【三日免費】 (05/22) The Great Outdoors 廣袤的戶外天地

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Advanced studio classroom is on the air.

[00:00:12]Join us as we explore America's national parks.

[00:00:34]Hello listeners and welcome back to another advanced studio classroom. My name is Simon and you are joining me along with my co-host Linda in the studio today for our April environment article. The article is titled The Great Outdoors. Linda, what is so great about the outdoors? It has nature and it has fresh air and it's beautiful. I love the great outdoors. Hello everyone. But when we say the great outdoors, we're not usually talking about how great the outdoors are. It's how big it is. Yeah, the grandness of it. So the great outdoors generally does not refer to your backyard or the little garden you have on your balcony, even if there are beautiful birds there and plants to look at. It refers to big open spaces like national parks.

[00:01:25]We see that there's a subtitle here today for our program.

[00:01:29]>> yes.

[00:01:30]>> Oh, the deck, yes.

[00:01:31]Good, thank you.

[00:01:33]>> of nature on a nation's identity. This is an interesting line for me. I don't know it for you as an American what this line means. I see this as being very true because Canadians tend to identify with the northernness of our environment. So, snow and the Arctic and all of these things. They play a very strong role in what makes things Canadian. So, for example, Canadian stories are often set in the north. There's kind of an irony to that because most Canadians do not live in the north. They live along the US border in the south. But, it's still an important part of the way we think of ourselves. Tell me, what does that mean to you as an American? Well, just a comment on your Canadian perspective.

[00:02:23]Um, well, you have a greater portion of the outdoors um in Canada. Like, you have a smaller population versus like the amount of undeveloped, uninhabited land. Um, we also have the great outdoors in the US. I actually didn't grow up exploring nature that much as a kid. Um, and I actually haven't been to that many national parks. But, it is very important to the identity of the US.

[00:02:53]>> So, if I were ever describing Canada and saying Canada is closely associated with the north, I would say the US is closely associated with There's two words I would think of. One is two words. They both start with W's. And then, the other one is one word that starts with an F.

[00:03:11]Do you know which ones I'm talking about?

[00:03:13]>> Wilderness? No, the wild west and the frontier. Those are two things I think of as being very American kind of ideas.

[00:03:21]Like, this you know, obviously the US was sort of first settled by Europeans along the east coast and then they moved west. And so, those areas, those frontier areas, the areas that were sort of separate from developed areas, the frontier, the edge, were wild places and they were in the west. So, I think of that like, you know, when I think of Americans, I think of things like cowboy hats and Yeah.

[00:03:46]>> barbecue and all of those things are kind of associated with the American environment.

[00:03:50]>> It's true. The two words that you gave are the references that you The Wild West and the frontier the great frontier, but those are all in reference to humans, people going to explore those lands, to develop those lands, to inhabit them. So, it's not it's not preserving them like we think of the great outdoors. Like you go to see it, but you leave it as is.

[00:04:15]The Wild West was there to be conquered.

[00:04:18]The great frontier was there to be inhabited. So, I think it's a different Yeah, different idea. I think it did sort of define the American national identity, though. Yes. Right? It's part of what we think of as being American.

[00:04:32]Yeah. I mean, here here we're on an island that the Portuguese named the beautiful island, right? So, we have a similar kind of process here involving like the way people think of themselves on the island, right?

[00:04:45]>> Also, land is much more limited here because it is an island. You know, you don't have this expansive amount of land to go and conquer or go to inhabit like we did in the US.

[00:04:59]>> Well, people in Hawaii have They I've heard people when I've been in Hawaii talk about like island living or like the island mentality because you're living in a place you can't just get off of, right?

[00:05:13]You can't just drive out of the island.

[00:05:15]You're sort of stuck. So, I guess in that way being surrounded by the ocean does kind of affect your identity, too, as an individual and as a group of people. It does, but it's ironic living here on this island. I don't feel that island mentality that you're referring to. Um like there is in Hawaii and Jamaica.

[00:05:35]>> bigger than Hawaii, though, you know.

[00:05:37]Yeah, it is. But there just doesn't exist I don't think that island mentality that same island mentality exists here. And that's due to culture and history, different reasons.

[00:05:50]Listeners, it's your chance. Join the conversation. Tell Linda and I how we're completely wrong about the way you perceive your identity in relation to your environment.

[00:06:01]Uh listeners, we're going to explore the ways that this sort of idea of space and national park have affected American identity as we read through our article.

[00:06:12]If you have your magazine with you, I would encourage you to open it up to the environment article. If you don't have your magazine, I would encourage you to get one because it's the easiest way to support us here at Advanced Radio. Um okay.

[00:06:27]Are you ready, Linda? Should we do our first reading? Let's do it together now.

