by Zoë Pollock
Robert Moor parses our cultural obsession with camping and survivalist shows:
What became clear to me in the course of teaching woodcraft is that survivalist gestures are a pantomime of the kind of self-reliance that adulthood is said to entail. The kids’ hemlock shelters were always rickety and porous, their traps never caught any actual animals, and starting a fire in heavy rain—without resorting to chemical accelerants like white gas or Purell—was damn near impossible. What wilderness survival teachers ultimately impart is not knowledge, but sentiment: how it feels to flourish in a menacingly vast and alien environment. This is a good thing. Roughing it in the woods remains one of the few activities in American life where children can act out their transition into adulthood without resorting to the violent initiation rites of gang or military warfare.
The Dish 