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Study: Park Visits Down 18-25 Percent02-12-08 | News

Study: Park Visits Down 18-25 Percent

Yosemite National Park visitors found this dramatic overlook by hiking up from crowded Tunnel View to Old Inspiration Point. A road that passed by this spot closed in the 1930s. A recent study charts declining park attendance over the past 25 years.
Photos: Erik Skindrud

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Parks and open spaces are seeing fewer visitors as people spend more time with video and computers. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and less concern with conservation and parks, researchers suggest.

Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More at https://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0709893105v1

A ranger leads a walk in Yosemite Valley in October 2007. A drop in park visitation may affect environmental attitudes and policies in the future, a recent report says.

Social and Political Effects

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The research was funded by The Nature Conservancy.

By studying visits to national and state park and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.

International Decline

The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.

For example, fishing peaked in 1981 and had declined 25 percent by 2005, the researchers found. Visits to national parks peaked in 1987 and dropped 23 percent by 2006, while hiking on the Appalachian Trial peaked in 2000 and was down 18 percent by 2005.

Japan suffered similar declines, the researchers found, as visits to national parks there dropped by 18 percent between 1991 and 2005.

Backpacking, Hunting Steady

There was a small growth in backpacking, but that may reflect day trips by some people who previously were campers, wrote Pergams and Zaradic. Pergams is a visiting research assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while Zaradic is a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Delaware Valley, in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market, they found.

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Sources: Associated Press, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Nature Conservancy