Of what avail to reach the summit, if we do not return with the good will of our comrades?

- Dr Charles Houston

My first clue that the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) might itself make the summit but not "return with the good will of our comrades" came in the fall of 1992. I was in a conversation with Tom Sharp, a member of that school's board of trustees. We were discussing the future of NOLS, and he was proposing growth: more new branches in other countries, more wilderness courses, more students. I pointed out that a larger school (NOLS at that time already had over 100 instructors and five branches around the world) defeated the basic intent of outdoor education: to create small, humanly scaled communities whose values were rooted in the non-materialistic traditions of Thoreau and Muir. In fact, I added, the chief challenge before the school was how to better realize its mission - by shrinking the twenty-person course groups, getting the school's catalog printed on recycled paper and finding a way to keep aging instructors passionate about the wilderness experience of new students. reacted. "You're just trying to keep NOLS as a cozy little place for the instructors!" Sharp said caustically.

Apparently Sharp did not see me as his peer in the debate. An instructor for five years, I had up until that time had the naïve impression that NOLS was run by civil discussion in a tradition which we taught on the wilderness courses: Expedition Behavior. This was a respectful dialogue between parties who, while they might differ in their areas of expertise, were of "equal value to the expedition." In the context of the whole school this meant that instructors, who were familiar with what was desirable and practical in the field, and administrators, whose job it was to float visionary new ideas, would run the program in concert. By characterizing my perspective as selfish, parochial and small-minded Sharp revealed a different process, one whose implications I did not appreciate at the time. It was a foreshadowing of the way that upper-level administrators would increasingly reject ideas coming from the school's large community of instructors, and would alienate and ultimately lose the fellowship of that community.

Although conventional wisdom suggests that no company functions in the idealistic, Expedition Behavior manner I just described, NOLS had been operating outside and beyond the conventional wisdom for years. The dedication which most instructors brought to NOLS - as did most of the logistical support staff - was written on the walls at the school: the low pay they received, the long hours they worked, and the research they did on their own time to improve their teaching. In the offices, doors were always open, and instructors were expected not only to pop in and discuss strategic school issues, but, between courses, to take on administrative roles by planning new course types, researching new techniques or helping with the acquisition of gear. Likewise, administrators often left their offices to work stints as instructors. There was no essential distinction between administrator and instrcutor - these were merely hats we wore at different times in our different roles.

Yet to dismiss the importance of the guiding vision embedded in each instructor, Sharp had to imagine NOLS's success almost solely in terms of administrative vigilance and dedication - as if a strong hand led the instructors. This was ironic, since the school's in-town component was historically a low-key operation which provided the instructors (particularly the more senior instructors known as "course leaders") with the supplies and information they needed to create courses which took place exclusively in the wilderness, free from contact with the office. The idea that the credit for the school's excellent courses instead lay chiefly in the office allowed Sharp - and others such as board chairman Wil Welch and executive director Jim Ratz - to conceive of a NOLS in which administrators of superior vision led, and the instructors followed.

A review of NOLS administrative accomplishments since 1990 reveals what motivated Sharp et al to increasingly discredit input from the body of his school. NOLS eventually implemented the creation of two new foreign branches, a 50% increase in course offerings, a school credit card, a government partnership to teach Leave No Trace, and the planting of a complementary article in the Wall Street Journal about how much "market share" the school has stolen from Outward Bound. The iconoclastic, backcountry NOLS community would never have spent its energies on this kind of conventional corporate image-building. Nor would it have supported acts of questionable ethics, such as hiring a lobbyist to confound the National Park Service in its efforts to reduce NOLS course size. To realize their vision of NOLS, which also included a fund-raising campaign, new buildings at every branch and using the voice mail system to answer the phones, the NOLS board and top-level administrators would have to provide all the energy and direction themselves.

