I moved to a smaller city after living in NYC for ten years. It's had a profound affect on mental and physical health. I enjoyed New York a lot, but it is far too culturally and politically intense for my liking. I also casually drank too much while I lived there.
Above all though I had such poor access to natural beauty and wild country, which I now realize is important to me.
360 dunk is very different than a double pump or windmill. Spud Webb was doing a double pump 30 years ago...
I think you are looking through rose colored glasses if you believe there was a glut of 14 year old European dudes with the hops for 360 dunks in 1989...
Nice, I use it mostly for finding river frontage in Maine that I can access for fishing. Maine also has a ton of land trusts and conservancies, so I will use it to map out their borders.
I'm from Texas originally and in Texas, well, you just don't go on other peoples land. But I grew up sharing a fence line with national grasslands and I naturally developed an affinity for public land.
A few years ago I learned about Hawaiis public ownership of the beaches when a friend took me to a locals secret spot in Kauai that we had to trespass to get to. The trail to get there represented a battle between landowner (a golf resort) and the trespassers, with big soil dumps to create steep descents and thorny bushes vines planted to make it difficult (or at least painful) to get to the cove. But on the other hand it was clear people had come through there with shovels and machetes to clear the way so people could access that beautiful beach. I imagine that battle is still being waged today.
Recently I moved to a state (Maine) with a more nuanced set of norms about private land use (for recreation and hunting/fishing both), Before I didn't realize there are places in the US where it's normal to access peoples private land without permission. I took a hunters safety course here and one of the things they reinforce over and over again is to get permission to hunt land. They even gave us booklet containing templates for getting signed permission to hunt land. It was unfathomable to me that you would hunt on someones land without permission. They also taught us that times are changing here and in a couple of generations this whole culture of public use of private lands will probably go away, so it’s important to be respectful so as not to hasten its demise.
I’ve come around to believing that nature ought to be seen and land should be used (in a respectful way). Just to be able to go on a hike and be in nature is a special kind of liberty.
Those Wilks brothers in the article represent a culture of fear and paranoia that is born of certain ideologies (religion, neoconservatism, etc). I imagine they can’t see the world in any other way. That Justin Wilks thinks recreating on his 300,000 acres is somehow equivalent to him camping on your front yard shows you how petty and slighted even billionaires can be.
This seems like a feature that will eventually be baked into onX, which I happily pay for. Right now though it only draws a distinct line between public/private in my state and some public parcels (like city or land trust owned property) appear as private land. Still after a while you get a good sense of whether the parcel is accessible by the name alone.
Above all though I had such poor access to natural beauty and wild country, which I now realize is important to me.