinda the definition of a sense of superiority, yeah.
I have no problem criticizing people who litter in nature, or destroy it in some way, but putting every jogger into the same box, with disregard to the variability of those people’s respect and appreciation of nature just due to the way they personally enjoy it? Oof.
I am arguing our cultural framing around outdoor culture is inferior and shallow compared to a deeper more thoughtful relationship with the natural world and and an awareness of the living history of colonialism as it bends and warps our perspective our relationship with nature.
If you do not allow me this without labelling me as attempting to claim I am superior than you simply do not allow any kind of criticism of your beliefs/actions in this area. How else am I supposed to interpet this?
My opinion is that painting with such a broad brush that anyone who simply jogs in the woods is performing a selfish act and unable to appreciate nature the correct way is an elitist claim, as it doesn’t allow for people who do deeply respect and appreciate nature, but who may also enjoy exercising among it, or for people who experience nature differently from the way you do.
You seem to have an absolutist viewpoint that there is objectively only one correct way of experiencing nature. No one is stopping you from making that argument, but you are not entitled to everyone agreeing with that viewpoint or how it is presented.