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The confounding politics of camping in America

• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  I spent several years camping all over the U.S. recently, from the countryside to the sidewalk. I had a good experience doing it, and little trouble. Apolitical. If you're trying to not pay rent for a while and enjoy a more free lifestyle, I think it's worth dipping one's toes into, especially if you have prior camping experience.
• CyberRabbi 4y ago
  > Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it Huh? Anyone is allowed to camp in designated camping areas. No one is allowed to “camp” in random public areas. There is nothing anti-homeless about camping. Is this article for real?
  • clort 4y ago
    The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France (The Red Lily, 1894)
    • dfadsadsf 4y ago
      Another aspect of majestic equality is that insider trading laws and AMT apply to both CEO and the poor living under bridges.
      • plasticchris 4y ago
        It’s majestically equal that they frequently pay the same amount of tax too ;)
      • EL_Loco 4y ago
        It's also magestically equal that both the CEO and the homeless are entitled to the lawyers they can afford.
    • CyberRabbi 4y ago
      There are more effective and intentional ways to solve poverty than permitting theft and camping in public spaces.
      • objectivetruth 4y ago
      • foxyv 4y ago
        When those more effective ways are accomplished, then and only then would these laws be just.
        • CyberRabbi 4y ago
          So is it your position that we should legalize theft until poverty is solved? In what area of the world do you live?
          • foxyv 4y ago
            What I'm saying is feed and house the freakin homeless!
            • CyberRabbi 4y ago
              Well you implied that laws against theft are not just. I disagree but disagreement is fine. Just, in what general area of the world do you live? I’m in Louisiana by the way.
  • pjmorris 4y ago
    "As I went walking I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me." - 'This Land Is Your Land', Woody Guthrie
    • loeg 4y ago
      Guthrie's position was and continues to be relatively extreme.
  • presentation 4y ago
    "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule." - Giorgio Agamben
  • compiler-guy 4y ago
    The article starts at a time in American history where there weren’t campsites at all, and describes times and situations where certain people were either explicitly forbidden or highly discouraged from camping in designated places.
    • usrn 4y ago
      This is still the case in very rural areas. I remember camping in the fields down by the river as a cub scout. You just had to ask the farmer who owns them first, he would always say yes.
  • sjg007 4y ago
    You can camp anywhere you want in the national forests.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Almost. Got to be 1/4 mile from the nearest paved road.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      Somewhat. Permits are required in some places, especially Wilderness Areas and other heavily-used places. There may also be maximum length of stay restrictions. (And actual campgrounds typically charge and have set spots.) National forests may also lease land for non-recreational use, e.g. lumber.
  • dillondoyle 4y ago
    First, there is a huge amount of public lands where you can't just set up camp. National parks, lots of state parks, city mountain parks which are public and do allow camping have very limited permit access, rules, exclusions etc. Some lands which ostensibly should be dispersed camping allowed you can't even access bc you'd have to travel through private land. But your comment misses the entire crux of the article imho. It's not that camping is anti-homeless, it's that there has historically been - and still is - a societal judgement and double standard based on ethnicity, class, and housed status. It's about a double standard of the Govt forcing native Americans to give up their 'barbarous campfire life' while the rich were encouraged to have the same experience for the benefit of their health. Same happens today just not as extreme. Just to illustrate, i get this isn't the same as pitching a tent in front of someone's house. But society says it's not ok for the homeless to stay in their RVs on public streets but it is ok for people to stay the night in 150k sprinter vans. Not exaggerating, there are both happening in large numbers here in Denver. The difference is one can afford to move their place of rest around the other can't. I might try and take a photo at the Movement Baker gym there are 2 homeless RVs on the road and almost always at least 3 sprinters, usually one with doors totally open someone just chilling there living their day. Shower & internet inside. For the rich climbing dirt bag only though.
