The Outdoor Industry's Mythology

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis consumer spending on outdoor recreation contributed $640 billion to the national GDP, representing 2.3 percent of total economic activity. In Minnesota, outdoor recreation spending contributed $13.5 billion to the state GDP.

Outdoor recreation provides an outlet for millions of Americans, seeking solace and peace away from hectic professional lives. In the recently published “Minnesota’s Untamed Dividend, Outdoor Recreation Fueling Our Economy” report, 69 percent of Minnesotan’s report they participate in outdoor recreation to feel healthier.

In a thought-provoking book, the author examines America’s relationship with the outdoor recreation industry, public land use and Indigenous communities. From a perspective of environmental justice activism, the book challenges long-standing beliefs and narratives that underlie traditional approaches to outdoor recreation.

The term “wilderness” often conjures up images of pristine, untouched landscapes and places set apart from human history. But in your work, you argue that wilderness is something that has to be actively created. What do you mean by “wildernessing,” and how does it change the way we think about outdoor spaces?

In the U.S., wilderness is both popularly understood and legally defined in the Wilderness Act as a space outside the domain of human influence, where the processes of nature continue undisturbed, much as they have for millennia. These outdoor spaces are not “natural” at all, but constructed spaces designed to fit our preexisting conceptions. They are created through the removal of people living there—sometimes communities who had called these lands home for many thousands of years—and maintained though specific land management choices that don’t always replicate nonhuman processes.

Wildernessing, then, is the process by which these ideas of wilderness are created on the ground. They are the physical manifestation of social, political, and economic agendas. It is a difficult process to see because once it’s complete, it seems to prove the very wilderness mythologies that made it possible. What we see must have always been so.

For outdoor recreators and those of us who visit wilderness areas, state parks, and other outdoor spaces, understanding the history of these places should change how we look at them. They are result of choices we’ve made as a society that may or may not reflect our personal ethics and priorities. They serve as a reminder that even something perceived as unambiguously good has winners and losers.

The outdoor recreation economy is frequently celebrated as a success story for conservation and community wellbeing. Yet you suggest that the industry’s growth is tied up in what you call the “outdoor recreation industrial complex.” How do outdoor companies, public land agencies, and consumers reinforce one another in ways that benefit some groups while erasing others?

The outdoor industry depends on open, accessible public land. Companies like Patagonia or The North Face sell products and lifestyles that assume these lands will be available, explorable, and “wild.” In fact, they have invested considerable time and money to ensure that they remain so. At the same time, public land agencies benefit from the industry’s positive marketing. They get legitimacy and political cover for continuing to manage land under settler-state control. The land, seemingly protected, in reality remains available for resource extraction, should the security of our nation require it.

While this feedback system is enormously profitable for the outdoor industry, generating $1.2 trillion nationally in 2024, it is also unsustainable as a strategy for environmental conservation and the industries itself. In the past decade, we’ve seen that our flimsy recreation and conservation-focused land designations can be in the face of energy crises or other, more immediately profitable or politically expedient uses.

More importantly for the Indigenous communities removed from these spaces, the outdoor industry legitimizes the U.S. (and Canadian) governments’ continued control over stolen land, overriding Indigenous treaty-guaranteed sovereignty and rights. It allows corporations to profit off spaces that exist only because of Indigenous removal.

In Marketing the Wilderness you describe an earlier phase of outdoor marketing as the era of “frontier wilderness,” when Indigenous presence was actually part of how landscapes were represented to the public. How did this version of wilderness differ from the one we know today, and what can that history teach us about the way cultural ideas of nature shift over time?

This is important because it shows that how we understand wilderness and how we shape the environment to fit that idea isn’t inevitable or unchanging.

If you look at outdoor ads from the early 20th century, Indigenous people, or at least a romanticized version of them, were often portrayed as central to the wilderness experience. Far from an unpeopled land, Indigenous people were presented as authenticators of a landscape that stood outside of “civilization.” Of course, this was deeply problematic in its own way. Indigenous people were used as props in the myth of a lost American frontier at the same time that they were being confined to reservations and stripped of land and resources.

By the mid-twentieth century, however, this shifted. Wilderness was redefined as “untrammeled,” untouched by human hands. Indigenous people vanished from outdoor advertising, and the landscapes themselves were managed to look empty. I go into the reasons for this change in detail in the book, but what is shows is that wilderness isn’t a timeless idea. It’s flexible, it evolves with cultural needs, and, unfortunately, it remains an idea serving colonial purposes.

So much of outdoor branding leans into the figure of the explorer, from hashtags like #Explore to entire marketing campaigns centered on discovery and conquest. Why is the explorer archetype so powerful for consumers, and what does it obscure about whose lands are being explored?

The explorer is one of the most durable figures in American culture. He’s adventurous, independent, and heroic, someone who discovers new worlds and claims them. This is a classic and powerful archetype for outdoor marketers, so they invite consumers to step into the role themselves. Buy this jacket, climb this peak, and you too are an explorer.

The problem with this is twofold. First, this is a reenactment of the colonial fantasy of discovery. It positions outdoor recreation as a kind of conquest, not necessarily malicious, but still rooted in staking a claim. Through this performance, we reify a particular kind of relationship with the natural world, one that is extractive and devalues the inherent value and rights of the environment itself. Second, exploration requires the creation and re-creation of the kind of pristine, unpeopled landscapes I talked about above.

When we embrace the explorer story uncritically, we’re perpetuating a model that justifies occupation and erasure.

As Minnesota and the nation invest in outdoor recreation as a cornerstone of economic development, there’s also an opportunity to rethink what these spaces mean and who they serve. From your perspective, what would a more reciprocal and just outdoor future look like?

First, I want to make clear that I absolutely think Minnesota should be investing in outdoor recreation and environmental conservation. Outdoor recreation, including activities like hunting and fishing, are one of the primary ways Minnesotans encounter and build relationships with land and the natural environment. But investing uncritically and focusing exclusively on the economic benefits not only risks perpetuating the kind of colonial systems I’ve described, but it is also short sighted, keeping these lands in the same competitive market as other, more destructive economic interests.

A more just outdoor future would mean recognizing that these lands have histories and ongoing Indigenous presence. Land back initiatives, co-management, and treaty rights should be taken seriously as concrete pathways toward justice.

It would also mean shifting from a one-way relationship with land, where we take experiences from it and treat is as consumable, to a reciprocal one. That could look like learning the histories and ecologies of the places we recreate, seeing ourselves as part of an ecosystem rather than separate from it, recognizing rights and needs beyond that of ourselves as humans, and being willing to fight for places not just as backdrops for adventure but as living communities.

Finally, it would mean imagining alternatives to wilderness as the only model. Public lands don’t have to be pristine or empty to be valuable for recreation. They can be sites of human and nonhuman coexistence, of sustainable use, and of cultural renewal. While I understand and acknowledge the fear that moving away from the wilderness model could open up land for exploitation, not addressing wilderness’s contradictions and shortcomings comes with its own set of risks. Outdoor recreation has the potential to support a different vision, but only if it’s willing to let go of the myths that have defined it for more than a century.