During his introduction to “Notes on Camp,” an episode of the National Public Radio program This American Life, host Ira Glass states there is a clearly discernible gap between “camp people and non-camp people.” (1) If this be the case, the photographs in this collection clearly come from someone who identifies with the former. In its uniquely American form, summer camps have proven to be a fertile ground for teen, coming-of-age comedies and horror films. More importantly, summer camps are one of the few remaining places where young people can have intimate and prolonged interactions with wild nature. These experiences are often their first and will continue to influence them for the rest of their lives in profound and subtle ways. Through these photographs, I wish to uphold that for all children, camp should be an indispensable and inalienable right of youth. In my case, those camps were specifically Scout camps, for which this book of photographs is a visual memoir, tribute, and at times critique. In concert, I hope they might form a subjective mash-up of what was, what is, and what still may be — given the ever present need that we all develop a closer relationship and understanding of the natural world in which we always find ourselves.

Like many others, I’ve conditioned myself to avoid nostalgia in order to project myself as a “serious” artist. Reflections on happy events in childhood can certainly pose a challenge to this front. Nonetheless, I reconcile myself to this dilemma with the awareness that it was not only as a returning adult, but also initially as a youth at camp that I first experienced and understood the nature of sentimentality — the interplay of campfires, folklore, and fireflies writ large in the romantic imagination of a twelve-year-old boy. I perceived that no one, save for those who had experienced the mysteries and camaraderie of camp-life for themselves, would ever be able to understand. In other incidences I hope the photographs will have some value as a visual ethnography of Scouting, with all of its rituals and insignias, the sources and significance of which I will return to below. Particularly with regard to Scouting BSA’s recent decision to include girls in all levels of membership and advancement (a move I wholeheartedly support), I hope this collection of images is not mistaken as a regressive call to champion the “old guard.” Rather, my intention is that it might eventually serve as a time capsule, reflective of Scouting’s early, and no less honorable days. Given that all of the photographs were taken prior to this policy shift in February 2019 and its subsequent official name change to Scouts BSA, I will for my purposes here continue to refer to the organization as the Boy Scouts of America, or simply BSA. Also, here I should make the distinction between “nature” camps, for which I use the term, summer camp, or simply camp, as opposed to “alternative” camps dedicated to athletics or performing arts.

For myself, the inspiration to produce this collection was two-fold — my experiences as a Scout in my youth, which formed a considerable part of my young identity and revelations made during a first semester graduate writing assignment on the origins and attributes of my personal land ethic. This term was originated by ecologist and naturalist writer, Aldo Leopold, to signify our moral relationships to land and its collective inhabitants, or lack thereof. (2) Most of us directly or indirectly fail to consistently behave in a manor beneficial or non-harming to nature. We do so, not out of belligerence, but out of a lack of thorough consideration of our explicit relationship to nature. The essay assignment challenged me to consider a variety of events in my early life from pop-culture influences such as The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss, and the National Wildlife Federation’s Ranger Rick magazine, to later inspiration from Leopold’s landmark collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac. At the center of all these images and ideas, however, was the sensorial and irreplaceable engagement with nature itself. In my youth, the most important sources of this interaction were seasonal, weekend camping trips and week-long summer camp ventures with the Boy Scouts of America. The New Arcadians is a furtherance of this original assignment, which I hope will inspire you to reflect not only on Scouting and summer camps, but the sources and importance of your own land ethic as well.

Throughout this project, the art history concept of Arcadia has proven to be a useful metaphor for contextualizing the values and aesthetics of the summer camp experience. The original Arcadia existed in the mountainous interior of the Peloponnese Peninsula of ancient Greece. It was a wilderness home to a society of hunters and herders, which lay forebodingly removed from the cultural and political seats of Greek civilization. Arcadia’s most famous denizens included Pan, whose half-man, half-wild goat effigy was worshiped in caves instead of temples; and Arcas, the land’s namesake and son of Zeus. Arcas and his mother, were eventually both turned into bears at the hand of Zeus, and then, according to legend, ascended permanently into the stars. Today we know the mother-son companions as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, or more commonly as the Big and Little Dippers. The tip of Arcas’s tail is Polaris, the North Star.