Clearly this was action focussed on transforming the very essence of the school itself. The ideas proceeding from Sharp, Ratz, etc. suggested a company in the for-profit arena. Yet the bulk of the school's instructors were telling their administrators that this style of business was anathema to a non-profit, particularly to a wilderness non-profit. Even many for-profit companies avoided such a level of transparent self-promotion. Non-profit status not only implied an enterprise without shareholders, but also values and a limiting code of behavior (ecologist Aldo Leopold's definition ⁽¹⁾ of an 'ethic'). This code was non-competitive and oriented towards organizational substance rather than a showy appearance. The teachings of the wilderness experience specifically required NOLS to be a role model of minimal resource consumption, to teach the superficiality of media myth-making rather than participate in it, and to have an actual person answer its phones. Finally, by embracing the fast game of prestige NOLS was abandoning a key ethical distinction between it and a wilderness-based industrial entity such as the mining giant Noranda. We show our faithfulness to the wilderness by not having big egos. Any outdoor person, even if they could not articulate their reasoning well, could tell you that there was something very wrong with the proposed picture (2).

Now, six years after the school's board and administrators began dismissing the instructors' perspective as naïve and irrelevant, the price is beginning to appear: the early signs of the impending death of the school's community. Objections to school growth and style by instructors or support staff receive not so much a response as a redirection. Critics are told to read inanimate documents such as a "Mission Statement" or a "Vision Statement" - as if they were children who had failed to read the rules before playing the game. Field staff no longer find being at NOLS so idealistically satisfying that the traditional trickle of low pay is sufficient, and they are demanding more money. Animated, individually crafted arguments in the school's internal newsletter have been largely replaced with the bland euphemisms which grace the interoffice memos of corporate culture, such as "compensation," "supervision" and "accountability" (the kind of soulless verbiage one expects outdoor people traditionally make fun of, not participate in). Instructors and the top-level administration wrangle over who is trusted enough to make the calls on field safety practices. Perhaps the clearest indication of a breakdown in relationships is the formation of a "Staff Relations Committee" to formally handle what was once, in a smaller school, a personal bond between the top-level administrators and the instructors. This is a sad and embarrassing state of affairs for what was once known as the coolest outdoor school, envied for its official disdain of written protocol, its irreverent style, its integrity, dedication and awesome community.

I would be the first to admit that I came to NOLS for idealistic reasons. As an opportunity for freedom, independence, adventure, danger and excellence all rolled into one, NOLS appealed in the late 1980's as an almost unparalleled Shangri-La for the young, outdoor aficionado. An international wilderness school, it dispatched its experts in do-or-die situation survival to remote, beautiful places to pull off unpredictable journeys with fascinating students. It appeared to be a chance to live in an extraordinary community: so close to the natural world and so far from television and malls, a troupe of competent, funny, warm, athletic friends unlimited by commitments and free to pursue their dreams.

Improbably, the school bore out these lurid imaginings. NOLS was a community of adventure-seekers with shared values and a shared vision of the operational style that went with those values. The school had funky facilities that taught the ethic of reduce, reuse, recycle: an old lumberyard in Wyoming, a backyard barn in Washington and a former dairy farm in Alaska. The place was advertised only by word of mouth, supporting the idea that it served an outdoor community that was itself based in word-of-mouth. Safety was based on high expectations of instructor judgement, not written policy ⁽³⁾ and much fun was made of people who thought that safety was so simple that one could look up in a book how to respond to a lightening storm or cross a river. To rise to a certain senior staff level one had to work at other outdoor centers, organizations which were seen as allies in the common cause. The administrators made do with a space that was once the lobby of an historic Wyoming hotel; the admissions team kept track of how many students were enrolled on each course by using push pins on a wall. The mission (unwritten and universally apprehended) was to take exceptional groups of young people and train them with creativity and humor to join the elite community of wilderness travelers. Despite the low pay there were scores of people who wanted just to be a part of it. This was not a job: it was a calling.

The school also had that quality of being truly outside society, of wild people who have found a place where they can be themselves. Toilet paper was improvised from snow, stones, or leaves. Students felt free from taboos on nudity and urinating in public; nude swimming was common. Each course had its own unique feel, but all began to diverge from norms as soon as they left contact with society. For many students, this group of peers in which they felt so free, comfortable and safe was a microcosm of the ideal society. In the intimate co-ed environment, lovers received only a cautionary talk on not depriving the rest of the group of their company. The measure of a good course was that, at the end, no one wanted to go "back."

