Study shows nature not appreciated as much as YouTube

From a press release via the University of Illinois - Chicago:

"Pergams and Patricia Zaradic, a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Delaware Valley in Bryn Mawr, Pa., had previously reported a steady decline in per capita visits to U.S. national parks since the late 1980s -- which correlated very strongly with a rise in playing video games, surfing the Internet and watching movies. The researchers call this recent shift to sedentary, electronic diversions "videophilia." And they don't see it as healthy progress."

I'm all for studies that point out the flaws of our nature-isolated culture. But this study is really very dumb.

My first objection: What are biologists doing, making up a term for a human condition? "Videophilia" seems a thinly veiled scientific mask for saying, "You people watch YouTube too much."

My second objection: It's pretty obvious that sitting around and watching YouTube all day is not as healthy as mountain climbing, gardening, or even walking aimlessly around a field somewhere.

The third objection: They use arbitrary data to tell us so. According to the press release, "The biologists examined figures on backpacking, fishing, hiking, hunting, visits to national and state parks and forests. They found comparable reliable statistics from Japan and, to a lesser extent, Spain. They found that during the decade from 1981 to 1991, per-capita nature recreation declined at rates from 1 percent to 1.3 percent per year, depending on the activity studied. The typical drop in nature use since then has been 18-25 percent."

So what does this tell us? What we've known for the past twenty years - not only are human activities ruining nature, we're also using it less. In the way of justification, the authors say, "We don't see how future generations, with less exploration of nature, will be as interested in conservation as past generations."

WTF? Nothing looks good for getting people interested in anything proactive anymore. Join the interdisciplinary choir, kids.

[Full disclosure: My own nature recreation has dropped 75 - 80% since moving to Texas. The reason? Well, I'm still working on my data sets and compute models, but the conclusion I'm aiming for is that I live in Texas.]