Although still a Greek province today, the Arcadia of legend was not to remain a wilderness, nor exclusively Greek. Through the painters and poets of the European Renaissance and later-day Romantics, Arcadia evolved from a physical geography into a metaphorical landscape. This Arcadia was an Eden-like, nearly unattainable, lost world of idyllic bliss, whose pastoral residents remained uncorrupted by the dawn of the Industrial Age. At least in paintings and print, Arcadia became an unspoiled naturalist’s Utopia, a happy meeting of cultivated field and primordial forest, where nature and culture resolved to live together in a harmonious equilibrium. Outside of this symbolic Arcadia, in the world of daily experience, these two poles were cast against each other as perpetual foils. Since the Renaissance, Western societies have been so transfixed by the notion of the Arcadian that the concept became canonized as a signifier of the central dilemma between humankind and nature. Arcadia became the ultimate terrestrial homeland from which we seem to have fallen, which provokes the question: how might we get back there? By contemporary standards, the theme may seem naive. There is no returning to a place and time that never actually existed. Norman Rockwell for example, who was famously commissioned to produce a wide range of Boy Scout inspired paintings, exists as an Arcadian-American, whose idyllic vision of scouting and American life is routinely dismissed today as quaint. Nonetheless, romantic ideals of nature and landscape were perpetuated by notions of the Arcadian through centuries of European and 19th century American art. The latter was represented most famously by the Hudson River tradition of landscape painting, whose artists had by-and-large moved beyond classical and historical European themes, replacing them with the wilds of the American landscape and frontier life. More rugged to be sure and occasionally lacking a human or pastoral presence altogether, some Hudson River artists chartered a return to a wilder Arcadia, but significantly, one within which the inhabitants or human psyche viewing it still felt largely at home.

Summer camps, like the concept of national parks, can best be seen as “Little Arcadias,” where people and nature can metaphorically return to a state of equilibrium. Granted, amidst the turbulent years of adolescence, this must seem like a lot to aspire toward even in symbolic terms. However, the values of a landscape designed to facilitate the integration of youth and nature within a framework of play, discovery, and folk traditions should not be underestimated. In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that if we knew where and how to look for them, nature myths and rituals have not been lost to Western culture, but have merely been buried to varying degrees. (3) As much as I may hope this to be true, I’m afraid overall that Schama’s scholarly excavations themselves suggest that these rites, though a part of our shared history, are not actively at work in mainstream culture today in substantive ways. At the very least, the veneer covering them is so seductive and ubiquitous that it prevents us from seeing and renewing our commitments to these nature-rich cultural forms and practices. Nonetheless, I must concede from my own experience, it is within the context of Scouting and summer camp in particular that nature-rich rituals do continue to find an active and ongoing expression. Songs and patrol affiliations are still full of direct and symbolic animal and plant references. Archery, the identification of local flora and fauna, canoeing, fire-building, tracking, self-reliance, and other environmental literacies from a seemingly bygone era have strong inherent value and cultural expression at camp, perhaps even more so in a technological age. The very structure of advancement within Scouting is even predicated in part on one’s demonstration of these skills. One could successfully argue that in BSA, these skills and attributes supplement others like civic responsibility and first aid. Yet for many, including myself, the underlying image of a Scout is that of a young woodsman and woodswoman, which attests to the inescapable contributions made to BSA at the time of its inception by Ernest Thompson Seton, whose early illustrations are featured throughout this book.