Just as it was an manifestation of the values and dreams of American backpacking culture, the NOLS community in turn had a broad influence on wilderness travel among the public through its teaching of technical skills. This influence occurred through ties to the greater outdoor community that were more personal than professional. NOLS was able to disseminate ideas among independent-minded backpackers, mountaineers and kayakers with a disarming combination of informality and a respect for individual approaches. "There's a right way, a wrong way and a NOLS way," was how the school made fun of itself and the idea of getting too serious about how to go camping. So on my own climbing trips with friends from back home or stints working at other schools I too taught, learned and swapped ideas with other outdoors people. It was one big family.

If the month-long NOLS course was an experimental stab at creating an unfettered and healthy human-scale community, the school itself had the potential to be a showplace for ideas far deeper and more lasting than the freedom to take off one's clothes. For one, outdoor people longed for a community where the social values mirrored those found on backcountry trips, such as cooperation, integrity, honesty and humility. Sociologist Joseph Sax provides a succinct description of the outdoor subculture, its characteristics being, "a repugnance at the seemingly boundless materialism that infused American life, a spiritual attachment to nature, and a self-congratulatory attitude towards preservation of nature's bounty. ⁽⁴⁾" NOLS had the potential to realize this vision on a permanent basis.

Beyond bearing witness to the values and lifestyle of its instructors and students, the NOLS office had the potential to implement the degree of humanity found on its courses. It is perhaps difficult for the non-wilderness traveler to imagine the rich experience of this intimate world in which a small group, travelling and camping through a wilderness, might not see a stranger for several weeks. The tapestry of life takes on a richness fed by the discrete details of everyday occurrences. One gets to know so many facets of the others on the journey that certain events in society, typically interactions based on the "non-intimacy" of two parties, seem ridiculous. The idea of suing someone because you slipped on their sidewalk, for example, becomes inconceivable. If the NOLS office, as the portion of the backcountry school which protruded into society, strove make this level of humanity a goal in its daily business, it would be doing truly useful work: gathering practical knowledge about implement the lessons of wilderness in the context of business.

The NOLS course in fact was a micro-model for what the school could be. NOLS courses were highly communal societies. "All the food is expedition food," was a standard theme. There was very little personal space, and each person's injuries and anxieties were public business because they had the potential to affect the course of the expedition. Humility was a constant underlying theme, not only because such an attitude allowed one to be constantly aware and cautious of the unpredictable and deadly forces of nature, but also because during experiential learning students were expected to "check their egos at the door" and attempt things where the possibility of first time failure was high. There was an ear open to the sacred, in that instructors and students commonly felt clear, in the wilderness ⁽⁵⁾, that elements of modern American society - the glorification of self-interest, the evasion of responsibility, the inequitable distribution of wealth, and the culture of the short-sighted decision - could be abandoned for a higher way. As a wilderness instructor stooped under the mass of supporting quotes which I carried, from the likes of Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Barry Lopez, Brenda Peterson, Mary Austin, Gary Snyder and Wendell Barry, these values were not merely landmarks but an entire landscape - it was inconceivable to me that anyone in wilderness work could miss them. Our culture reviled organizations which styled themselves in the ethic-free corporate marketplace, and an outdoor school which chose to do so could not only expect to lose the loyalty of the outdoor community, but also its guiding inner vision and the high morale of quite a few of its employees.

Those in 1998 who have any doubt that the corporate model has triumphed within the NOLS office need look no further than the school's catalog. The first "alumni profile," ostensibly an opportunity for the school to highlight graduates who represent the flowering of NOLS values, presents the president of "the nation's largest chain of natural food supermarkets," noting that "sales this year are projected to top the $1 billion mark." The second alumnus profiled "works for Morgan Stanley in New York City" and his book "spent two months on the New York Times Best Seller's list and Ann Landers recommended it to her 9 million readers." If this parade of material and mass-media icons is not enough to communicate where the leaders of this school want to go and how they feel about where they came from, there is this telling self-assessment: "NOLS has grown from a little funky outdoor school operating in one mountain range, to a world-wide, highly regarded leader in an industry that is still growing."

