 n a recent Fact Sheet I picked up
at the San Diego Ecotourism Summit Conference, I read the following:
"More than 76 million Americans watched, photographed,
and fed birds and other wildlife, spending $18.1 billion. This generated
nearly $40 billion in total economic activity across the country, supporting
766,000 jobs and resulting in $3 billion in state and federal tax revenues."
 The report noted that 109 million Americans
participated in wildlife-related recreation, including hunting and fishing.
By comparison, 105 million attended major league football, basketball, hockey,
and baseball games in 1991. Nationally, Florida led the way with 2.9 million
anglers 16 and older, followed closely by California with 2.7 million. Texas
had 2.6 million, Michigan 1.8 million and New York 1.7 million.
The survey revealed that 5.7 million
Californians 16 and older enjoyed observing, photographing, or feeding wildlife
around their homes while 2.4 million took trips away from home to enjoy
these activities.
A National Survey on Recreation and
the Environment, comparing passive to active recreation between 1982-83
and 1994-95 showed people: walking +42.98 percent, backpacking +72.7 percent,
hiking 93.5 percent, and bird watching 155.2 percent. Active recreation:
water skiing +12.6 percent, fishing -3.8 percent, sailing -9.4 percent,
and hunting -12.3 percent.
This range of popular activities, collectively
becoming known as ecotourism, is gaining in popularity and increasing about
35 percent each year. In 1991, 4 million Texas residents spent over $877
million observing, feeding, or photographing wildlife and spent $423 million
traveling to get there. In Cape May, considered to be the number one birding
spot in North America, in 1996, 100,000 birders arrived spending $31 million.
The County Ecotourism Fact Sheet goes on to say that: "San Diego can
be a birding mecca like Cape May. We have more bird species, 485 plus, than
any other county in the United States."
Then why is the City pouring millions
of dollars into stadiums as opposed to helping to develop wildlife habitats
and bird sanctuaries that would bring in more revenues than football or
baseball?
Thanks to the foresight of County Supervisor
Pam Slater, who called for the Ecotourism Summit Conference, San Diego County
is now getting ready to shore up wildlife-related recreation attractions
in the County while at the same time striving to make ecotourism more sustainable
here by ensuring that the habitats we have will be enhanced and not destroyed.
Other elected officials should find
out a little bit more about what people here in San Diego really want. And
maybe our schools should spend just a little more time developing courses
that are aimed at wildlife and birding. Maybe one problem with our youth
is that we spend millions of dollars and thousand of hours teaching them
to be competitive through athletic games, yet we spend little time and money
helping them to develop an appreciation of nature and their life support
system. As a result, they seem to have become so alienated from nature,
and consequently from themselves, that they no longer know who they are
and treat nature as if it were a foreign object. Could this possibly be
why we have so many young people on drugs, so many street gangs, so many
teenage pregnancies?
Learning about and connecting with nature
seems to help people understand what life is all about and imbue an appreciation
for it. Organized sports teaches how to be competitive and how to win while
making the other side a loser. This may work fine in the business world,
but it doesn't teach much about how to "live."
In developing sustainable communities,
so necessary for the survival of the human race, I have to ask if competitive
games such as football, basketball, hockey, baseball and soccer at the level
to which they have been elevated really play a net-positive role in our
society.
If you look at the statistics here,
many more are voting for nature recreation than are voting for pro-sports
as verified by the activity level. Shouldn't our City government take a
cue from this? What's going on? Am I the only one confused here?  | 
cts.com.