Featured speaker: Phoebe Young
How has our understanding of the outdoors evolved over time? In the past year many of us have longed for wild, unpopulated spaces, and at a more local level there is now a general consensus that time in nature is important. Recently, “nature deficit disorder” has even been named as a biological ill that must be remedied, and outdoor time an essential activity for mental health.
But the idea of wilderness exists in tension with the infrastructure and impact that humans leave behind in these spaces. Who has access to the outdoors, and in what ways? Should there be limits on the number and kind of interactions we have with nature? This salon will explore how humans experience the outdoors through the lens of history and culture.
Phoebe is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she focuses on the cultural and environmental history of the modern United States and the American West. She is the author of California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Her second book, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2021), traces the hidden history of camping and the outdoors in American life that connects a familiar recreational pastime to camps for functional needs and political purposes.
Related readings and resources
Phoebe S.K. Young
Erin Berger
This salon took place June 18, 2021.