• linguae 4y ago
  A related issue to restrictions regarding camping is the politics of zoning laws in America. As someone who works in Silicon Valley and can afford to rent an apartment but cannot afford to purchase even a condo in the area, for the past few years I've researched alternatives such as living in a mobile home and buying land and placing a tiny house on it. However, the zoning laws in many of the municipalities within a two-hour radius of Silicon Valley make it very difficult to do these things. In all the municipalities I researched, I'm not allowed to live in a mobile home on my own land unless I'm in the process of building a home on a permanent foundation. Homes on a permanent foundation must meet minimum size requirements, thus prohibiting tiny homes and thus requires spending more money for a larger place. Permits can cost many thousands of dollars, and that's assuming I could get the permits. Water is a serious issue; in some parts of Monterey County, there are long waitlists to connect to the water system, and in Cambria (a town in northern San Luis Obispo County) there's an ordinance barring any new construction until more water is available. A part of me understands the rationale for these restrictions. But another part of me feels discouraged that the real estate market in much of California is all sewn up with no way to "hack" it without figuring out how to make $200K+ per year or throwing in the towel and moving to some other part of the state or outside California. Thus I continue to rent my apartment while trying to find other ways to get into real estate.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Serious answer: get into your local politics. Start calling up your representatives and demanding this change. Find a representative for which this is a key issue for them and start campaigning to get them elected or re-elected. Organize with other renters; there’s more of you than there are land owners there I bet. The number of voters needed to radically alter the landscape of extremely local politics is probably maybe a dozen or less in this way, btw.
    • zbrozek 4y ago
      I got 14 residents of Los Altos Hills to join me to ask for changes to local zoning law. The council completely ignored us. You have to be on the council, along with a like-minded majority. It'll be a full time job for all of you.
• OJFord 4y ago
  > reëducation Although that spelling makes sense, it's not one that's ever been widely used (since 'education' is from French éducation). So I'm not sure if that's an attempt to use a dated spelling (I noticed some others, such as élite) to conjure a certain je ne sais quois, or to forge a new trend for continental accents in English writing where it seems there ought to be?
  • hinoki 4y ago
    Here’s another New Yorker article to explain :) TL;DR: it was an arbitrary decision from long ago that they stick to despite getting many letters of complaint. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis/amp https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
    • throw0101a 4y ago
      > Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most. Personally I use a diaeresis as well. Not very hard on an Apple device: press-and-hole "o", wait for the pop-up, press 2. > This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
      • presentation 4y ago
        I thought it was kind of funny they wrote élitism, as the inclusion of the accent made the sentence itself feel vaguely elitist.
      • samatman 4y ago
        I'm particularly fond of naïve, it's just an attractive spelling of the word, one which draws out the unusual stress which marks it as distinctive.
      • 4y ago
• twofornone 4y ago
  >The government forced Native children to attend boarding school and subjected adults to dehumanizing reëducation projects. This isn't morally right by the standards of modern western neo-liberal culture, but with the alternative it is imperative that we accept that these different cultures are not likely able to achieve collective equity in a society of equal opportunity. And that's ok, because we have no right to impose our cultures onto others, even if we believe our practices to be better suited for success in the modern world. >In June, 2020, in Forks, Washington, residents mistook a mixed-race family for members of Antifa. The family, unemployed because of the pandemic, had been living in a modified school bus... The race of the family is completely irrelevant and serves only to race bait. Also there's no indication that they weren't involved in a little protesting on the side, especially when covering up such a fact would make their story far more sympathetic. The fact that racist policies were once common and sanctioned in the US does not imply that all modern inequities are due solely or significantly to discrimination, past or present, but that seems to be the consistent angle of material from high brow outlets like the New Yorker and NPR, exponentially so as of the last few years. If we cut out the race and political baiting and clearly define camping in the typical modern sense of a sleeping bag, tent, and/or trailer in an outdoor setting surrounded by nature then the confoundedness disappears. It's borderline disingenuous to treat a nature escape and a tent on a city street as conceptually the same activity just because both involve sleeping outside, and betrays an agenda.
  • supernovae 4y ago
• randallsquared 4y ago
  Only slightly related to the article is "stealth camping", which is an entertaining genre of youtube channels, including Steve Wallis. A recent example is https://youtu.be/OPDvLaXuSHQ https://youtu.be/OPDvLaXuSHQ Wallis is Canadian, but similar sensibilities hold with regard to camping in places that aren't explicitly marked as campable.
  • serenitylater 4y ago
    That reminds me, time for a step 2.
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    + 1 for stealth camping. Just be respectful of the land and others using it
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    I've seen a few of that guy's videos. He's very sweet and entertaining, but there definitely seems to be a bit of nose-thumbing and gentle protest in his stealth camping. I won't call it overtly political, but he does seem to like the idea of transgressing what he believes are silly laws, and given his homelessness in the past, there's also a "'til things are brighter, I'm the man in black" quality to it. All that to say, I think it is relevant to the article!
