I went camping in the Catskills and I have many thoughts about how wilderness management, as currently run by the NY Dept of Environmental Conservation, is effectively racist.

@NYSDEC forest rangers & local police are busy fighting one singular enemy of wilderness: Overuse. That includes people tramping around wet spots on trails, crushing stream-side vegetation, and most of all parking cars at swimming holes in ways that block the roads.

In the area we visited, the Peekamoose valley, most users are Latino families looking to sit in a cool, shady spot for the day and let the kids play in the water. But for the rangers, this is not the designated use of these swimming holes. One told me people "think it's a park."

It's not, he said. It's a primitive area. Trampled ground will take a generation to return. Local resentment came up in several conversations. People are angry at litter, at the big extended families, at lack of car parking. Next year they plan to ban picnics at the river.

He was annoyed that people don't learn as kids how to camp & trek properly, ignoring that his childhood was, at a global level, incredibly weird. Most kids in the world don't go pleasure-camping in wilderness! But the normalization & invisibilization of whiteness is too deep.

So back up a sec. 1. Maybe these Latino visitors show demand for "use" of rivers that doesn't line up with what a rural white dude thinks of as "normal." In the Caribbean, sitting by a river with family is a normal way to spend the afternoon. (It's also free, a rarity in NY!)

If you start with *that* as your idea of normal, you think about how to provide for it. A couple picnic tables. A parking area outside the valley. Instead of rangers with guns, environmental educators who can teach about forest ecology and encourage people to haul their litter.

2: What's the biggest risk to this forest? Not a few hundred square feet trampled by hikers, but a few hundred square miles likely to burn. Climate change is the threat. Yet there is a paved road through the woods and the rangers drive SUVs. You want real conservation? Ban cars!

That would actually go well with accommodating family visits. For the cost of law-enforcement parking patrols, you could probably provide free shuttle buses all the way from NYC & Poughkeepsie. But again, you need to start with the idea that families hanging out are normal.

We can scoff at how Latin American countries are often crappy about litter. But in Latin America, every remote waterfall and swimming hole is accessible by bus for a reasonable fare. Maybe start by imitating what's good about LatAm culture instead of treating it as alien & bad.

In the end, the issue is that @NYSDEC appears to be able to say "NO" to anything and send men with guns after any problem, but has no imagination about different positive ways to interact with and protect nature.

PS: Here's what's happening in the world's biggest swamp right now. https://twitter.com/DanCancel/status/1295429068867985409

You think the Catskills can escape this fate by barring big families sitting by the river?

PPS: this is the sort of thing that's on the way to New York State. How can we justify sending rangers to the backcountry to stop a few hikers from widening a few trails? https://twitter.com/Bruno_J_Navarro/status/1295431808176324609