Outdoor recreation’s value is contrast with mechanized work, which excessive gadgetry destroys.

Evidence

Not all sports have degenerated to the same extent as duck-hunting. Defenders of the American tradition still exist. Perhaps the bow-and-arrow movement and the revival of falconry mark the beginnings of a reaction. The net trend, however, is clearly toward more and more mechanization, with a corresponding shrinkage in cultural values, especially split-rail values and ethical restraints. … I have the impression that the American sportsman is puzzled; he doesn’t understand what is happening to him. Bigger and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive, atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or to the marsh. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 633

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Contrast-value’ — leisure holds value precisely as the opposite of industrial work; mechanizing the woods erases the very difference that makes them restorative. Core concept for the reading-landscape rationale.
• ADDENDUM: The contrast-value logic — that a good only holds value by opposing its industrialized counterpart — structurally echoes the immodesty essays’ point that dress norms derive their charge from transgression against norms.
• XREF: connects to: Mass recreation dilutes what it seeks, making the search self-defeating — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 576; Economic obsession with growth itself destroys the conditions that make prosperity possible — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 13; Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 65

Broader Connections

• Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor #complicates (0.75) — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 65