What outdoor teaching inflames

Madrasas, THEY’RE CALLED. IN PAKISTAN and environs, radical imams use some of these total-immersion schools to teach Islamic youngsters not only to love their faith but also to hate infidels and sometimes to destroy them.

I thought about them last week, right after I read that young Billy Cottrell, alleged eco-terrorist, spent part of his teens in “wilderness therapy.”

Cottrell is the 23-year-old Caltech student the FBI arrested in Pasadena and accused of playing a role in the burning and spray-painting of 125 vehicles at San Gabriel Valley auto dealerships in August. The feds believe he was in cahoots with two unnamed co-conspirators who have since fled the country. Cottrell, jailed without bail in San Bernardino until arraignment later this month, denies wrongdoing.

But I wasn’t stuck on the question of whether he did it. I was busy imagining those scores of outdoorsy programs for troubled teens that have opened in Utah, Idaho and elsewhere. Could they be indoctrinating vulnerable, sometimes violent kids with such faith in nature that they’d defend it with terrorism? Then I did a little reading, made some calls, took a long walk in the strangely summery last week of winter.

In a 2001 study, professor Keith Russell, then of the University of Idaho, estimated that more than 100 “outdoor behavior healthcare” providers were typically charging $151 per person per day and collectively generating $200 million in revenue. Cottrell is one of tens of thousands of alumni these programs have nudged toward adulthood.

What sort of nudge? After all, you’d need a pretty thick psychological skin to rise at dawn on a high mountain meadow or canoe a riffling river at sunset without sensing something transcendent, getting attached, getting protective -- maybe sometimes too protective.

Most of the kids who attend wilderness schools come from cities or the suburbs, says Mark H. Sklarow, executive director of the Independent Educational Consultants Assn. in Fairfax, Va. “Seeing a mountaintop in Idaho for the first time can be a spiritual experience for anybody. So you wonder about a kid who’s already in a fragile state.”

Veterans in the field say that nature indoctrination isn’t at all the point of most programs. Nature, they say, is an instructional tool. Instructors and therapists send kids crashing through rapids or rappelling off 80-foot cliffs or backpacking through wilderness for mile upon mile to point them toward broader perspectives, healthful risk-taking and peer trust.

A good wilderness program uses the outdoors as “a wonderful place to separate children from everything they think is important in their life, and actually isn’t, and help them get in touch with things that really matter,” says Michael G. Conner, a clinical psychologist in Bend, Ore., who has advised many families looking at these programs.

Wilderness reduces life “to its simplest elements. Food, shelter, clothing and your team,” says Amy Dodge, marketing director and former instructor at the Voyageur Outward Bound School in Ely, Minn. If teens make a bad choice, she says, “they might be eating dinner in the dark or paddling into the wrong bay.”

But clearly, attachments to the landscape get made along the way. Fresh graduates, Conner notes, often wind up sleeping on the floor in the hotel room with their parents when first reunited, “because they don’t want to get into the bed, because it’s too close to all the comforts in life that ruined them.” When alumni return to visit him months or years later, he adds, many tell him, “You’ll never be able to keep me from the outdoors.”

Three years ago, in interviews for a New York Times article on programs aimed at defiant teens, Cottrell and his father told of how he struggled in several schools before landing at age 14 in a “wilderness therapy” program in Idaho. After he ran away from that, his family enrolled him in the Provo Canyon School in Utah, a high-security residential facility that promises backpacking and canoe trips in the canyons of southern Utah between lockdowns.

At the Provo Canyon School, whose administration didn’t return my calls, the school website stresses “therapy without walls,” including six trips yearly to southern Utah and 10 to the north, with canoeing on the Green River, backpacking in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, cross-country skiing and yurt-camping in the Uinta Mountains.

From Utah, Cottrell headed into the mainstream. He went on to the University of Chicago, where he ran cross-country and double-majored in math and physics, then grad school at Caltech. These days, Cottrell’s attorney, Stephen J. Alexander, told me, his client is sympathetic to environmental issues but no more so than many Caltech students.

But I wonder. Once their hiking, paddling and sleeping on the ground is done, once they’ve shouted themselves hoarse at the rain and raced to make a fire in plummeting temperatures and had to cooperate with a kid they didn’t like, once the worst adolescent storm clouds have passed, do some wilderness-therapy alumni sense, a little more viscerally than the rest of us, the humbling, healing, clarifying power of nature?

I’ll bet some do. And the more I think about it, the more I believe we’re better off for it.

Inevitably, some true believers out there, whether eco-therapy graduates or not, see arson as an acceptable means to an end. It’s not. It’s as inexcusable as setting off on a jihad to smite innocent strangers. But treasuring your forest: That’s not only noble, it’s necessary.

Our air, water, soil and ice caps are in the shape they’re in today because there are too few people carrying around reverence for unadulterated landscapes, not too many.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.