[00:06:38]The Great Outdoors.

[00:06:40]The influence of nature on a nation's identity.

[00:06:44]As summer approaches, millions of Americans begin planning or taking trips to state and national parks seeking to explore the wide range of outdoor recreational opportunities across the nation. A lot of them will head toward the nation's wilderness areas, 110 million acres mostly in the west that are protected by the strictest federal conservation rules. When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, it described wilderness areas as places that evoked mystery and wonder where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. These are wild landscapes that present nature in its rawest form. The law requires the federal government to protect these areas for the permanent good of the whole people. This belief is an idea eloquently articulated and popularized 65 years ago by the noted Western writer Wallace Stegner. His eloquence helped launch the modern environmental movement and gave power to the idea that the nation's public lands are a fundamental part of the United States national identity and a cornerstone of American freedom.

[00:08:17]All right, Linda. You got to give us some insight here. This first paragraph, it's talking about summer approaching and so millions of Americans are planning trips to state and national parks. Now, obviously our listeners will have heard of famous American parks like Yellowstone, things like that, right?

[00:08:35]They're these huge parks, but they're not really that huge when you look at a map of the United States, right? I mean, it's not like 30% of the country is in these parks or something.

[00:08:46]>> I mean, they're they're spread out, but like these parks, I mean, like the Yellowstone National Park and Grand Canyon, they're pretty big.

[00:08:55]>> All right. Okay, so Americans plan to go to them. Yes.

[00:08:58]>> It's like a an American summer pastime.

[00:09:01]>> Mhm. To go to national parks.

[00:09:02]>> Yeah, families go to national parks.

[00:09:04]They take a road trip to visit the parks.

[00:09:08]>> Why?

[00:09:09]Why like why not Disneyland?

[00:09:11]>> I mean, they go there, too, you know.

[00:09:14]This is just one of the options that they See, I a number of years ago, camping became very popular on the island and I spent a lot of time wondering why camping was popular because, you know, I went camping and people tend to camp in a very different sort of way here. Like I went camping with a group one time and they had Well, they had a tent set up for video games, you know?

[00:09:37]>> Mhm. Like so, you know, it's it's not like people set up their tent and then went hiking.

[00:09:44]You know, we sort of hung around the camp and cooked and it was a social thing as opposed to a wilderness experience.

[00:09:51]>> of just being close to nature because you have all of the modern amenities there. You even have toilets, but if you are really going want to going to go into the wilderness, then you leave all of those modern devices and technology behind so that you can truly experience nature. See, I'm not sure you do. That's the point I'm kind of getting to here.

[00:10:13]Like the last time I was in a national park. Now, admittedly, this was in Canada.

[00:10:17]A huge section of the campground was filled with like mobile homes. Like those vehicles you drive that you live in, right? Like you know, you could take a shower. But they still had sort of facilities that the normal people in the little tents had to share the bathroom.

[00:10:34]Yeah, and that's a different form of camping. But my idea of like camping camping you are out in the wilderness and you don't have you don't have technology. I mean, you might use your phone for navigation, but that's about it.

[00:10:49]>> So I think I think what we're getting down to here is this idea of camping in these national parks, it is the way we think of it is more a matter of identity than of reality, right?

[00:11:00]>> Could be, yes.

[00:11:00]>> lot of people who camp in North America basically just put a tent up beside their car.

[00:11:05]>> Mhm.

[00:11:06]>> drive wherever they're going or they >> It's what we did car camping. Yeah, it's much more convenient. But then like you will leave your like you might set up camp there, but then you go and take hikes into nature and then come back to where you camped.

[00:11:19]>> So there's this expectation of camping being more raw or less comfortable and involving wilderness experience, maybe.

[00:11:29]Yeah, I think traditionally, but now camping can be as comfortable as your own home. They have so many like amenities offer. So it just depends on what kind of camping style you want to partake in. So this idea here, we actually see this in the language of this paragraph. Like if we go on to the second sentence it says a lot of them will head towards the nation's wilderness areas. Now there are actually wilderness areas is like a category of park. It's like a park that has less facilities, right? But in general when we're talking about the wilderness, we're talking about places that are uh not serviced for human convenience.

[00:12:08]They're just sort of natural areas.

[00:12:11]Tells us there's 110 million acres mostly in the west that are protected by the strictest federal conservation rules. Now just quickly Linda, uh what is conservation?

[00:12:23]Conservation is preserving the environment, protecting it. That includes the wildlife and the plant life that are in that area. Okay. So they say that basically these areas in the US, they are protected by the strictest federal rules and those rules come from a law that here I mean here they use the term act which is basically the name we use in the title of a law, the name of the law. What is that law?

