The Manning Brothers Are Right

America's conservation future demands more of something Americans generally suck at: casual participation.

In case you haven’t heard, Peyton and Eli Manning are taking back sports.

ESPN and the Positive Coaching Alliance recently launched a new Take Back Sports initiative intended to tackle a steady drop in youth sports participation. The initiative’s latest ad campaign features the Manning brothers holding a press conference in which they accuse adults of turning youth sports into “overscheduled, overpriced, overcoached chaos from the people who made 10-year-olds choose between AAU, club, or a training academy eleven states away.”

I rewatched the ad three times. As a former year-round travel softball player who burned way out after two D-3 college seasons, the subversion of this concept — the concept of “what the hell are we doing here” — has gravitational pull. (I should note that my parents were always fantastic in this capacity, but I’ve…seen things.)

You mean a frontcountry frolic in Missoula gets you this?

The ad reminded me of an interview I read in a 2013 issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern with Lawrence Weschler, a journalist, cultural critic, and longtime staff writer for the New Yorker. He dedicated much of his career to recording biographies and deep studies on artists, mostly contemporary types whose work Weschler described as both “annoying” and “delightful.” Guys who hand-draw replicas of paper currency, get arrested for using it, then try to persuade juries that something can’t be counterfeit if it’s more valuable than the original.¹ Guys who present near-empty rooms — save for a few clear acrylic pillars in the middle of the installation — and call the observer experience “art.”² Guys who fuck with seemingly unfuckwithable establishments until you feel the simultaneous urge to shake their hands and punch their smug faces and voilà! Now you’re part of it, too.

Clearly, you could fit what I know about art in a teaspoon. But I’m partial to acts of creative expression with the power and tendency to subvert norms. When these acts are rich in color and humor, all the better. The ESPN ad, which also features a glasses-clad Steph Curry pretending to be a reporter, landed as a type of performance art that uses incredibly high-visibility figures to fuck with the seemingly unfuckwithable establishment that has become youth athletics. The campaign centers on an agenda so obvious that ESPN wrote it up (with alliterative flourish) and dropped it right into the Manning brothers’ script: “Putting play before pressure, multi-sport over madness, fun over…whatever this is.” (Peyton holds up a hardcover book titled “Elite Youth Development Manual”.)

Somewhere between the push and pull of Weschler’s preferred adjectives to describe his artistic subjects — annoying and delightful — is a third word, one that sits at the heart of the ESPN ad: playful. By poking some good-humored fun at a $40-billion industry that tends to turn children into adults and adults into children, Curry and the Manning brothers deflate the ballooning desirability of it all — something that only the most successful athletes would ever have the social capital to do.

This all made me wonder what the art of subversion looks like in the context of conservation. Is anyone making art like that right now? If so, what is it accomplishing? And what establishment is it subverting? Sadly, I came to the conclusion that “playful” is a word that rarely seems to find a home in the conservation realm.

When playfulness does show up in conservation, it’s a force to behold. Playful like John Oliver’s Duck Stamp saga, which ultimately funneled over $100,000 into the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund. Playful like the Gen-Z tone that has commandeered social media accounts for various state and federal fish, wildlife, and land agencies. Playful like Bill Bryson’s misadventure prose, like Eeland Stribling’s fishy comedy, like young wildlife caught on camera doing, well, anything. The joy of being surprised by something unexpected, momentarily misunderstood, or disorienting in its silliness, is a joy I have heard many seasoned outdoorsy types and conservationists decry as “missing from our world.”

Diagnosing this absence is easy: we (myself, a comparatively unseasoned outdoorsy type, plus all the seasoned folks around me) constantly feel the weight of looming disaster. We shoulder the plight of the spotted owl, the mule deer, the steelhead, the piping plover, the wolf, the desert bighorn. Visions of an American future without designated wilderness areas or permanent conservation easements or snowy elk hunts spook and distract from enjoyment. These are difficult circumstances to mine for joy.

But I fear that, in becoming overwhelmingly serious about the threats to our environment that seem to multiply by the day, we have also started overwhelmingly identifying as conservationists as an act of political defiance (which is a lot like subversion, minus the playful part). And I fear that, when an identity like “conservationist” becomes a marker of membership in some highly visible, cool-kid crowd — something into which much of the outdoors community has notoriously transformed — that identity stands little to no chance at ever becoming mainstream.

