Baratunde Thurston's New Series Shows the Diversity of Outdoor Spaces and Those Who Enjoy Them

PBS is premiering a new six-part series on July 5 hosted by author and comedian Baratunde Thurston, titled America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston. The series will follow Thurston as he visits six different areas in the country to showcase the various ways Americans interact with the outdoors. Thurston's destinations include Death Valley National Park, Idaho, Los Angeles, Appalachia in West Virginia, the coasts of North Carolina and Minnesota's Arrowhead region. The series will stream on PBS platforms, Roku, Apple TV and more. “We think viewers will be transported by this journey to discover our outdoor lives and culture,” Michael Rosenfeld, vp, national production at Twin Cities PBS and executive producer of the series, said in a statement. “As we traveled the country, we discovered a wide range of attitudes towards the outdoors, but we also found some consistent themes—most importantly, a deeply held belief that being outside is essential to our wellbeing, and access to outdoor spaces is worth fighting for.” Adweek caught up with Thurston to discuss his experience and his thoughts on how the outdoors has become more accessible for marginalized folks, how climate change is changing everything and what a brand's responsibility is in such a complicated landscape. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Adweek: Could you tell me about your new series and what inspired you to want to do this?Baratunde Thurston: America Outdoors is exploring America and exploring the people of America through our relationship with the outdoors—the relationship of work, of play and, to some degree, escape that we all find in this big old country of ours. It's passionate, and it's complicated. I think of it as a beautiful reason to connect with people in a country that feels increasingly divided. This allowed me to literally find common ground—whether it's a beach or a mountain or a river or a bay—and talk with folks about some of the social-political issues. It's a powerful reminder, especially in these digital times for such a digital person like myself, that our connection to the outdoors helps us connect with ourselves and each other in a way that digital connections still can't compete with. What interests you most about the outdoors? Are you a national parks person or a hiker or anything?I'm all the things. I grew up outside in many ways. I grew up in Washington D.C. in the '80s. My mother was a pro "get these kids out the house" type of city mom, so we went camping. By 12 years old, I had been to every state on the east coast, mostly staying in national parks or state parks. I was mountain biking. I was a Boy Scout. I was hiking with the Sierra Club and my mother as a grade-schooler. As I got older, I got more disconnected from that world and more connected to the digital world. Part of my excitement with this series was, 'Oh, it's like a homecoming!' What sorts of places did you see? What parks did you visit, and what activities did you do during your travels?This was a six-episode series, and each episode, we spent a week filming in a location or in a general region. We did a whole Death Valley episode, and we did a variety of activities in Death Valley. We did a Los Angeles episode that was focused on the urban outdoors. We did a tidewater episode in the Outer Banks and the Chesapeake Bay area. We did Idaho and Appalachia and northern and central Minnesota. Outdoor Retailers Strive to Make Nature More Accessible to Marginalized Groups We connected with folks who have a reason to value the outdoors that's as varied as the landscape of the country. Most meaningful to me by far was the connection with indigenous communities. I got to spend time with three different nations: the Timbisha Shoshone, which is the Death Valley region; the Anishinaabe up in Minnesota; and the Shoshone-Bannock in Idaho. And in each place, there were complications by long history or by present crisis. Part of the beauty of the series for me is it's not a simple story of loss or of theft. It's also a story of reclamation. I spent time with a lot of Black people on this show and a lot of women on this show and folks with disabilities. I went whitewater rafting on the New River in Appalachia, West Virginia, with this dude Eric Thompson, who is paralyzed from the neck down. He had this adaptive watercraft vehicle. Before an auto accident, he was a skier, a river guide and the most active person ever, and then he had this accident, lost a lot of his bodily control and figured out a way to get back out there. Part of the beauty of the series for me is it's not a simple story of loss or of theft. It's also a story of reclamation. And I went surfing in L.A. with this organization, Color the Water, that emerged during that tumultuous summer of 2020. It's a BIPOC-focused group getting more folks to surf, and I've never seen so many Black people on surfboards in my life. Seeing this wide age range, this multi-gender, multishades of brown and black out there on these surfboards, that was beautiful to see. … It's like, 'OK, so we're, we're losing