[00:12:53]>> It is called the Wilderness Act and it was passed in 1964.

[00:12:59]Okay. And it described wilderness areas as places that evoked mystery and wonder. So therein too, we have part of that identity, right? What is the wilderness? It's a place that invokes mystery and wonder. Now what is evoking?

[00:13:16]To cause, to Cause you to like think of, right? Yes, make you wonder, make you wonder why or just to bring out a sense of awe. So mystery here, I suppose the mystery would be like what is my purpose in life or you know, finding your place, things like that.

[00:13:35]>> admiration of nature's beauty. The wonder there, yeah. Okay, so where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man. Now man here obviously means humans.

[00:13:49]>> Mhm. But untrammeled? Means to be not limited by anyone or anything. So it's unlimited. And then they say where man himself, people, are visitors who do not remain. So you can't live there, can't build your home there, you can only pass through.

[00:14:08]>> And that is key because wherever humans go, they destroy the environment. Okay, so it goes on to tell us here that these are wild landscapes that present nature in its rawest form. Now again, I've been to national parks where you know, phones were available and there were vending machines and bathrooms and shower facilities and all kinds of things. So it's not like there's no human impact on these areas.

[00:14:35]But there is this idea that they should be somehow purer and left more wild, right?

[00:14:40]>> Mhm. And I think those facilities are limited to a like the visitor center area. Like they don't have those things all throughout the park.

[00:14:49]>> But if you're on a hiking trail and you come out towards the end of the trail, you know, you can find garbage and recycling.

[00:14:57]So somebody is clearly collecting the garbage and the recycling from those things, right? Different things like that. So there's different levels of human interaction here.

[00:15:07]As we go on into our next paragraph, it tells us what the law requires.

[00:15:11]What does it require? It requires the federal government to protect these areas for the permanent good of the whole people.

[00:15:20]>> Whole people's an interesting term.

[00:15:22]Yeah, it just means everyone.

[00:15:25]>> everyone. Yeah.

[00:15:25]>> Yeah. So, they're available for everyone and the permanent good means they should uh you know, be sustainably held in the condition they're in forever.

[00:15:36]>> This belief is an idea eloquently articulated and popularized 65 years ago by the noted Western writer Wallace Stegner. Okay, so eloquently articulated basically means beautifully said, right?

[00:15:52]>> And popularized by this noted writer.

[00:15:55]What's a noted writer? Um famous writer.

[00:15:59]>> Well known. Okay. And so, his eloquence, his beautiful speech, helped launch the modern environmental movement and gave power to the idea that the nation's public lands are a fundamental part of the United States national identity and a cornerstone of American freedom. So, a fundamental part of the identity basically means one of the essential elements, one of the things you can't remove. So, uh what then is a cornerstone?

[00:16:30]So, literally a cornerstone in a building is a very, very important part.

[00:16:35]Like you need If you didn't have the cornerstone, the The building falls down.

[00:16:40]>> Yeah, you wouldn't be able to have a building. So, cornerstone is something that is extremely important that everything else depends on. And so, So, how are these parks a cornerstone of freedom? I think part of it is that idea that it's shared by everyone. It's for the whole, right?

[00:16:56]>> Yeah, it represents freedom and that is one of the tenets of the United States of America.

[00:17:03]>> sort of if you have a very wealthy person who owns a lot of land and you have a poorer person who doesn't own land, once they pass into one of these national parks, they are equal. Mhm.

[00:17:15]They are equal owners of the national park, right?

[00:17:18]>> It's available to everyone.

[00:17:20]>> to everyone.

[00:17:20]>> The whole people. There we go. That brings us to our second reading. Let's do that together now.

[00:17:32]Humble origins.

[00:17:34]In 1958, Congress established the outdoor recreation resources review commission to examine outdoor recreation in the US in order to determine not only what Americans wanted from the outdoors, but to consider how those needs and desires might change decades into the future. One of the commission's members, David E. Pesonen, was asked to examine wilderness and its relationship to outdoor recreation. Pesonen had no idea what to say about wilderness. However, he had been impressed by the wild landscapes of the American West in Stegner's 1954 history, Beyond the 100th Meridian, John Wesley Powell and the second opening of the West. He wrote to Stegner at Stanford University asking for help in articulating the wilderness idea. Stegner's response, which he said later was written in a single afternoon, was an off-the-cuff riff on why he cared about preserving wildlands. This letter became known as the wilderness letter and marked a turning point in American political and conservation history.

[00:18:57]So, my understanding, Linda, is that this sort of national park movement, it sort of developed in what I would describe in English as fits and starts, which means kind of >> I wasn't convinced.