Prior to Scouting’s official U.S. formation in 1910, two other organizations were already vying for membership and acceptance among American boys — Seton’s, Woodcraft Indians (established 1901) and Daniel Carter Beard’s, Sons of Daniel Boone (established 1905). In fact, both of these organizations pre-date the original Boy Scout program in England, inaugurated by Robert Baden-Powell on a camping excursion to Brownsea Island in 1907. Baden-Powell’s organization would go on to become the progenitor of BSA and the World Scouting Movement, currently comprised of 169 independent organizations internationally and 40 million members. (4) By way of an uneasy truce, both Seton and Beard’s organizations would eventually be absorbed into BSA, whose growing membership and broader public appeal threatened to rapidly overtake them.

An author and illustrator by trade, Seton modified and expanded two of his earlier publications, The Birch Bark Roll and Two Little Savages  to create the first Official Boy Scout Handbook. (5) Additionally, he made regular contributions to Boys’ Life magazine. Surely captured by the romantic influence of the characters Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, in addition to his own backwoods adventures, Seton widely infused Native American motifs into his own organization and later into BSA iconography. Though sparse, much of the indigenous language used in Scouting comes from the Lenape or Delaware people, whose ancestral homelands include the state of Connecticut, where Seton lived and developed his Woodcraft Indians concept. Seton’s idea of “woodcraft” was the set of skills and knowledge derived from a life in the woods. In his view, American Indians, and other indigenous peoples by extension, were the original and greatest practitioners of the woodcraft way of life. These cultures and practices were seen as valuable models for interacting with nature. In theory, one could learn more about a particular landscape from indigenous cultures that have developed within or from out of a specific environment. Just as landscape-level characteristics like geology and climate produce a particular plant and animal community, so too do they collectively interact with humans to produce a particular language and culture. I speculate that Seton had grown disenchanted with his own European culture in many regards and was looking for fresh meaning and context to his wilderness experiences. Native American life-skills and mythology provided exactly the framework he was searching for. Although at times insensitive or comical to contemporary eyes, I see Seton’s adoption of these forms as entirely logical and consistent with his own values and aspirations. 

In his book Playing Indian, Philip Deloria conducts a survey of the use of  “Indian-likeness” throughout U.S. history by non-Indians. (6)  In each case, the non-Indians used the Indian image to reflect their own projections about Native Americans to achieve their own internal goals, which is true also of Seton. For Daniel Beard, Seton’s original competitor and ultimate ouster from his position as BSA’s first Chief Scout (1910-1915), Seton was a radical, a pagan, and worse still by Beard’s standards, a British-born, Canadian. Beard’s Scouting model was based on the ethos and likeness of the frontiersmen, cutting a path through the dark heart of indigenous America as he saw it. The values and aesthetic preferences of Seton’s Woodcraft Indians and Beard’s Sons of Daniel Boone can still be seen and felt within the DNA of American scouting. Truly, the American fascination with Indian-ness is fraught with great irony and painful contradictions. Nonetheless, I believe Seton was earnestly attempting to achieve nothing short of a spiritual transformation in his own life and those of young Americans entering the 20th century. He may have hoped to engender an affinity for the virtues of wild country that might be rekindled if only coddled feet were allowed to run bare over the soil while under a totem banner of wolf and bison. Embracing these practices raised the experience of Scout camp to the level of the mythic, but may have ultimately failed to bring a more nuanced appreciation for the different indigenous cultures and their distinctive landscapes. The answer, I believe, is for BSA to have a richer and more meaningful interaction with present day indigenous organizations in order to better appreciate their cultural/regional distinctions and histories, both communal and personal. Meanwhile, scouts will come to know which ceremonial practices they and other non-indigenous people can not only participate in appropriately, but also potentially play some meaningful role in their preservation. Just as Seton’s antiquated and high-impact, woodcraft practices have been modified by our contemporary Leave No Trace standards, so too can BSA’s “Indian lore” policies and practices be updated, improved and expanded upon with proper guidance.

