Tag: Darwin Awards

Let’s face it: we’re all tourons

There’s an undeniably smug pleasure many of us take in observing others’ failings or stupid behavior, and indeed, it’s hard not to feel superior when reading about the latest winners of the Darwin Awards. Or when gaping at the pictures posted on the People of Walmart site. Who goes out in public like that? How do some people come up with such incredibly dumb ideas?

And aren’t we special/smart/superior not to be like that?

And yet . . . and yet, perhaps the line between smart and stupid is a lot fuzzier than we think. Consider, for example, the gleeful fascination that self-styled outdoorsy types have with “tourons,” that mashup of tourist and moron used to describe people who think it’s a good idea to take selfies with a bison or elk, or who try to pet bear cubs. These encounters, which frequently end badly for the touron, are grounded in a Disney-fied view of nature and its creatures as essentially benign and placed on this world for our enjoyment. For a touron, the thought that we might be perceived as a threat—or even as a food source— is inconceivable. And it’s that lack of awareness that causes so much self-satisfaction for observers who pat themselves on the back for knowing so much better.

But what if we’re all tourons, to one degree or another, distinguished only by the clarity of our perceptions and the sophistication of our understanding? How much difference is there between the tourist who ambles up to a wild animal and the tourist who thrashes heedlessly through a tick-infested meadow, or who kicks up leaf mold and breathes in fungal spores, or who ignores a mosquito bite even after the headaches it caused progress to vomiting, high fever and aching joint pain?

That last set of symptoms describes the progression of dengue fever, which can leave a lucky person debilitated for weeks on end. The unlucky ones develop severe dengue, which causes plasma to leak out of blood vessels and results in organ failure. If untreated, with blood transfusions and intravenous fluids, the mortality rate is 15%. That’s probably higher than the mortality rate inflicted by bison goring stupid tourists, but thus far, at least, no one is calling dengue victims “tourons.” Not yet.

Although many Americans have never heard of dengue fever, or if they have, think of it as something exotic, it is in fact establishing a foothold in the United States, as are a growing number of other tropical diseases. Not seen in the U.S. until a few years ago, dengue is already found in the warmer, wetter parts of the country—Florida in particular, but also Texas, Arizona and southern California—and is expected to get a boost this year as a current explosion of the virus in Brazil moves north with the seasons. Depending on the weather, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi could be next. The few hundred cases reported to date could quickly swell into the thousands.

This spread of mosquito-borne diseases—not just dengue, but yellow fever, West Nile and Zika viruses, malaria and others—is just one result of a warming climate that gets more attention because of the extreme weather it produces. But the “natural” world of flora and fauna is just as strongly affected by climate change as the physical world of wind and ocean currents and the increasingly violent storms they kick up. Warming waters produce algae blooms that poison once-pristine rivers and lakes. Shorter winters enable the spread of tick-borne lyme disease far beyond its New England origins. “Valley fever,” once confined to the desert southwest, is becoming endemic throughout the country.

All of which is to say that the romanticized view of Mother Nature promoted by the campground industry, and now its glampground imitators, is just as superficial and ignorant as that of the tourons who view wild animals as cuddly photo-ops. There are numerous threats to our well-being when we venture out of our domestic bubbles, some not even visible to the naked eye, and that number is growing at an alarming rate. Ignoring those less obvious perils doesn’t make us superior to tourons—indeed, failing to recognize our responsibility for creating a more dangerous environment, through our contributions to climate change, arguably makes us dumber.

Nature is not inherently hostile to humans: it just doesn’t give a damn, any more than a lightning bolt concerns itself with the tree it cleaves. In the final analysis, then, we have only ourselves to blame when we put ourselves in danger’s way, whether that danger comes in the form of a 1,200-pound bison that can run 35 miles per hour, or a 2.5-miligram mosquito.

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Chill out by camping? Not exactly . . .

Want to go camping? Today’s heat map for the U.S., with the red areas clocking in at more than 103 degrees, are considered “dangerous,” while the darker orange shows highs of 90-103.