[00:19:10]>> periods of activity and then periods of, you know, so as far as I know places like Yellowstone were sort of created by you know, like Theodore Roosevelt during that time, right? And largely because you know, Americans who had been moving west had reached the Pacific Ocean. Like they'd run out of wild west to expand into and there was a concern that it was all going to get gobbled up. So they needed to set land aside, right? But we see a very different thing happening here in the middle of the 20th century where rather than just practically setting land aside, there's a different kind of idea emerging like an environmental movement. I think they describe it here, right? Yeah.

[00:19:51]>> So what would have what would have caused that?

[00:19:54]Well, in 1958 they established commission, the outdoor recreation resources review commission and their job was to examine outdoor recreation in the United States and then determine what Americans wanted from the outdoors and also to consider the needs and desires, how those needs and desires might change in the future. So they'd sort of set land aside, but they weren't really sure how to use it.

[00:20:26]Right? Like actually one of the things I discovered in in the lead up to this article was that there are huge amounts of land in the United States that are public lands, but they're not protected. They're like owned by the government. You know, like if you go to somewhere like Arizona, like it there's a lot of desert in Arizona, right? People don't live on all of that. People it wouldn't support huge millions of people crowding into that kind of environment, but that doesn't mean it's sort of protected and set aside for public use for things like camping. Doesn't have any services, those kinds of things. So there was clearly land set aside, but there was sort of a desire to have people able to interact with it. But it is protected in the sense that you couldn't go there and like build something on it or use it for your >> Yeah, but I think that largely emerged through this Wilderness Act in 1964. So, as a result of this commission movement, like they set up a distinction between public land and park. You know, I mean they already obviously had that legal distinction, but the idea of what was meant by each is probably a different thing. Because of course public lands in the United States, uh as I understand it, like you can get approval to do things like mine on the public land, right? Or log public land or things like that, but that's hardly conservation and protecting the public land.

[00:21:52]>> Mhm. So, a different kind of idea here.

[00:21:54]One of the commission's members was David E. Pessinen, and that person was asked to examine wilderness and its relationship to outdoor recre- recreation. So, when we say wilderness here, we're kind of talking about the idea of the idea of wilderness, right?

[00:22:11]>> Mhm. As opposed to just the environment itself, okay? So, uh this Pessinen, this member of the commission, had no idea what to say about this. And so, he sought help.

[00:22:24]Exactly, he sought the book, the writing of Wallace Stegner. Yeah. This book was entitled Beyond the 100th Meridian, John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. So, he was impressed by all the descriptions of the wild landscapes of the American West in Stegner's book.

[00:22:46]Tells us the writer was at Stanford University, clearly not involved in technology at the time though. It was a writer, right? A good reminder that Stanford University does more than Silicon Valley, I suppose.

[00:23:00]Anyway.

[00:23:00]>> Sorry, and his name was Wallace, not William.

[00:23:03]>> Oh, Wallace. Yeah. There we go. And so, basically, our commission member asked this person from the university, this noted writer, for help in articulating the wilderness idea. So, you know, "Hey, you're a writer. You're very eloquent.

[00:23:18]You're good at using language in a beautiful way. Help me. Give me the words to explain the idea and the importance of wilderness, this wilderness idea." And this, of course, would be that sort of American point of view, that American identity. Stegner responded. And what did he say about that? Well, he said that he ended up writing what he wrote in a single afternoon. So, it was and it was off the cuff. It wasn't planned um or rehearsed. And it's described as a riff. And something that's a riff is or gives the appearance of being unplanned. Um we can also use this in song if someone is riffing in song, like they are just making up as they go along. Um So, he did it off the cuff. He did it not really planning and wrote this piece on why he cared about preserving It the wildlands.

[00:24:16]>> It would be fair to note, though, that the reason the commissioner found Stegner was because Stegner had already written books about wilderness, right?

[00:24:26]So, he maybe didn't revise the the text multiple times. He just wrote it in one afternoon, but it was clearly a thing the writer had cared about for a while and put a lot of thought into.

[00:24:38]So, nonetheless, we get this piece of text, and it was a letter. And the letter later then became known as the wilderness letter, and it marked a turning point in American political and conservation history. So, a turning point here basically means uh a point in history or time where everything changes.

[00:25:01]And interestingly enough, it changed American politics and conservation. Why?

[00:25:05]Probably because It must have been a very moving letter. Yeah, it probably >> Very well worded. Very We already know he's very articulate, so put this environmental issue back on the political agenda. We mentioned that the development was in fits and starts, so it was probably something that people were not thinking about very much until they read the letter, and then everyone was thinking about it. Now listeners, we are not done with our environment article, but we are done with our program for today, and so we are hoping you will join us for the next part of this lesson tomorrow. But until then, I'm Simon. I'm Linda. Saying goodbye for now. Goodbye.