Timothy Egan posted an interesting “Opinionator” piece to the New York Times today titled “Nature Without the Nanny State.” It discusses the rising incidence of city-bred visitors ignoring common sense precautions when visiting national parks, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Here’s the meat of the piece . . .
More than ever, an urban nation plagued by obesity, sloth and a surfeit of digital entertainment should encourage people to experience the wild — but does that mean nature has to be tame and lawyer-vetted?
My experience, purely anecdotal, is that the more rangers try to bring the nanny state to public lands, the more careless, and dependent, people become. There will always be steep cliffs, deep water, and ornery and unpredictable animals in that messy part of the national habitat not crossed by climate-controlled malls and processed-food emporiums. If people expect a grizzly bear to be benign, or think a glacier is just another variant of a theme park slide, it’s not the fault of the government when something goes fatally wrong.