The Back-to-Nature Crowd

By the 1960s and 1970s, generational dynamics and modern environmentalism fostered new camping experiences that led away from amenity-rich and resource-heavy family campgrounds. Youth who came of age in this era shaped new forms of camping to support interests in self-discovery, countercultural values, and environmental awareness. Organizers and participants of the National Outdoor Leadership School, launched in 1965, began to link backcountry camping with countercultural mindsets, personal freedom, and connection with nature. In so doing they experimented with new social contracts in microcosm, and after 1970 increasingly began to align their mission with environmentalist agendas. Echoing the popular belief that the personal is political, many began to embrace specific forms of camping like backpacking as a way of expressing their identity and viewpoints. The new popularity of minimum-impact forms of camping in turn generated a growing market for high-tech outdoor gear intended to enhance experience and advance conservation.

Occupying Public Ground

Chapter 6 uses Occupy Wall Street as a window to examine episodes of politically inflected camping, particularly a series of encampments in the nation’s capital since the late 1960s. While for many Occupy seemed unprecedented, earlier protests that used camping to protest poverty, the Vietnam War, and homelessness reveal new perspectives on public nature. Many of them wound through the courts, culminating in a Supreme Court case from 1984 that examined whether the Constitution protected camping and sleeping outside as a First Amendment expression. The rise of the homeless crisis in the 1980s, which this last case concerned, was a significant development. Camping as function of poverty or as a platform for politics remained available as means of last resort—to find shelter or assert voice. Occupy, and protests that preceded it, attempted to use camping to reinvigorate political participation, to reestablish community and connection, and to renew the social contract.

Comrades and Campfires

During and after the Civil War, Union army soldiers and veterans attempted to make sense of their military camping experiences, which could exemplify generational camaraderie, political organization, and national belonging. This chapter follows the career of John Mead Gould, a soldier from Portland, Maine who kept an extensive diary and published a camping manual in 1877. It also discusses the role of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization that organized reunions in the form of annual encampments as part of a campaign to lobby the government for veterans’ pensions. Its form of camping put forward the veteran as a new exemplar of the ideal citizen for a modern commercial age. Veterans claimed a meaningful place in a world where the nation’s social and economic underpinnings were in flux and understandings of citizenship, manhood, work, and success were shifting under their feet.

Establishing the Campers’ Republic

Chapter 4 focuses on how federal agencies responded to the growth of recreational camping—popularized among the middle class by the mass production of the automobile—and the challenge of new waves of transients and protestors during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, recreational camping gained state sponsorship as an exercise of democracy spurred on by the design of the loop campground and its related social philosophy. As the New Deal rapidly solidified the terms of a new social contract, campers added their own set of expectations. The vast expansion of a public landscape for recreational camping emerged as counterpoint to the unsettled masses of the Great Depression and became an effective tool for national recovery. By the 1940s, citizens were claiming rights of access to or, in the case of African Americans, protesting exclusion from this public camping landscape.

Introduction

The introduction explains the complexities involved in the definition and history of camping, and the ways its recreational, political, and functional versions have intertwined and coevolved. It relates camping to the concept of the social contract that anchored the founding era of the United States, particularly as an agrarian ideal promoted by Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, it introduces the term “public nature”—both outdoor spaces and ideas about those spaces as settings where people work out relationships to nature, nation, and each other—as a useful way to approach the key questions of the book: What does it mean to camp, and why does it matter? The introduction offers a brief overview of the social contract and its relationship to public nature through the early twentieth centuries, touching on John Locke’s philosophy, back-to-the-land movements, the growth of urban industrial systems, consumer culture, and preservation movements.

Tramps and Tramp Style

Chapter 3 delves into the stories of early leisure camping enthusiasts, particularly among the elite classes, and what they hoped to find by venturing into the outdoors. It traces how leisure camping gained popularity and respectability through the 1910s in parallel with the marginalization of functional campers. Proliferating outdoor magazines and guidebooks suggest how campers imagined themselves making temporary homes in the wilderness, complete with negotiations over gender and modern family relationships. They did not have the woods to themselves, as the phenomena of tramps, hoboes, and itinerant workers grew during the same era, both in numerical terms and in public alarm about what their seeming rootlessness might portend for the nation. Reactions to tramps and workers heightened the cultural resonance of leisure camping, particularly as a consensus emerged around camping as a temporary pursuit that relied upon the existence of a permanent one.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly surveys the twenty-first-century landscape of camping—a dizzying continuum from glamping and adventure styles to new streams of mobile laborers, from campground hosts to Amazon’s Camperforce. Meanwhile, advocates of recreational camping—and the outdoor recreational industry—have begun to trade in narratives of biological need and social prescription, of a nature-deficit disorder and a nature cure. Time spent recreating in nature is now promoted as a universal human need, to keep our bodies and minds in balance. Recreational camping came to promise, in the neoliberal framing, a good return on private investment in terms of family health and personal well-being, more so than democratic access to public nature. The parallel rise of this justification for leisure camping and the intensifying homeless crisis—both thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic—strongly suggests that the social contract may again be in transition.

The Roads Home

Chapter 2 follows the early travels of John Muir to get a glimpse of the highly mobile landscape of the decades that followed the Civil War, particularly in the South and West. Before he rose to fame as the founder of the Sierra Club, Muir walked the country’s roads alongside mobile laborers, newly freed African Americans, and Native peoples. For them, as for the itinerant naturalist, sleeping outside could constitute a marginal and perilous, if all-too-familiar existence. Muir alternately knocked on strangers’ doors, slept outside in fear of disease and alligators, and herded sheep in Sierra meadows. His interpretations and criticisms of Black and Indigenous people figured into Muir’s seminal perspectives on wilderness, which in turn influenced changing views of public nature, including recreational and nonrecreational campers alike in the late nineteenth century.