My family isn’t very outdoorsy—my parents didn’t immigrate to the United States to sleep outdoors for fun. It’d probably take me an hour to set up a tent, I don’t know what a sleeping pad is for, and I have no idea how people make food out there. And as I’m preparing to enter the Environmental Studies field, I’m realizing that I’m enormously underqualified for certain careers that require camping, backpacking, and other outdoor skills, especially compared to peers who have been exposed to these activities their entire lives.
To prepare underrepresented students for success in careers in the environment, the UCSB Environmental Studies department should offer camping and outdoor skills courses.
To break this claim down, let's first analyze who is underrepresented in outdoor spaces. Historically, access to the outdoors has been barred to people of color. Take the US National Park System. From their conception, national parks in the US were created and managed by white, racist men, like John Muir. Given the lack of say in the creation of these spaces, people of color were not considered the beneficiaries of such spaces. Furthermore, the formation of certain national parks forcibly removed indigenous people from their land. The racialized legacies of land use in the United States present themselves as very tangible barriers to exploring the outdoors for Black, Indigenous, and people of color and reinforce the idea that BIPOC don’t belong there.
Due to this history, were camping and outdoors skills courses to be added to the Environmental Studies department, it would be paramount to cover the topic of safety as a person of color. At an environmental professionals of color networking event hosted by Stanford earlier this year, a Latino environmental educator emphasized the importance of understanding the extra safety measures people of color have to take in the outdoors. Why? As put by the North Carolina State Dean of the College of Natural Resources, Myron Floyd, “the white majority can perceive people of color to be out of place in outdoor spaces.” We saw the manifestations of this last summer, when a white woman, Amy Cooper, called the cops on a Black birder, Christian Cooper.
Despite the racialized past and present of outdoor recreation, there is a desire by underrepresented communities to be able to access these spaces. Why wouldn't there be, when the environment has proven to benefit both your physical and mental health? At UCSB, student organizations like Making Adventures Possible for All Students (MAPAS) have proven the need for outdoor skills curriculum. MAPAS has organized several programs including camping skills classes, gear giveaways, and trail maintenance trips. They recently organized a freediving class that had so many sign-ups that they had to do a second round of applications to make their final selection. This goes to show that students of color are looking for opportunities to learn how to explore the outdoors. However, the labor required to provide such opportunities shouldn’t have to fall on the backs of those very students.
If UCSB really is committed to principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, for all their students, they should fund outdoor education for marginalized students. If we have the funding to build new engineering buildings and a fifty meter telescope (that only certain students and researchers can benefit from), the school should be able to prioritize funding for other types of programs that serve its current students in their professional development.
But doesn't the school already have outdoor recreation programs? Letting student-run programs like Adventure Programs and Excursion Club be in charge of exposing students to the outdoors doesn't cut it. Many of the students in those programs already have a significant amount of experience, making it intimidating to enter those spaces. Additionally, money can act as a barrier for low-income students who can’t pay the fees that these programs require.
I’m tired of having to deny myself professional opportunities because I don’t meet requirements like being comfortable camping and backpacking on my own. UCSB should meet students like myself where we’re at, follow their own mission of providing educational opportunities for diverse students, and help us build community with each other, so that we can more fully bring our perspectives and experiences into outdoor spaces.
Lizzy Mau is a fourth-year Environmental Studies student. Since writing this op-ed for their writing for public discourse class, they have had a multitude of camping experiences, jumpstarted by going on a camping trip with MAPAS in the winter of their senior year.