Feels like this is partly an issue of worldview and partly lack of education.
I live in an area that is quite conservative. I donāt just mean politically; I mean in general people are looking to the wisdom of the past to get them through the problems of the present and the future. Sometimes that wisdom is the best thing going and sometimes itās not. In the past, no one worried about washing their hands in a creek. That old way of thinking is just inaccurate in this case Iām guessing.
To be totally frank, I clicked this specific post (I donāt read nearly all of them) to educate myself on why I shouldnāt use soap in a river. Generally where I backpack I donāt see other people or other peopleās messes. Occasionally I find very old trash on a flat spot off the trail where I set up camp – an unestablished campsite – and itās kind of neat to me to try and guess how old it is. My point here is that the local backcountry areas I use are so infrequently used that not enough people are leaving traces for me to be annoyed by itā¦although I can totally see how that could get annoying real quick if it was recent trash – I do find it at trailheads and it is annoying).
The reason Iām bringing all of this up is that I suspect it has a lot to do with the answer to your question. LNT matters but many people are not convinced and are not being won over by the tone of what they are presented with. Or perhaps itās just foolishness or stubbornness but thereās no question in my mind most folks have heard about LNT or similar concepts and remain unconvinced.
Personally, I was quite unconvinced about how much impact people could have in the wilderness until I started reading the stuff here on BPL and backpacking a little further out than I usually go in the last few years. As I started to research trip planning and began realizing how few and far between these sacred places are (National parks, wilderness areas, etc.) and how much effort goes into keeping them āwildā Iāve Ā become convinced that we humans in our billions can have a hugely negative impact on wild places surprisingly quickly. But I will say I was never presented with good arguments for this stuff until I started reading BPL or digging into guide books (which I never thought of using before BPL). Also I think getting out there and enjoying the āwildā builds up the argument for a person. Until youāve experienced it itās just hard to care as much. The information I was presented with before I started perusing this site was often not explained but rather told or preached at me and not convincingly but with what felt like condemnation. Also, because I hadnāt seen evidence of it personally, I choose not to worry about it.
So Iām thankful for the tone of this community – not condemning but informing. But that is not the tone of most public discourse (or even the discourse in pamphlets you find at trailheads) and I wonder how we could help make it so. That seems to be one of the biggest reason āold timersā donāt take LNT seriously; the tone they are presented it with and maybe also not having the concepts explained evidentially.
As Iām wrapping this up Iām questioning that condemning tone I mentioned. And I begin to ask myself if that tone I felt in the past was real or merely perceived. Not sure; but as a feeling at least it was there and it was palpable and I do hear it as a point of contention when I talk with local people who are annoyed and turned off by being told they are going to ruin the woods they grew up with if they donāt get with the program. A delicate subject for sure.