Yet how did this change come about? Because the adventure-seeking NOLS populace was essentially counter-cultural, one would think that the corporate model could not have found a more inhospitable wilderness in which to take root. Were NOLS a television comedy, the happy ending would have had the "boosters" who mistook this feisty community for an easy target regretting that they ever saw NOLS, having discovered that you can dress outdoor people up but you can never shut them up. But the fact that even now most of the top-level administrators at NOLS are themselves former instructors indicates that while this may have been a take-over by an alien idea, it was not a take-over by outsiders themselves. The success of the corporate metaphor at NOLS and the acceptance of a corporate style and values within the school's offices can only be explained by an unlucky convergence of factors: among them an overly ambitious board of trustees; some unexpected prosperity; a pre-existing cultural flaw; a demographic shift; and some very subtle tactics.

Board members for a non-profit are chosen for their expertise in areas other than what the non-profit does. In NOLS's case, they are intended to be able to offer direction and contacts when the school ventures out of the wilderness for its necessary trips "into town." Board members are supposed to advise on construction, insurance, and so on. Unfortunately what this meant at NOLS was that while most board member had experienced wilderness, few understood what it stood for. And most understood all too well what conventional companies are supposed to look and act like. Board members choose each other, so once a certain vision of success had become established, that vision was unconsciously yet effectively perpetuated

I remember being surprised, the first time I went to a board meeting at NOLS, how many of the elements of corporate culture were already present: the rules of order, the transparencies on the overhead projector, the bound sets of agenda, the reports by committees. Board members were the only people at NOLS who might interrupt you and cut right to the point in a conversation, the only people who hadn't learned or didn't care about "listening well." They were friendly people but they were clearly not part of the outdoor culture. They used phrases like "at the end of the day." They liked a lively argument with raised voices. The goal seemed to be to come to decisions quickly.

The NOLS culture was ill suited to stand its ground in conflict with such people. Most instructors and junior administrators lived in a highly insulated (some would say cult-like) outdoor-oriented world of students and other instructors, where - other than explicit safety decisions - good group feelings consistently took priority over critical thinking. Every idea, even those which they thought fatally flawed, would get a fair hearing in order to preserve the all-important egalitarian process. For the board of trustees, getting the attention and compliance of this group was like shooting fish in a barrel. Once the school became prosperous enough in the late 1980's ⁽⁶⁾ to suggest that it could be something really big, they began picking off their targets. Top-level administrators and new instructors alike moved to appease these businesspeople, with their strange ideas about "professionalism," about how peer evaluations which were not critical were worthless, and how there was only one place to hold in the "outdoor education industry," and that was number one. These sounded respectable, like the sort of things real business people said. One had the sense that if we disagreed with them we were ostracizing ourselves from the world of reasonable people.

Under the board's influence, NOLS began to alter its performance - both in relation to local business and students' parents. Increasingly the perceived audience could be characterized as a conservative, impulsive and harried individual who jumped to conclusions, rather than a Sierra Clubber who wanted substance and had the time to spend on finding it. Attempts not to offend this new audience began to account for much of the behavior of top-level administrators. Fellow instructors who went to a local hearing on wolf reintroduction in Wyoming - the quintessential, liberal outdoor issue - were subsequently told by Executive Director Ratz that in the interest of NOLS retaining the good will of local business they should not have appeared at that meeting. Marijuana use, endemic at NOLS for decades, was aggressively stamped out ⁽⁷⁾. Student deaths, already tragic and difficult events, became the focus of anxious investigations that had to produce simple reasons and propose simple solutions which were intelligible to those unfamiliar with wilderness travel. NOLS had been drawn into a larger world, but appeasement was still the only tool it had to work with these new audiences.

The vocabulary of the corporate world had a slowly numbing effect. We all adopted the spiffy new terms (and surreally) began to describe outdoor education as an "industry." NOLS instructors were "contract employees," wilderness was a "resource," and travelers in it were "users." Outward Bound became a "competitor." In the new linguistic model, "field staff" (not instructors) were "supervised" (not reviewed, not mentored) like blue-collar workers toiling on the assembly line. Top-level administrators and board members set "priorities" and "furthered the mission." NOLS had never had vocabulary like this.

