Background notes on "Marketing the Sacred Space"

by Morgan Hite

The catalogue is a perennial concern of field instructors at NOLS. It is generally criticized for its gloss (hard to recycle), its flash (not really the style of the school) and its relentlessly sunny pictures of beautiful people having good times on the courses (not a faithful representation of the real people on wilderness expeditions). "How are people going to know what we stand for," instructors ask, "if this is the kind of literature we put out?"

I wrote this piece in the fall of 1990, the third year I worked for NOLS, and I wrote it to give to the new Marketing Director of the school, because instructors were always encouraged to bring their ideas to the administration. This was my polite, solution-oriented approach towards creating some change. I was naïve then about the realities of the school, specifically about the commitment of the top level of the administration to building a glossy image for the school.

The opening paragraph of praise for the catalogue is just a (transparent) gambit to disarm any defensiveness on the part of my reader.

Unfortunately that Marketing Director was soon fired from her job (or forced to resign). Many of us suspected that she had to leave because she was too sympathetic to ideas like this. So, as far as I know, my arguments went nowhere.

The primary idea here was that you cannot "market" wilderness. You can disseminate information about a wilderness school, i.e., you can make information available about what your program does. But to use the word "market" implies an attitude more at home in the corporate world than in the backcountry. The fact that NOLS had a "marketing" department was a red flag that I completely missed. I was not prepared to see that this outdoor school that I loved was in fact in the hands of people who were not after the simple, rustic rewards of backcountry travel, but instead aspired to preside over a media success story.

My goal was to have a catalogue which attracted people who were already gravitating towards the backcountry sub-culture, rather than those who just wanted to "do NOLS" (such students being a perennial irritation to instructors). In effect I wanted to encourage the "travelers" and discourage the "tourists." My strategy was to play up the importance of commitment and to have the catalogue's style evoke the kind of values which we associate with people who like to backpack (e.g., simplicity, straightforwardness, personal satisfaction over material wealth).

The administration's goal however was to maximize the number of students, and so discouraging those who were not really interested in being part of the backcountry community's "lifestyle" was not in their interest. Unfortunately what this meant was recruiting lots of people to the backcountry who saw in it neither the sacredness of John Muir, nor the anti-establishment politics of Edward Abbey. (Outside magazine was doing the same thing at the same time: "marketing" the backcountry without discussing any of the things it stood for.) As a result I think that in teh United States, the "meaning" of the backcountry has in fact changed today.

Someone at NOLS would perhaps argue that it is "elitist" to only want to bring backcountry-type people to the backcountry, and also not a very good conservation strategy for building a broad-based political will to protect wild lands. My response is that building that broad-based political will is the job of the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, etc., not NOLS. NOLS's job was to be an organization backcountry people could think of as their "home" in the front-country, a place that faithfully represented and modeled their values.