06/02/2026
Nature Is Still Quiet. Are We?
One thing that stands out to me these days, as social media promotes "nature" is how loud it all is.
On the surface, everyone posting videos promoting fun and excitement seems like a good thing. But it can also be the foundation of stress, and stress, as it turns out, is the enemy of the very thing we came outside to find.
We all know that particular type of salesperson. Raised voice. Fast language. The rush to commit. "Limited time. Don't miss out." Social media often lives in exactly that space, doesn't it? The breathless caption. The adrenaline ju**ie. The music. The countdown. The pressure to see everything, do everything, buy everything, and of course, post everything before you leave.
Here's what's interesting from a science standpoint: research published in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences shows that stress physically shifts your thinking away from deliberate, goal-directed choices and toward automatic, habit-based ones. The land of bad decisions.
(Calling the lizard brain!) It’s the mental state that makes you overspend, snap at the kids, go off trail, chase off the wildlife, and leave feeling like you rushed through, went everywhere, and saw nothing. When people complain about difficult tourist behavior, they're often really complaining about the downstream effects of stress. And a lot of that stress gets manufactured long before anyone sets foot on the trail, by the way we market the places themselves.
It's a two-way street. The loud sell creates the stressed visitor.
At one time, before profit overran stewardship and authenticity, nature operated on a different set of terms entirely. It was understood, especially by the people who studied it most closely, as a place of reverential quiet. Not passive. Not boring. But slow enough that you could actually explore and absorb it. This is why our parks had naturalists. (19 full-time DNR park educators not all that long ago.)
John Muir put it plainly: "Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees." That's not a marketing tagline. That's a description of a biological and spiritual process that requires you to slow down long enough for it to work.
Aldo Leopold, who did much of his most important thinking right here in Wisconsin, learned this the hard way. As we famously know today, He hunted wolves as part of his job with the US Forest Service. Then he watched a wolf die, watched the green fire go out in her eyes, and understood something that changed everything he believed about land and wildness.
"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
The extractive mindset, the “take what you want, move on,” exists in nature tourism as well. It runs straight through the way we sell outdoor destinations.
Neither of these men was anti-adventure. Muir climbed glaciers. Leopold rebuilt his relationship with the land from the ground up right here in Sauk County. But both understood that what nature offers most deeply is not stimulation, it’s restoration. And restoration comes from a different place than the one most of us are invited to arrive with.
Devil's Lake wasn't always what it is today, and not because the land has changed. The park was created, promoted, and then more recently, left to run on shrinking budgets and skeleton crews. What visitors expect and what they find have been drifting apart for years. The crowds, the stress, the crumbling trails, the parking anxiety, etc. A lot of that is the gap between how a place gets presented and what resources actually exist to support the visit.
We’re not selling the quiet observation of wildlife or reverence for this amazing landscape. Rather, we helped create the loud version. That's on us and worth rethinking. Especially if we both want to profit from and protect the land long into the future. We have to find a balance.
The quartzite doesn't perform. The herons don't pose. The fog coming off the water in the early morning isn't doing it for an audience. Tee Wakącąk (Sacred Lake in the Ho-Chunk language) is still doing what it has always done. The question is whether we're arriving ready to receive it, or if we are too wound up before we get here and wondering why we can't settle down once we do.
That's not a knock on anyone. The excitement framing is everywhere (just check your stories and reels), and it works in the short term for clicks and shares. But there might be something worth trying on the other end of that dial. Messaging that brings visitors, but also starts the course toward a better experience.
What do you think? Does the way our outdoor destinations get promoted online match the experience you're actually looking for? How can we take advantage of nature tourism while leading with an atmosphere of respect and stewardship for the very nature we are promoting?
Something to ponder.