It literally became impossible to engage in debate without using these words, yet few meaningful ideas unique to outdoor education could be expressed with them. I observed, for example how new instructors re-vitalized older instructors by bringing in ideas from other programs. But there was no vocabulary for that phenomenon in the new lexicon, so in time most administrators forgot that this was part of what made a course a great. I also knew that young, nomadic instructors acquired a familiarity with the needs and desires of the outdoor community, and that this gave them a valuable sense of what students want and need. But this too could not be expressed simply in the new lingo, and over time it dropped out of the way administrators understood how the school worked. Great people and great times are the heart of a NOLS course, but who would guess it from the new, best translation: quality personnel are a curriculum asset? 

Confusion reigned. Articles by top-level administrators were placed at the front of the school's internal newsletter, while articles by instructors were placed at the back, creating the paradoxical impression that what went on in the office was more important than what went on in the field. Stories were circulated about the intimidating presence of forces which few outdoor people were in a position to verify: an increasingly litigious public and an overwhelming new onslaught of backcountry visitors. In seminars we were told that the public ⁽⁸⁾ was increasingly hostile, and that everything must be documented. We were also told that NOLS must grow in order to reach the masses now surging towards wilderness. Neither the school's local branch administrators nor its instructors had the time to overcome their relative isolation and investigate these assertions.

Caught between frustrated employees and the board, top-level administrators feigned bewilderment as to why instructors would oppose growth or allege that NOLS was no longer thinking of the good of the wilderness. Apparently without any sense of irony they declared that the change of school style was in the best interest of the land ⁽⁹⁾, the students and the NOLS community itself. Objections brought into the halls of administration were carefully and sympathetically listened to - but not acted upon. Top-level administrators claimed that they were being presented with no coherent alternative proposals, as if a lack of consensus on what should be done meant there was no credible opposition to what was being done. Similarly, they dismissed critique offered on issues where most community members were ignorant of the details, such as the school's budgetary process.

One of the first things the board did was eliminate fasting during the last four days of courses - because it was potentially dangerous (although no problems had occurred in nearly 30 years) and because it was done inconsistently. Fasting had not been a pleasant experience for anyone who had done it, and certainly there were eating disorder issues to be addressed; but fasting was a symbol of NOLS's dedication to realistic training and its willingness to recognize the harsh, visceral potential of wilderness travel. Fasting may have dissuaded less-than-serious students from taking NOLS courses. The NOLS administration, which in a moral sense answered to the outdoor community but in a much more immediate sense now found themselves responding to another audience, did not defend these points or assert that lack of consistency (¹⁰⁾ was not necessarily a problem in good education.

The board delivered the idea that the important elements of NOLS should be objectively measured. Success was quantified by student days, outreach programs, school growth and publication sales. We found ourselves handing out forms on which the students were to evaluate us from one to ten in different "performance categories." At the end of each course we received bar charts expressing our performance. Because this model could not accommodate the human events of outdoor education, such as the triumph of a swim in a mountain lake or the gravity of a student confiding that he resists his parents' plans for him, such events became incidental. They were not officially part of why, or how well, instructors performed. Although I saw the disappointment of good students whose courses were distracted and dogged by the behavioral problems of unmotivated participants (who filled "enrollment objectives"), that disappointment did not show up as a number someone could take into a managers' meeting.

At the point when the instructors finally were driven to do the unthinkable and place good feelings aside, the company's internal conflict was swept under the rug. Critical letters to the school's newsletter about the administration's growing lack of trust and respect for its instructors were printed next to an administrator's instant rebuttal, so that on a superficial level all concerns appeared to have been addressed. Official "feedback" channels stripped messages of their emotional content so that, "Take your goddamn helmet policy and shove it!" became "A staff member had concerns about the new helmet policy. ⁽¹¹⁾"

But there is more to the story than pressure from the board. Over the years when these changes were occurring, a slow but inexorable demographic shift softened resistance to the erosion of the school's integrity. Top-level administrators, unlike the instructor and in-town populace, increasingly had homes, children, and lives which were not organized around freedom, rebellion, and adventure. The average age of an instructor also rose from 26 to 32, a jump which, in the demographics of adventure-seeking people, is anything but trivial. In effect, the outer edge of NOLS became less hostile to ideas such as regulation, uniformity, and hierarchy, while the interior of the NOLS community began to have a more ambivalent grip on its humanistic, egalitarian stand. While these changing perspectives were valid in the maturation of the individuals involved, they had a disastrous effect upon an organization which represented the pursuit of the wanderlust of youth.

