I saw a recent news article about the opening of a new whitewater park and community called WaveYard in, of all places, Mesa, Arizona. The town just voted Yes on 35 million in tax incentives to support the project. While I haven't dug deeply into the whole political scene behind this, I think it is a great case study of how the outdoors is being turned into a manufactured commodity and the dangers that this poses in actually distancing people from the outdoors.

According to the WaveYard Web site it will have:

• Artificial Whitewater course billed as the largest of its kind
• The largest man-made Wave Pool for surfing & body surfing
• A SCUBA lagoon
• A Wake Boarding Park
• An Indoor Water Park

Besides the water activities the will be Lost Canyon "the country’s first engineered Canyoneering and Coasteering experience. Designed for the adrenaline addicted, Lost Canyon will be about being outside, challenging yourself, and staring fear in the face." There will also be a Ropes Course, Climbing Wall ,and a Via Ferrata Course. And of course, a resort hotel, conference center, retail shops, townhouses and office space.

I am amazed at the potential environmental impact on water resources in the desert. This thing is being built in Mesa, Arizona of all places. In part, according to the developer, because the folks there don't have access to this type of water and he wants to 'bring it to them.' Here are some interesting stats from the City of Mesa weather. It is described as arid and gets less than 8 inches of rain a year.  

The water features at WaveYard are only going to use 50 million gallons of water at first to fill its artificial oceans and rivers and then another another 60 to 100 million gallons per year (enough to support about 1,200 people in the Phoenix area) to replenish water lost to evaporation and spillage (it is the desert after all) according to Chris Kahn a writer for the Associated Press Writer. On one of the news releases Waveyard states that "in comparison, a typical 18-hole golf course uses 144 million gallons per year" while that's some water savings I've never been a fan of 18-hole golf courses in the desert either especially since Arizona has been in a drought for a decade, and rivers that feed Phoenix and surrounding communities have experienced near-record low measurements this year. This seems to me a lot like Ski Dubai, the indoor ski area in the middle of the desert in the United Arab Emirates with 22,500 square meters of snow year round. The fact that you can build something, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.

It scares me a bit to see our society moving in this direction. At the same time there is the 'No Child Left Inside' (USA Today) groundswell in secondary school education following books like Richard Louv's "Last Child in the Woods" (NPR Audio). What WaveYard looks like to me is taking a video game and plunking it down in a shopping mall as a way of interacting with the outdoors. It's definitely not the same as experiencing a real river, canyon, or ocean and I think that it is only going to further distance people from the outdoors. I mean, who actually will need the outdoors if you can just build it into your development and, as Joni Mitchell says in the 2007 re-release of her song Big Yellow Taxi, "charge the people an arm and a leg just to see it"? So where will the commitment be in the next generation to preserve the mountains, rivers, and oceans? While the town of Mesa voted and approved this project, I wonder what they'll be thinking 15 years from now when western water is even more scarce than it is now. Let me know what you think.

I want to thank all of my good friends, remote colleagues, and all the people that I have never had the pleasure of meeting in person for your involvement with this list. I also want to thank many of you for your kind words to me both on and off the list. The Internet is a lot like the kind of work that many of us do. We interact with people and create impact but we often don't get to see what that impact is. The many thank you's that I received really touched me and reminded me that it was definitely worth it. 

As someone who has spent all of my career at a University, I see acquiring knowledge and the sharing of that knowledge as one of the most valuable things that anyone can do. That's why I've shared lots of what I've learned through the Internet and worked to develop avenues for others to share what they know. All of us working and sharing together are much stronger than each of us apart.

The Web is the better tool for us to keep on sharing so I invite all of you to continue to be part of the great community we have established here by joining the Outdoor Ed Community. Already we have Forums and some great Bloggers. In the next few months I'll be introducing more new ways for us to share.

