NATURE IN POPULAR CULTURE

Popular culture is less directly tied to the physical environment than are folk and indigenous cultures, which is not to say that it does not have an enormous impact on the environment. City dwellers generally do not draw their livelihoods from the land. They have no direct experience with farming, mining, or logging activities, though they could not live without the products and materials produced from those activities. Gone is the intimate association between people and land once known by past folk generations. Gone, too, is our direct vulnerability to many environmental forces, although this security is counter-balanced by new risks. Because popular culture is so tied to mass consumption, it can have enormous environmental impacts, such as the production of air and water pollution and massive amounts of solid waste. Also, because popular culture fosters limited contact with and knowledge of the physical world, usually through recreational activities, our environmental perceptions can become quite distorted. (See Rod’s Notebook.)

Popular culture makes heavy demands on ecosystems. This is true even in the seemingly harmless activity of outdoor recreation. Recreational activities have increased greatly in the world’s economically affluent regions. Many of these activities require machines, such as snowmobiles, off-road vehicles, and jet skis, that are powered by internal combustion engines and have numerous adverse ecological impacts ranging from air pollution to soil erosion. In national parks and protected areas worldwide, affluent tourists in search of nature have overtaxed protected environments and wildlife and produced levels of congestion approaching those of urban areas (Figure 2.45).

Such a massive presence of people in our recreational areas inevitably results in damage to the physical environment. A study by geographer Jeanne Kay and her students in Utah revealed substantial environmental damage done by off-road recreational vehicles, including “soil loss and long-term soil deterioration.” One of the paradoxes of the modern age and popular culture seems to be that the more we cluster in cities and suburbs, the greater our impact on open areas because we carry our popular culture with us when we vacation in such regions.