Nor should fingers be pointed only at the board. While responsibility for the moral wreck of NOLS lay chiefly with its board, top-level administrators were too thoroughly involved not to know what they were doing. This was not the case of a company hiring a captain who then got drunk and ran aground. This was a case of an eager-to-please officer team being told to sail directly onto a reef and doing it because they thought it might provide a more stable future. Shouts and messages from the deckhands were ignored.

The consequences of this expensive adventure into corporate conformity are, like a ship going slowly aground, neither easily reversible nor joltingly apparent. It is doubtful that any NOLS administrators will note that their emperor now has no clothes on, that indeed whatever "emperor" of wilderness values there might have been has now departed to take up residence at some school that has not (as NOLS has) issued its own credit card. Yet there will be very real consequences. By this I do not mean the internal foolishness which will certainly occur at the school, such as a non-disclosure agreement required of incoming instructors, bans on nude swimming or sex between students, the requirement of toilet paper or a "quality assurance program." I mean problems in student quality, safety, morale and staffing which, while they may in time be correctly perceived as having arisen from NOLS's inappropriate change of style, will probably in the short run be rationalized away by the NOLS boosters as "bad luck and market forces."

For young people whose aspiration is not merely to attend a summer camp-like program where their friends have gone, but to join the rugged, self-reliant and self-styled outdoor community, NOLS courses are declining in appeal. The argument that the courses are still good, can still attend in the field to the matters that are important and seminal in wilderness-based culture, is at best a brave show. Field courses do, of course, build their own local realities which nurture students' classic interests in non-materialism and the priority of a human scale in human affairs. But when the school which the students approach to help them escape from society turns out not to affirm their grave newfound resolutions to consume less, but rather to suggest in their graduation packet that they now buy outdoor gear at "preferred NOLS retailers," the image of the nurturing haven outside of societal norms is, to say the least, lost.

From a safety point of view, failure to honor the quasi-revolutionary values of outdoorspeople is the ultimate short-sighted decision. As instructors become disaffected with the lack of counter-cultural idealism at the school, they will not only ask for more money to work there, but they will also no longer see their work as a personal mission to be done as well as possible. A dedicated community of the self-motivated has a built-in safety valve against supervisory ineptitude; an indifferent briefer can not undermine safety because instructors follow what is in their vision rather than what they are told. Yet in an outdoor school which demands that its hierarchy be taken seriously, an instructor will always be tempted to follow "accepted practices" even when s/he is aware of a better solution. No amount of safety briefings, training and communications workshops can replace the personal dedication to being an excellent instructor that comes from believing in what one's school is about. In the long term, a thriving NOLS community centered around a youthful vision of rebellion makes the school not only a good place to work but also a reasonably safe place to send one's children when they get interested in dangerous adventure. The anonymous skeleton of corporate structure has no understanding of the adolescent phase of life, or its attraction to death and its distaste for authority; it creates a school without a soul where the odds are that much higher that something will go wrong.

The boosters at NOLS are indifferent to the opinion of the outdoor community, so the loss of support from that direction is not likely to be too troubling to them. Yet historically many good students have come on the basis of a recommendation from someone in the outdoor community. Now it becomes difficult to recommend to young people a school where "Leadership" is being looked to as a word that can be marketed to attract parent dollars, and where the catalog - in recognition of the fact that hard information results in a certain percentage of cancellations - presents bland, content-free paragraphs about courses. Similarly, many outdoor people are ambivalent about instructing at a school whose style values them so little. Even as new people are applying for the Instructor's Course in record numbers, morale problems are stalking NOLS instructors as they approach their third or fourth year with the school. Few seasoned instructors are interested in going into an administration which is so divorced from the real concerns of outdoor education. Historically there was fierce competition for each office job; now a administrative position can be advertised and it may happen that no senior staff will apply.

