As significant swaths of the country swelter under heat domes and wet-bulb temperatures that run into triple digits, a growing number of Americans may find themselves wondering at all the fuss about “the great outdoors.” And if the heat isn’t enough of a deterrent, there’s the lung-searing smoke from more than 500 Canadian wildfires that are expected to burn for several more months and that already have consumed an area the equivalent size of South Carolina.
All of which prompts, on this date celebrating independence, two unrelated but parallel thoughts.
The first is that we owe a debt to Daniel Ellsberg, who died a couple of weeks ago at the age of 92, for more than his leaking of the Pentagon Papers. Long after that pivotal point in political history, Ellsberg was still prodding American journalists to look beyond the surface of current events. And one of his most consequential nudges, as recently recounted by David Sassoon, founder and publisher of Inside Climate News (ICN), was to insist that the press needed to expose what the oil companies really knew about global warming and when they knew it.
That challenge led directly to ICN’s 2015 publication of a 24,ooo-word investigative series called “Exxon: The Road Not Taken,” that chronicled how the oil company’s own scientists had warned its management committee that burning fossil fuels was warming Earth’s atmosphere. That was in 1977—more than a decade before NASA scientist James Hansen famously told the U.S. Senate, ““The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” Yet in the 46 years since its own employees rang the alarm, Exxon did more to change the political climate than to preserve the natural one, casting so much doubt on climate science to protect its own financial interests that there are people who to this day deny the evidence of their senses.
Sooner or later, reality will prevail. Rising seas, shrinking glaciers, increasingly erratic and extreme weather will not be wished away. Whether Exxon and its ilk will be held accountable is an entirely different question, of course, but thanks to Ellsberg and those he inspired, the ammunition is there if anyone cares to load it. Meanwhile, however, we can count on the Exxon effect as being one of at least two major causes behind the coming demise of camping as an attractive pastime or lifestyle: who wants to take on energy-sapping heat and life-threatening air pollution if there are air-conditioned alternatives available? Cracked earth, curling leaves and brown air do not evoke poetry. Torrential rains, hail the size of golf balls and tornadic winds don’t soothe the soul.
Yet punishing weather is only half of the picture. The other major cause behind the coming decline in camping is that it’s become just too damn expensive, even as its growing financial burden falls on the demographic least able to shoulder the load. Camping industry leaders have been inordinately giddy over survey results that show the average age of RV buyers last year was 33, signaling—in their eyes—the revitalization of an industry that had been in danger of aging out: move over, grandma and grandpa! The millennials have arrived and they’ll save the day.
But maybe not. Consider that the RV Dealers Association reports that the average RV sold in May went for $51,896, with most of that amount financed over 16 years at a 9.61% interest rate. That works out to a monthly payment of $517, often coming on top of a mortgage and car payments—and oh, yes: student loan payments, which are about to kick in again after a three-year hiatus. That’s a huge bite for a discretionary purchase, even as overall U.S. household debt has spiked to $17 trillion, including a record $986 billion in credit card debt—up 17% in just 12 months. Does that sound sustainable? And if not, what does that imply for future growth?
Couple those financial stresses with KOA’s statistic that two-thirds of all first-time campers are less than thrilled with the experience, and the outlook for campground operators is grim. Industry leaders have tried to reframe these adverse forces as “pain points,” which is to say, as marketing and customer service challenges that can be massaged away, but it would be more accurate to call them existential threats. There’s no massaging—or messaging— away either the financial burden or the climatic oppressiveness that increasingly defines the camping experience, and that’s without even getting into the increased prices and gentrification of commercial campgrounds, the notoriously shoddy construction of many new RVs or the apparently growing boorishness of a significant segment of the camping public.
Old-timey RVers like to think of themselves as independent spirits, and at one time that may have been more true than not. But on this Independence Day, all signs point to such a halcyon camping age being as much a part of history as the Revolutionary War. Campground owners, meanwhile, would be well advised to brace themselves for the coming drought.
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