Ultimate Survival - Alaska

There is a new show coming up in two weeks. It is called Ultimate Survival – Alaska. The show will air Sundays at 10PM on the National Geographic Channel starting May 12, 2013.

The premise of the show looks very interesting. It is supposed to take eight survival experts and just let them survive together in the Alaskan wilderness with what they have in their packs. From what I can see, there is no competition, no elimination challenges, or anything like that. It is exactly the type of show I would like to see. Here is what National Geographic has to say in their description:

“They are some the toughest, most extreme survivalists that Alaska has to offer. Going head to head, eight men of a rare breed are about to take the ultimate test of survival in Arctic conditions that only National Geographic could inspire. Dropped in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness by bush plane, with only their raw, mountain-man ingenuity, they’ll navigate through treacherous glaciated river valleys, barren ridgelines, and high mountain peaks, battling hunger, hostile predators, and perilous weather conditions along the way. Like the original National Geographic explorers, for those who succeed there is no grand prize, just the well-fought pride of having conquered the grueling challenges that Mother Nature can throw at them. It's an epic competition series where the only prize is survival.”

The spirit of the show seems very similar to other ones like the Alaska Experiment. It starts May 12, 2013 on the National Geographic Channel.

Jack Mountain Bushcraft Book List

Some of you might already be familiar with Jack Mountain Bushcraft. It is a wilderness living school started and operated by Tim Smith in Maine. The school is one of the few of its kind that takes this type of education seriously, providing long term emersion programs.

Well, earlier this week a fellow blogger pointed out that Tim Smith has put out a bibliography containing the book list provided to students of Jack Mountian Bushcraft as past of the student handbooks. It is an extensive list, that is divided into different categories. You can download the book list from Jack Mountain Bushcraft here, or go directly to the PDF file here.

As with most books, the content starts to get repetitive very quickly, so I’m not sure of the value of reading all of the listed books, but it is a great resource for when you are searching for good reading material in a particular category.

Traditional Camping and the Environmental Ethic – A different Perspective

A few days ago, a fellow blogger, posted an essay by Steven M. Watts titled Traditional Camping and the Environmental Ethic: Trail Food For Thought.

The article attempted to present a different approach to environmental conservation to the one that predominates the outdoor community today, namely leave no trace. Steven Watts contends in his essay that the leave no trace principle is mistaken in thinking that it has less of an environmental impact than what he calls “traditional” camping, i.e. chopping down trees for shelter and fire, hunting and foraging for food, etc. In his opinion, the resources required to create the technology necessary for the leave no trace approach (stoves, nylon tents, etc) has much more of a negative environmental impact than traditional camping. Since the article is titled “Trail Food for Thought”, and yesterday being Earth Day, I figured I would put in my $0.02.

In my opinion, the article is overly simplistic in its approach to the topic, while at the same time overly romanticizing a golden age of traditional camping. I believe both of those things lead to misguided conclusions.

Let’s start with the romanticism. Steven Watts defines “traditional camping” as the type of camping done by people like Nessmuk, Horace Kephart, Daniel Carter Beard, Ernest Thompson Seton, Robert Baden Powell, Col. Townsend Whelen. In his opinion what they did was very different from what he calls “the tree-hacking, tin-can strewing hordes of chumps that literally hit the woods following World War II”. After all, let’s not forget that it was exactly those people that by the early 70s had rendered every publicly accessible piece of forest completely covered with garbage and fare damage.

Now, Mr. Watts distinguishes those people from “true” woodsmen like Nessmuk, Kephart, et al, in part because the woodsmen did not tend to go through the forest, but were more sedentary, a point which I don’t believe to be necessarily accurate, nor relevant to the discussion on environmental damage. The article is a bit vague on this point, so I’m not sure what the author intended.

But let’s leave that aside, and assume that he was giving men like Nessmuk and Kephart as examples of a more environmentally friendly type of camping. Mr. Watts is in fact correct that their gear made less of an environmental impact in many ways. Much of it was old equipment, made of natural materials. Granted, it is an oversimplified view, as both Nessmuk and Kephart had state of the art technology, many times from abroad, but let’s leave that aside and assume the best of them.

Even while looking with rose colored glasses however, even the most casual reader of the above authors will point out that their method of camping was not sustainable. For example, in his book, Nessmuk speaks of chopping down one fully grown tree each night for fire and another fully grown tree for shelter. During the only ten day trip he recounts, he writes of killing three deer, which he left to rot after eating some of the meat for dinner. Kephart on the other hand makes numerous references of mule trains carrying his equipment into the woods and how to chop and nail trees to make camp furniture. Regardless of whether their gear was made from fairy dust, it doesn’t take an environmental expert to figure out that if every camper and backapcker out in the woods today took the same approach, there wouldn’t be a single tree left standing in any of the forest of the US, nor will there be a single animal left alive.

I think a large reason for what I see as the error made by Steven Watts, is that the above romantic view of woodsmen from the past is mixed in with an overly simplistic approach to environmental conservation.

It may very well be the case, or let’s at least say for the sake of argument that it is, that each individual trip made by Nessmuk caused less overall environmental impact than does a trip by a modern camper because of the high amount of resources the production and transport of his gear requires. What Mr. Watts neglects however is that environmental impact can not simply be observed as abstract numbers. Pollution, resource depletion, etc have very different impacts on different areas and local environments. So, while the production of a nylon tent might use up many resources around the world, the two fully grown trees that were just cut down for camp were concentrated within the same local area. Overall the global production might have a larger environmental impact, but the local consumption of resources will have a much larger and more negative impact on the particular forest and its biodiversity. 100,000 campers using modern tents and stoves uses up fossil fuels, causes CO2 pollution, etc. 100,000 campers in your local forest, each using up two fully grown trees for camp each night and killing a deer for dinner, turns the forest into a parking lot within six months.

Now, we shouldn’t be overly simplistic in the other direction either. Conservation efforts require proper maintenance of wildlife, which includes cutting down trees and hunting. However, it has to be done within the modern method. The practices of men like Nessmuk, Horace Kephart, Daniel Carter Beard, Ernest Thompson Seton, Robert Baden Powell, Col. Townsend Whelen are not sustainable despite how much we may wish they were.

Living in Balance With Nature

This will be a short post that got prompted by a painting that I saw from the 19th century.

We often talk when it comes to bushcraft about living in balance with nature. Utilizing the resources she provides while not taking more than the ecosystem can afford. It struck me that there are two distinct ways to do that. The first is creating a balance with nature as an intentional goal. This can be seen in modern conservation methods, where how much game can be taken any particular season is determined by studying the population of the particular animal and the carrying capacity of the regional ecosystem. Then there is the model that we often refer to in bushcraft circles, and that is the type of balance achieved by indigenous societies. This balance is often created not by intentional conservation efforts, but by necessity. In simple terms, some indigenous societies have no express interest in managing wildlife. They take as much game as possible and use as many resources as possible without concern for overuse. The balance is created due to the fact that their methods for exploiting the resources at their disposal are very inefficient.  

The above is a painting by Alfred Jacob Miller created around 1860. It depicts Plains Indians driving buffalo over a cliff. While the painting is certainly an exaggerated portrayal of such a hunt, it was in fact a hunting technique in use at the time.

A balance with nature can be achieved either by intentional control of how much resources are taken, so that there is no overuse, or the balance can be created by having the intention to take as much resources as possible, but lacking the ability to do so due to limited technology. It’s just something I thought about when looking at the painting.