• carapace 4y ago
  (I'm quoting myself from a few days ago, sorry) Really it goes back to European vs. Native lifestyles and colonization. The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up. People who could get away from the towns and join Native American societies didn't want to go back. Whereas Natives had to be forced (typically with savage brutality) to adopt European culture. "Going native" was perceived as a serious problem, because it was: if you didn't like society, or your actual literal "master" (a person under the psychotic delusion that he or she actually literally owned you) you could try to escape to, say, the Sioux nation. We mostly exterminated or marginalized these societies, and filled and/or enclosed most of the open land, so it seems like options are fewer. And today we have "the homeless" to act as a goad: if you don't work you will starve in the street. There's not supposed to be a way out.
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    This is somewhat of a Noble native fallacy. Native American culture was diverse and a mixed bag. Some exercised extreme territorial claims and had very hierarchical societies. Some practice slavery and cannibalism.
    • carapace 4y ago
      Yeah, that's an unfortunate flaw in the above screed, and I appreciate you pointing it out. I do not mean that Native American cultures were or are some kind of fantasy elves or anything like that. Humans are humans. I'm trying to point out the deeper currents that underlie the stuff the article is talking about. They touch on it but they don't cut to the bone. I don't have time this morning to go into detail but the main points are: 1) The essence of state power is the ability of the king to command others to die for the state (often even before they reproduced!), this is almost entirely absent in Native American cultures. (At least in the ones we know about.) The Native view was that Europeans were not really free: they had to obey their kings. 2) There really was a serious problem with people preferring Native cultures to European cultures in the New World. Harsh measures were enacted. 3) Natives did not spontaneously adopt European cultures. Again, harsh measures were enacted. 4) Last but hardly least, Native cultures were integrated with ecological systems much more efficiently than European cultures. (This was almost certainly a major reason why Native life was generally more fun and easy than European life.) In sum, the reasons why we are messed up in the heads about camping today go back pretty far, and tie in pretty deeply with the structure of our culture and society. - - - - I can't help but add that I believe there is a way to fashion a new kind of society that fuses elements of Eastern, Western, and Native American cultures with modern science and particularly ecology to, uh, make a really fun and easy way to live, but that's a whole 'nother story and it's a sunny Sunday morning, so it'll have to wait.
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I didn't see it mentioned in the quick search of the article so a quick reminder that federally managed BLM land has the best use in camping options. You can usually go anywhere at your own risk of death and stay in any one place for up to two weeks for free
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I didn't see it mentioned in the quick search of the article so a quick reminder that federally managed BLM land has the best use in camping options. You can usually go anywhere at your own risk of death and stay in any one place for up to two weeks for free. National Forest are one step behind, rarely requiring permits with lots of free camping opportunities
  • lesgobrandon 4y ago
• sandworm101 4y ago
  How can such a huge article about camping, one that links it back to the civil war, not even mention the word "hunting"? If you want to talk about politics of the outdoors, there is nothing more illustrative than the different viewpoints of hunters and hikers.
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    There are some very interesting current developments in this area going on today with checkerboard public lands that are bounded on the sides with private land but touch other public land on the corners. Hunters will take ladders across from public land to a public land not touching the private land. There are some lawsuits from private owners saying this violates their property rights trying to stop it. If this is upheld, it would mean that only the private landowners have access to the National Forest
    • ghaff 4y ago
      In general, as areas get built up and properties get subdivided, activities that a lot of landowners didn't really have an issue with can start getting clamped down on. Of course, as around where I live, when people start tearing up paths with ATVs, that doesn't help either.
      • s1artibartfast 4y ago
        I'm sure that is an issue too, but I was thinking of areas where 10s of thousands of acres are broken into 160 acre parcels with checkerboard private public ownership. Here's a picture for context. https://www.seligmanaz.us/checkerboard-land-use/ https://www.seligmanaz.us/checkerboard-land-use/
• kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Camping is so easy out east and so difficult out west. People must be writing scripts to book these campsites on these websites the nanosecond they become available. Its such a shame.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Really? Certainly there are popular locations out West in season including but not limited to the national parks where it can be hard to reserve a spot/get a permit. But especially once you get to vast BLM and National Forest properties, with some exceptions it's usually pretty easy to just find a spot.In general, even backpacking in the East, your options tend to be more limited.