Beyond these foundational influences, I personally find it difficult to separate the timing and unique attributes of the origins of Scouting in America (both BSA and Girl Scouts of America) from such events as the founding of our system of national parks and national forests during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even if these events are bound only by a common zeitgeist of the era, it was always a central tenet of BSA to develop character and better citizens through nature study and a robust outdoor life. Few things would be more salient today, than a new generation of visionary young people with an advanced level of environmental literacy or nature-intelligence to herald a course through the many social and ecological challenges of the present century. I propose that the sense of wonder and tactile, sensory experiences discovered at camp may very well form a cornerstone of these identities and values, as they did in my own life.

The growing body of research from health, rehabilitation, clinical psychology, and child development professionals tells us empirically that which we already know to be true: there is an incalculable and irreplaceable value in a life lived with direct interaction with nature. The pioneering biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson, himself an Eagle Scout and former nature counselor of his boyhood Scout camp near Mobile, Alabama, postulated a theory of biophilia. (7) He argues that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. We have co-evolved to form an architecture of the human mind that is inseparable from the desire to participate in these engagements. (8) In their absence, we risk becoming awash in feelings of alienation and depression, punctuated by public shootings and rising suicide rates. Though no panacea, youth summer camps should be re-evaluated as essential institutions because they mitigate the consequences of our oversaturation of electronic media and technology. Camps also directly address the dearth of opportunities for young people to experience nature; a nature, which by definition, does not include that of nature documentaries or fabricated, geodesic playgrounds. Richard Louv has been a pioneering and seminal voice in this area since his landmark publication of The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. (9) The Children and Nature Network, co-founded by Louv, has created an online database of abstracts from published research in this field. The findings show a strong correlation between exposure to “nature-rich” experiences and improved mental health and childhood development. These correlations include decreases in depression, anxiety, feelings of alienation, ADHD, and early onset of childhood diabetes. Studies also show that regular exposure to nature-play and interactions with animals, consistently have a positive effect on creativity, sociability, and empathy. (10)

For many years, a central focus of environmental advocacy regarding public land was the preservation of wilderness and roadless areas. One of the unintended consequences of these initiatives has been the lack of attention paid to the existence and quality of local parks and wild green spaces where most children and families primarily interact with nature in their daily lives. The present generation of environmental leaders and nature educators, currently in middle-age, were raised as “free-range kids,” to borrow Lenore Skenazy’s excellent term. (11) As such, we were inspired in our youth as much by “wild” experiences within our own communities and landscapes as those of the High Sierras and Continental Divide. A new call has come forth to re-examine the importance of local experiences and habitats. Likewise, I see summer camps as immersive and guided retreats that bring meaning, context, and confidence to regular and more frequent nature-play closer to home. Just as contemporary libraries are being forced to adapt or risk obsolescence and closure, so too must summer camp administrators re-imagine camps for new demands and opportunities, without losing what is best and unique about them.

Louv too has proposed the concept of a New Nature Movement, which aspires to bypass politically excluding labels such as environmentalism. The goal is to achieve a broadly inclusive movement dedicated to a cultural shift that promotes direct and integrated relationships with the natural world at a societal level. (12) Cities would be planned to become sources of biodiversity and agriculture, rather than sinks. Outdoor experiences would be promoted as primary versus alternative experiences to our normative indoor lives at home, school, work, and places of worship. Children from the earliest age should be guided to cultivate what Louv calls a “hybrid mind,” whereby a balance is struck between skills they need to survive in a technologically advanced world and the empathy, mental health, and mindful resilience that develops from regular contact with natural environments. Scouting BSA provides essential environmental education and access to nature for American youth. In the years to come I hope it will see itself as a valuable member of this community of New Nature Movement advocates. It can provide considerable leadership, but also learn a lot from the activities of other organizations with similar goals. Currently, no other single group can match BSA’s size, reach and infrastructure for educating and exposing children to nature.

