Читать книгу The Unsettling Outdoors - Russell Hitchings - Страница 19

The book title is an attempt to combine all the above components into a succinct form of words to guide my endeavours in the following chapters. But I’m also quite keen on the ‘unsettling outdoors’ because of how it reframes the way in which societies like mine often think about how certain environments are, and should be, experienced by their members. All around the world, it is common to speak of the ‘great outdoors’. Imbued with various beliefs about healthy exercise and the personal regeneration that comes from escaping the stresses of city life, it’s an immediately appealing idea. It is also one which often pops up in our ongoing societal conversations about where people should go and what they should ideally be doing. And, to return briefly to some of the research findings with which this chapter started, we might agree that greenspace experiences could be ‘great’ in the sense that they do various good things to people, and in ways that might be more important than ever. Yet, as I have also argued, what many people find when they go outdoors may now feel somehow strange and unfamiliar to them. Indeed, it is exactly because of these attributes that it could be fairly tempting for certain groups to shun the outdoors in their everyday lives even though they may very well know that adjusting to it could be good for themselves, for others, and for the wider environment too. In short, though ‘the outdoors’ may be ‘great’ in principle, experiencing it can also be ‘unsettling’ in practice.