Summer is only half over, and the death toll of people out for a walk over the past month is already impressive. Toward the end of June, it claimed a 31-year-old man and his 14-year-old stepson hiking in Big Bend National Park; roughly a week later it added a 57-year-old woman hiking in Grand Canyon National Park. On July 18 it was a 71-year-old man collapsing at a restroom shortly after hiking in Death Valley National Park, two weeks after a 65-year-old man had also died in the park. Four days later, two women, ages 34 and 19, were found dead after hiking into a Nevada state park outside of Las Vegas.

All were doing nothing more remarkable or strenuous than taking a day-hike in areas traversed by countless others. They weren’t roofing a house or picking crops or working at some other job that required them to be outside—they were simply “recreating.” And all had headed into that tantalizing wonderland known as The Great Outdoors during the hottest summer ever recorded, in temperatures that greatly exceeded that of their body cores, seemingly without a second thought about the mortal danger they were courting.

What were they thinking? Can we just write them off as stupid or ignorant, gene-pool outliers that confirm yet again why the Darwin Awards will never run short of nominees? But if that’s the case, what are we to make of the tens of thousands of presumably more aware Americans who each year move to Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Antonio and other gateways to hell, where if the heat doesn’t get ’em, the lack of potable water eventually will?

The fact is that as a species we’re not very good at changing ingrained behaviors, nor are we mentally flexible enough to recognize when a shifting social or environmental landscape makes such changes prudent. We’ve always done things this way, so we’ll continue. And if we do somehow recognize that a change is afoot, we tend to think such change is lineal—a straight-line progression—rather than exponential, which it sometimes is, and which would require a far more robust response from us.

As a result, the prophets are ignored. It’s been just one year since First Street Foundation released its sixth national risk assessment, this one devoted to hazardous heat. The bottom line, as I wrote at the time, was that “extreme danger days,” with temperatures over 125 degrees, would affect approximately 50 counties with 8 million people this year. Presciently, the report went on to claim that extreme temperatures would be concentrated across the middle of the country, in an area stretching from the Louisiana and Texas border north through Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois. The map that accompanied that prediction looks an awful lot like the heat map at the top of this page, generated this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Yet most people are still oblivious to such research, even as the heat keeps cranking higher: Phoenix, for example, which continues to be a relocation magnet, is just wrapping up a full month of air temperatures exceeding 110 degrees every day, never mind the temperatures on asphalt roads and car door handles, which can cause second- and third-degree burns. But people in leadership positions whom we might expect to know more, and to know better, are just as oblivious to the implications of what’s happening—even when those implications pose a threat to their livelihoods. Or maybe that’s precisely why they turn a blind eye.

The campground and RV park industry is the poster child for this sort of willful ignorance. Global warming, climate change, extreme weather—all are subjects that never get broached by the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, whose preferred sense of “leadership” is to promote the latest whiz-bang technology or hotel-derived hospitality trend.

And while Kampgrounds of America has at least started asking campers about their weather-related concerns, it has yet to translate its findings into any kind of action agenda, despite many opportunities to do so. KOA’s July report, for example, found that 62% of campers have changed travel plans because of weather concerns, “with 22% canceling, 22% altering locations, and 18% revising the nature of their trips.” What did KOA learn from that? Apparently only that there’s enough camping demand that nothing much changed, as “approximately 21.5 million households participated in camping” over the July 4 holiday, a level “mirroring the previous year’s.”

Nothing to see here!

So now, as we head into the dog days of August and toward the traditional Labor Day frenzy, it’s steady as she goes. The status quo will prevail. The campground and RV industries will keep enticing people to go camping, with pictures of happy families roasting marshmallows and millennials spooning in their Class B vans, dirt bikes suggestively parked nearby. We’ll hear a lot about about “making memories” and “world class experiences” and about the restorative powers of connecting with Mother Nature.

Just don’t take a walk while you’re out there.

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