I admire BSA for both its hesitance and its willingness to embrace change as demonstrated by its recent history. Each requires a measure of organizational self-awareness and confidence. I’m also enormously grateful to those Scouts and adult Scouters who continue to shape and improve the organization from within. For decades it seems that BSA has been under fire for one reason or another, but I think it is significant to note that its “agitators” were seeking inclusion into what they knew to be a good thing. Apart from these legal unfoldings, all members have had to defend the organization against common accusations of a perceived “uncoolness.” The rise and dominance of youth culture over the last half century is largely to blame. Even today, there is no universal definition of cool, only a narrow litmus test of things that fall out and things that fall in, only to fall out again. We even refer to do-gooders, or someone filled with an over-abundance of earnestness, as a “boy scout” in a pejorative sense. For most Scouts, it can be a long road to acceptance among non-scout peers, but is made entirely tolerable by the enriching and empowering experiences and sense of community one can find within BSA. It would be a tragic error for BSA to organizationally withdraw from a focus on outdoor activities as they once did for a brief period in the 1970s, in a misguided attempt to gain more popularity. Ironically, this occurred during a time when the U.S. was experiencing a boom in enthusiasm for backpacking. Seeking to attain a clearer understanding of issues and attitudes among young people is decidedly useful, but losing touch of oneself and what BSA does best while chasing after pop-culture acceptance is a fool’s errand to be sure. For current and former Scouts and Scouters engaged in this struggle, I hope these photographs will validate your own experiences and instill a renewed sense of purpose. You might wish to come back to the organization as a volunteer, or pass it along to another generation as a parent. And if you are a non-Scout, I hope the images may help you see the contributions of the organization in a new or more nuanced light. Likewise, for the later, I hope you will be reminded of the importance of your own local summer camp and nature center and help them to live up to their fullest potential as they struggle with their own issues related to funding and relevance among young people.

I hope all of these considerations will propel you to get outside more often and take your children with you. Stay for a few days or a week when you can. You may be required to dress differently, but you don’t have to vote differently. Simply redirect yourself and your family toward nature-rich activities and have fun. To the extent to which you enjoy it (or initially don’t), please do it again, and keep doing it. I also encourage you to find a naturalist within your community of friends and implore them to be your guide for the day. Their knowledge and experience is far too valuable to remain unshared. We may periodically visit a nature center with an interpretive program for an hour or two, and the fortunate among us may visit a national park once or twice in a lifetime, but there are few substitutes, at the right formative age, for the uninterrupted week children spend at camp in direct and immersive engagement with nature. The development of new and existing organizations that responsibly facilitate this relationship are of tremendous value.

My life and work as a visual artist, storyteller and naturalist is built upon an article of faith, namely, the belief that if we were a society of naturalists, we would not require a special interest group of environmentalists. Which is to say, if bank tellers, real estate agents, CEOs, school bus drivers, and pastors all had a basic, but intimate and receptive awareness of the natural world around them, we would intuitively create very different economies, architectures, and educational systems from the ones we have today. We have always been deeply interdependent with the land as a point of fact; we just need to behave like it’s so. To paraphrase poet and essayist Gary Snyder, an ill of society is not that we don’t know the names of the plants and animals around us, but that we don’t know, we don’t know them. (13) Summer camps and Scout camps are excellent playgrounds and learning grounds where these awarenesses are established and cultivated in childhood. Let’s strive to make them all even better at doing so. I hope these photographs will inspire you in the undertaking.

NOTES

1. This American Life, “Notes on Camp,” episode 109, originally broadcast August 28, 1998.
2. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).
3. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 14.
4. See www.scout.org/historical-highlights.
5. Ernest Thompson Seton, Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians, 6th ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1906) and Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned (New York: Doubleday, 1903). 
6. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3-9. For a detailed history of Seton and the BSA, see 95-127.
7. E.O. Wilson, Naturalist (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1994).
8. E.O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
9. Richard Louv, The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005).
10. See www.childrenandnature.org/learn/research/.
11. Lenore Skenazy, Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children, Without Going Nuts with Worry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).
12. Richard Louv,The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2011).
See also www.richardlouv.com/blog/seven-reasons-for-a-new-nature-movement/.
13. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 39.