As long as America’s most potent leaders are elected into their positions by the rank-and-file, we probably aren’t prioritizing the creation of more casual, amateur conservationists (versus the empowerment of a few intense, professional ones) as much as we should be.

Aside from the fact that very few people in this country actively seek opportunities to be subversive, casting oneself as a member of a highly visible cool-kid crowd is a surefire way to get the same treatment the rest of society reserves for artists. “Oh, those [enter user group here]. They’re obsessed. Insular. Self-serving. Allergic to being casual. One-dimensional. Lousy at dinner parties. Unless, of course, they were in charge of the guest list, in which case they’re sure to be the most popular ones in the room.”

A great way to torpedo America’s outdoor stewardship legacy is to keep it tied to these highly evolved, specialized ways of being an outdoor steward. Sure, those ways are pretty ideologically diverse, something the outdoors community celebrates as a strength over and over and over again until it’s blue in the face. (Look, I did it right here, and I’m proud of it.)

But a crack has emerged in this armor. The most visible ways of “being a conservationist” share the incredibly expensive common denominator of obsession. Obsession is not something the totally normal, rank-and-file American can afford. Economies of time, money, and energy dictate that an all-consuming relationship with the outdoors — the type of relationship that gear brands and nonprofits alike are forced to encourage — is, at best, an aspirational one. Enter the statistic the Mannings cite on the precipitous decline in youth sports participation nationwide: when an activity is marketed and accordingly perceived as being high-commitment, the conversion rate tanks. Why? Because this is America, where apparently the only way to do something is to do it full-torque.

Obviously the act of conserving land, water, and wildlife is totally fuckwithable, and not nearly as much of an establishment as we would probably like it to be. But I can’t help but feel like capital-C “Conservation” has started to take on the aura of an unfuckwithable establishment, one mostly attended by those with the privilege of time, money, or energy required to be obsessed. (Since I try to avoid assuming the intentions of others, let’s call this an accidental byproduct of another aspirational industry and media landscape. See also: health and wellness, beauty, and — you guessed it — sports.)

This isn’t exactly a problem in need of fixing. Our lands, waters, and wildlife need our obsession now more than ever, and I’d be a fool to argue otherwise. But the side effect of that obsession is exclusion, a major Achilles’ heel to address and improve upon. How? Re-enter the Manning brothers. The best way to invigorate a cultural phenomenon is to make casual participation in that phenomenon attractive and accessible to a broad audience. Ease the access and broaden the audience enough and pretty soon, the concentration of that user group has diluted all the way through a demographically accurate slice of the American layer cake. Sure, hearty infighting is a certainty. But so is lasting power. So is fun.

At a time like this, we don’t just need to mobilize a more intense approach to actionable, measurable conservation and outdoor stewardship outcomes within our niche. We also need to normalize a less intense approach external of it. Being a casual conservationist who values fun, low-pressure outdoor experiences should be anything but subversive, if for no other reason than because obsession has a tendency to run dry.

The interesting part is, many of America’s outdoorspeople might already be heading in this direction. According to the Outdoor Industry Association’s 2025 participation report, overall participation is up and climbing, and yeah, outings per participant are down. But rather than fretting over some wilting national passion for the outdoors, the best thing we can do is re-up our own commitment to stewardship and conservation principles in whatever way best fits our normal-ass lives (if you’re an obsessor, go get ‘em, champ!) and invite others to do the same in ways that work best for them.

If you think I’m oversimplifying the issue at hand — the issue of whether enough Americans have a conservation ethic they’re willing and able to act on to help protect our natural resources — then I invite you to consider how you might be overcomplicating it.

The next three years (and whatever comes after them) are going to be the sociopolitical equivalent of that 135-mile ultramarathon through Death Valley all those crazy people run. If we want to come out the other side with our wild places relatively in tact, we desperately need gas in the tank. Right now, we’re guilty of taking ourselves a little too seriously out there, to the ultimate disadvantage of both our longevity and our broader relatability. So here’s a smug, punchable, subversive, delightful, and incredibly annoying reminder: money is paper, art is a room with a mirror, youth athletes are children, and conservation starts with humanity ignoring its vanity.

1. See more on the work of J.S.G. Boggs here.

2. See more on Robert Irwin’s “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s: Part II” here.