Barring a severe economic depression NOLS will of course continue. Business will go on, and administrators will struggle to keep the wheels turning, even if they no longer think critically about what the meaning of this enterprise should be. Instructors and logistical staff will come and go, trying to fix what they see is wrong yet leaving without the essence of their message having been heeded. The company line will be that wilderness needs NOLS, and that NOLS needs to play society's game to help the wilderness. That NOLS can no longer hear the wilderness saying that society's game is itself the problem, and that the social agenda illuminated by wilderness expeditions is being hindered - not helped - by NOLS's behavior, will not be discussed. In its journey to bag yet another summit of public accolade, NOLS, a troupe of uncritical students in hand, will press forward, smiling for the camera, yet perhaps wondering when and where it lost the good will of its comrades.

 © Copyright 1997, Morgan Hite

Notes

¹"An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence." A Sand County Almanac, p.238 [back to text]

² The sense of incongruity was not limited to the outdoor community. The Canadian government refused NOLS's application for charity status on the basis that NOLS did not meet the qualifying test of benefiting society by promoting education. On the evidence of the catalogue and curriculum materials, Revenue Canada identified NOLS as conducting a business that was chiefly interested in its own success and was therefore essentially indistinguishable from a private guiding service. [back to text]

³ This made sense because it was apparent that no one could be trained for all the possible events - human and environmental - that could occur when a group of twenty strangers went on a journey of exploration outside of the normal world . The emphasis was on sharpening one's problem solving skills and dealing with each situation anew. There was no implication that things were ever the same twice, hence no dulling sense that things could be "routine." A normal river received the same analysis that an unexpectedly swollen one did, so there was no surprise when what looked normal turned out to be otherwise. Similarly, once-in-a-career social problems, such as religious conflict between fundamentalist students, were taken in stride with more common problems, such as someone hoarding food. [back to text]

⁴ Sax, Mountains Without Handrails, p.10 [back to text]

⁵ Technically wilderness cannot itself be the source of these strong social values. The out-of-doors have been used, like the Bible, to justify everything from fascism to anarchy. But when a population of wilderness travellers, such as the modern Sierra-Club type recreationalist, consistently perceives a place to reinforce certain values, then even if it is an echo of their own unconscious projection, the message in a practical sense can be thought of as coming from "the wilderness." [back to text]

⁶ Outside magazine, interestingly, was at this time bent on its own unholy project: the creation and nurturing of a populace of backcountry travellers who were not even in the outdoor community. Outside presented outdoor pursuits as a new venue for the health club set, a place to dress fashionably, be the first to go to a new destination, and commute in a new 4x4. This vision of outdoor pursuits without their social-values component meshed well with the desires of the NOLS board, which needed an ever-increasing populace of students who were not terribly values-bound. [back to text]

⁷ I am not arguing that marijuana belonged on NOLS courses: I am arguing that the question "What are the elements of outdoor culture that suggest the presence of marijuana within wilderness education is normal?" was never asked. [back to text]

⁸ If the subject were rope systems or water dynamics, no outdoor person worth his or her salt would ever swallow such an allegation without checking it out himself; but in the legal arena we never asked questions: we just took notes. [back to text]

⁹ As recently as summer 1997 Executive Director John Gans equated the good of NOLS with the good of wilderness. This argument can only lead to the conclusion that to oppose NOLS is to oppose wilderness. [back to text]

¹⁰ The notable exception to this, while it lasted, was NOLS's staunch defence of its judgement-based safety system. Finally in 1996, during the investigation of a student fatality, external reviewers asked what the school's river crossing practices were and the top-level administrators had a crisis of confidence. Instead of maintaining that practices were a complex function of environmental and human variables, they acceded that, yes, NOLS should have a ready answer to such questions, and instituted a "accepted practices" program. [back to text]

¹¹ This also created the illusion at the top levels of administration that all objections were mild. For this reason when I worked in the offices I began to encourage instructors and in-town staff not to confide their issues in me, but to jump the "channels" and take them directly to the administrators who could change policy. [back to text]