Deciding what user impacts are natural or unnatural has inspired much debate. Biophysically, moose cause similar kinds of soil and vegetation impacts as hikers. Yet moose are the sign of nature while hikers are the sign of damage. The field of outdoor recreation is beset with paradoxes, and this book presents a unique, alternative framework to address these dilemmas. Examining outdoor recreation through the lens of ecological theory, Ryan draws from theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and Latour. The book explores minimum impact strategies designed to protect and enhance ecological integrity, but that also require a disturbing amount of policing of users, which runs counter to the freedom users seek. Recent ecological theory suggests that outdoor recreation's view of nature as balanced when impacts are removed is outdated and incorrect. What is needed, and indeed Ryan presents, is a paradoxical and ecological view of humans as neither natural nor unnatural, a view that embraces some traces in nature.

Ryan examines outdoor recreation through the lens of ecological theory, providing a unique, alternative framework to the dilemmas of user impacts on nature, and the paradoxes inherent within this.

This work is a large, powerfully illustrated interdisciplinary natural sciences volume, the first of its kind to examine the critically important nature of ecological paradox, through an abundance of lenses: the biological sciences, taxonomy, archaeology, geopolitical history, comparative ethics, literature, philosophy, the history of science, human geography, population ecology, epistemology, anthropology, demographics, and futurism. The ecological paradox suggests that the human biological–and from an insular perspective, successful–struggle to exist has come at the price of isolating H. sapiens from life-sustaining ecosystem services, and far too much of the biodiversity with which we find ourselves at crisis-level odds. It is a paradox dating back thousands of years, implicating millennia of human machinations that have been utterly ruinous to biological baselines. Those metrics are examined from numerous multidisciplinary approaches in this thoroughly original work, which aids readers, particularly natural history students, who aspire to grasp the far-reaching dimensions of the Anthropocene, as it affects every facet of human experience, past, present and future, and the rest of planetary sentience. With a Preface by Dr. Gerald Wayne Clough, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and President Emeritus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Foreword by Robert Gillespie, President of the non-profit, Population Communication.

This book focuses on the experiences of tourists visiting nature-based destinations, exploring current knowledge and providing insights into conceptual issues through the use of empirical evidence from five continents. Presented as three topics, the contents discuss tourism and naturebased experiences by looking at the role and relevance of nature and the uniqueness of such experiences. The book identifies visitor management challenges and provides explanations for the solutions reached. The final section takes a more overarching destination management perspective that transcends the tourism product or business level and focuses on destination and generic issues like indicators or marketing implications. The book also includes research-based case studies which contribute to an overall understanding of the core issues involved in managing visitor experiences in nature-based tourism.

Nature-based tourism (NBT) is a sector where entrepreneurial success is highly knowledge driven. This insightful book offers a comprehensive evaluation of NBT in a Nordic context, highlighting how long-established Nordic traditions of outdoor recreation practices can reveal lessons for the field more broadly. Chapters explore Nordic and international perspectives, local communities, market dynamics, firms, creativity, innovations and value-added experience products.

The American Adrenaline Narrative considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Kristin J. Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary American environmental movement. The forty-plus years since that day also mark the rise in the popularity and marketing of many things as “extreme,” including sports, jobs, travel, beverages, gum, makeovers, laundry detergent, and even the environmental movement itself. Jacobson maps the American eco-imagination via adrenaline narratives, grounding them in the traditional literary practice of close reading analysis and in ecofeminism. She surveys a range of popular and lesser-known primary texts by American authors, including best-selling books, such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and lesser-known texts, such as Patricia C. McCairen’s Canyon Solitude, Eddy L. Harris’s Mississippi Solo, and Stacy Allison’s Beyond the Limits. She also discusses such narratives as they appear in print and online articles and magazines, feature-length and short films, television shows, amateur videos, social networking site posts, fiction, advertising, and blogs. Jacobson contends that these stories constitute a distinctive genre because—unlike traditional nature, travel, and sports writing— adrenaline narratives sustain heightened risk or the element of the “extreme” within a natural setting. Additionally, these narratives provide important insight into the American environmental imagination’s connection to masculinity and adventure—knowledge that helps us grasp the current climate crisis and how narrative understanding provides a needed intervention.

This book gives voice to a group of leisure scholars who are engaged in conversations about sustainability. Beginning with discussions on the relationship between leisure and sustainability and how these concepts are addressed in current literature, a case is made for continued investigation of how leisure and sustainability need to be better understood; and viewed as integrally linked. The book discusses issues related to environmental sustainability; how, at the local level, leisure is considered as a solution to a range of social, environmental, and economic issues; and the value of leisure as an asset for addressing several social sustainability challenges. This book was originally published as a special issue of Leisure/Loisir: Journal of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies.