Conflict in the Great Outdoors: Toward Understanding and Managing for Diverse Sportsmen Preferences

Managing nature’s playground—where diversity meets design.

A major problem of outdoor recreation management addressed in Hobson Bryan’s Conflict in the Great Outdoors is the difficulty in identifying sportsmen subgroups having distinctive preferences and expectations as to the composition of the “quality” outdoor experience. Land-use managers and planners are faced with the problem of matching resources with more users having increasingly specific motivations. Bryan applies his theory of variations within a leisure activity by addressing what sportsmen do and why they do it in various activities such as mountain climbing, hunting, canoeing, skiing, and backpacking.