Just like joining the listserv you only need to enter a username and password and your email address and set up any special options for your profile. Jump to http://www.outdoored.com/community/default.aspx  and click the Join link in the top right corner. For more information go to our Getting Started page

(http://www.outdoored.com/community/themes/default/Common/r.ashx?6 ) and be a part of the next chapter of this great community.

I had the privilege of sending out the first message on this list Thursday 15 Oct 1992 so I also get to send out the last one.

Signing off the AEELIST
See you on the Web
 

Rick

I thought I'd start off this blog with a posting about risk management. Today in New Jersey we've been dealing with temperatures in the high 90's and high humidity. The potential for heat stress related illness made me think about a news story I read a few months ago about David Buschow, 29-year-old former US Air Force verteran who died on July 17, 2006 in the Escalante Grand Staircase monument in Utah while on Day 1 of 28-day survival course.

The incident has been well-described (though I would not call this the same as being well-documented) in various media articles. These are all collected at the RememberDave.net Web site set up by his family. (If you don't know this incident I'd suggest you read first news story from The Guardian in the UK and for some contrasting views read the second entry in The Ledger.)

• Guardian Online
• The Ledger
• CBS News Story
• FOX News Story
• Denver Post Article
• Article by Dr. Paul Auerbach
• CNN Blog with Story
• Inside Edition

I think this disturbing incident raises a number of critical issues for all outdoor programs.

When is it our job/responsibility to push and when is it our job/responsibility to ease off?

It is true that many aspects of outdoor education, therapeutic adventure and other many areas of our field urge, even require that we push participants. In this case David Buschow had signed up for extremely rigorous 28-day course where he was supposed to be challenged to his limits to survive in difficult circumstances. At the same time, in reading all of the accounts that I have seen, there is clear medical evidence that he was suffering from severe dehydration. As a safety measure his guides had water available, but no water was offered to him. The signs and symptoms "His breathing was laboured, he was vomiting, falling and hallucinating and he consistently complained of cramping pains in his legs" are easily recognizable as dehydration. But the goal of the course was to push students, so that's what happened. Later on, when Buschow collapsed and was unable to get up he requested water from the guide who was with him and was not offered any. Soon afterwards he died.

While this is an extreme and tragic example, it illustrates that instructors and programs really do, at times, have 'life and death' control over the people in our programs. While for most programs such decisions won't be truly a 'life or death' issue, can we judge and who are we to judge what might be something that is a 'life or death' issue for a participant?

For those of you who aren't familiar with Jasper Hunt's excellent book, Ethics in Experiential Education, (I suggest you get a copy) and read the chapter on Risk. Jasper does a superb job of exploring the ethical dilemma's associated with creating risk for people and the obligations that go with it and I talk about the two forces of Negative Risk and Positive Risk in my article on the Risk Assessment and Safety Management Model (read the article or watch the video).

I think the major failure here is not too disimilar from what happened on Mt. Everest in 1996, like the goal of getting to the summit, the goal of getting the participants to camp was made somehow paramount and it overshadowed what I see as common sense. I've led lots of trips and been led. The best guides I've seen spend the first day or several days evaluating the participants and start to make judgments about how far someone can go. This kind of 'leader's radar' is an essential skil for any outdoor educator. Where it was on this day, I couldn't say. If any goal including 'pushing people to their limits' becomes so paramount and we become so rigid that we cannot see and read the signs around us like David's dehydration signs then tragedies like this will continue to happen.

I think we have to constantly ask the difficult ethical questions that Jasper raises. There will be times when the risks we are creating will be justifiable. A juvenile offender hooked on crack may not have much of a chance for life without pushing, but should I be going to the same boundary point with an incoming college freshmen on a wilderness orientation trip? 

All of us send our condolences to David Buschow's family and friends. One thing that each of us can do to honor his memory is to never forget to ask ourselves the crucial questions about when to push and when to ease off. I don't have an answer for you, but I know what the result will be if we fail to ask the question.