Past as Prologue The Evolution of Outdoor Recreation Resource Management

In many respects, Past as Prologue:  The Evolution of Outdoor Recreation Resource Management reflects our collective body of work over the past five decades.  When we entered the nascent field in the 1970s, we were introduced to myriad management issues accompanying an upsurge of recreational interest in the public estate.  Paraphrasing the wilderness historian, Roderick Nash, we bore witness to outdoor recreation environments being "loved to death."  At the same time, the social scientific community began to conceptualize recreation as a psychological response to human involvement in activities rather than the activities themselves.  Coincident with that newfound behavioral approach to interpreting recreation's meaning, management concepts like the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, recreation carrying capacity, the Limits of Acceptable Change, recreation substitutability, and recreation conflict were discussed increasingly in the literature.  It was exciting time to think about outdoor recreation as a "problem"to be solved.

Our purpose in creating this book is to take a closer look at what we were thinking and writing in those years, and then to see if, and how, our perspective on outdoor recreation resource management has changed over time.  What thinking and writing have stood the test of time, and what thinking and writing have faded in meaning as new layers of understanding have presented themselves?