something sometimes in our relationship, but we're also gaining and claiming something.' As somebody who was involved in the outdoors as a kid, growing up in it, and now with this project, what have you seen changing with diversity in the outdoors?Many of us are more conscious and aware of the history of the spaces that we're in. That can be something as simple as [asking], 'Who is this trail named for?' There's a whole movement of decolonizing the outdoors and not celebrating slaveholders and concentration camp operators and genocidal people as we try to enjoy ourselves. It's not relaxing to everybody to be reminded of those traumas when they're trying to chill on a trail on a mountainside. I've seen a much stronger presence of indigenous communities reclaiming land. When I was a kid going out camping, hiking and biking, a lot of my peers were like, 'Oh, that's white. White people go camping. White people go hiking.' And when I was hiking with the Sierra Club with my mom, we were the only Black people. In my experience, at least, that's changing. If you look on Instagram, Outdoor Afro is one organization I've been following for years, and there's all these hashtags and all these groups combining mental health and outdoor access. GirlTrek is a beautiful group of Black women walking for their health. Especially for Black people, we have such a complicated history with the outdoors in this country. We were snatched up from somewhere, brought here to work outside for no money for generations. We were brutalized outdoors, we were buried outdoors in unmarked mass graves and we were slaughtered outdoors. Of course, our experience with the outdoors is going to be complicated because we've internalized some of that trauma. I'm seeing people talk about that. How the Black Marketing Community Used Juneteenth to Call for Change at Cannes Lions To bring it back to marketing, have you seen any brands that are kind of going above and beyond with accessibility and reaching people who are maybe handicapped or diverse folks that might not have been interested in hiking or biking or rafting or what have you? What brands do you think are doing it the right way?Eric Thompson [of Access on the Go and HandiCraft Adaptive], it's not a major brand, but when we were talking, I remember him talking about his partnership with Creature Crafts to create an adaptive version of a raft. There's these extreme Creature Crafts, which are basically rescue vehicles, and they're meant to be able to withstand intense classes of rapids, so he worked with them to create something that could work for someone in his condition. It's a great opportunity for brands, especially on the accessibility front. The other brand I'm thinking of that's more broadly related to the outdoors is Rivian, this electric vehicle company that's just launched. They're making the outdoors accessible in a different way with these vehicles. So much of our vehicular sense of the outdoors is loud and disruptive and destructive in certain ways. It seems like one of the biggest themes was obviously climate change and what folks all across the country are observing in how that's affecting their parks and their outdoor areas and their cities. What do you think that bigger brands and the national park system should be doing to align with consumer preferences and connect deeper with people?Companies need to be on the right side of this historic moment. There's a basic question: Are you about preserving our only habitable planet, or are you about destroying it? The answer to that question leads to a series of actions that you should be taking. There's a basic question [for brands]: Are you about preserving our only habitable planet, or are you about destroying it? Companies need to first know their carbon footprint. Then adjust it. Reduce, reuse and offset, in that order. I want to see people thinking about if their product or service depends on waste. Are you putting something into the world that requires me to discard it in order to be a good customer? Do I have to constantly upgrade? Do I have to constantly discard? There's so much value that companies can create by extending the life of a product rather than shortening it. And politically, I want to see these brands defunding climate catastrophe. If they are a part of these lobbying groups that are gaslighting the public, that are making it impossible to have meaningful climate legislation like carbon taxes or renewable standards, you have to stop that right away. You can't be talking all this stuff on social media on Earth Day, and then you're funding our destruction. Is there anything else you want to add that we didn't get to touch on?When it comes to the show, I think of it as America, comma Outdoors. My image of an outdoor show is a bearded white guy on the top of a mountain that he's just conquered. There's some maleness, there's some whiteness and there's some conquest involved. I got to reframe that dramatically making the series, and I'm excited for people to see themselves, basically; see all of America outside and remember that our connection to the planet is an essential part of who we are. We're not apart from the planet; we're a part of it.