A Crucial Species is now Endangered, and it’s all Our Fault

In the fight against Karen culture, the outdoor community inadvertently lost an important advocate. Our trails and parks are suffering for it.

“My name is the Karen, I speak to the managers.”

Our planet is full of big, complex ecosystems that require a lot of dirty, thankless jobs to keep humming along: Scavengers pick the bones of dead animals, termites break down dead wood, and microorganisms digest literal crap, turning it into useful nutrients.

The topic of today’s article is one such creature that played an important role in keeping our trails, campgrounds and parks protected from garbage, pet waste, and general misuse. But due to a host of other irritating traits, the often reviled Matrona Exigens was nearly driven into extinction.

You likely know this creature by its household name: the common Karen.

While their physical appearances can vary, all Karens share several defining behavioral traits; chiefly a proclivity for nosiness, and dogmatic adherence to even the most trivial rules.

These odious creatures have every snitch line you can imagine on speed dial. You can find them peering over fences to report children’s treehouses to code enforcement, or — in more recent years — crossing otherwise empty public parks to remind you to mask up.

When alone, the Karen is harmless to all but the most spineless of foes, hence their¹ propensity for pack hierarchy. The Karen’s main weapon is shaming, which carries considerably more weight when it has the backing of some kind of institution. These groups range from HOAs to school boards, and are where alpha Karens consolidate their power.

While capable of ingesting human food, their nutrients appear to come from the spit of service industry staff, unwittingly ingested after behaving boorishly in restaurants and cafés.

Misguided biologists classified the Matrona Exigens as a nuisance species — similar to the Zebra Mussel or Spotted Lanternfly — and most people were happy to jump on the extinction bandwagon. After all, no one wants termites chewing through their house, gophers digging up their lawn, or Karens giving them an earful the one time they don’t return their shopping cart to the little corral at the grocery store.

But just because a creature acts like a pest, doesn’t mean they don’t perform an important function.

“Erosion of Society Begins with the Individual.”

A fellow writer discussing their global travel experiences shared an anecdote that’s stuck with me for years. While visiting Japan, a local man politely but firmly stopped them from jaywalking. “The erosion of society begins with the individual,” he had said.

If you’re reading this, at some point you’ve probably jaywalked without a second thought. You’ve also likely littered, trampled some foliage, or violated one of the other principles of Leave No Trace — even unwittingly.

None of us like getting chastised in public, even when we’re in the wrong. And while many of us were brought up to be courteous and respectful in the outdoors, an increasing portion were not.

I’ve written about why fewer people have an environmentally conscientious upbringing in my guest post over on

John Carter

’s Substack. I’ve linked it below if you’d like to read it.

If you’re short on time, the big takeaway is that the cultural institutions that used to impart those values have been greatly eroded.

The Rough Rider Reconquista

If character is who you are when no one’s looking, then a non-negligible sum of people are slovenly cretins who can only be trusted to act right when someone is policing their behavior. But because we’ve also slid into a head-down, that’s-none-of-my-business society, most of us don’t want to do the policing — no matter how societally corrosive the behavior in question may be.

Leaving trash strewn about the backcountry campsite that could attract bears? What’s it to you?

Shooting heroin in the park by the elementary school? Cut him some slack, he probably had a rough childhood.

So much has been “normalized” that many of us feel uncomfortable rebuking anyone for anything, lest we commit some sort of social faux pas.

Karens however, had no such qualms. Alongside schoolyard bullies², they served as guardrails that kept our society rolling down the lane and out of the gutter.

Some of this was grating, sure. But candidly, if your unleashed, out-of-control dog is chasing wildlife and excitedly knocking over other hikers, you’ve earned talking to.

Extinction Event

Ultimately, technology was the meteor that wiped out the Karens.

Somewhere in the 20–teens, smartphone ownership and social media use became near-universal. There was now a kind of digital permanent record, where the videos from our now-omnipresent pocket cameras could be shared.

Unhelpfully: early algorithms didn’t really differentiate between positive and negative interaction. If something made you angry and you sounded off in the comments, your social platform du jour assumed you wanted more of it.

For this reason, content like Karen freak-outs and police beatings flooded newsfeeds. This artificial amplification may have been one of the contributing factors that led Americans to massively overestimate how frequently these incidents happen. That discrepancy hardly mattered.

Incensed viewers quickly dogpiled the (alleged) perpetrators in these clips. Being the subject of such a video could have career-ending consequences. In an ironic twist, many a Karen found themself on the receiving end of the social shaming pitchfork.

One well-documented example was the tale of “BBQ Becky.” The Karen in question ostensibly called Oakland Police on a group of men for using a charcoal grill in a public area that only permits non-charcoal grills. She told the dispatcher she was concerned about kids getting burned by the coals, which had apparently happened a few years prior.

General consensus seemed to be that she reported the men because they were black.

Then again, calling the cops over someone using the wrong type of grill is textbook Karen behavior. But while knowing her true motivation is impossible, gauging public perception is not.

Karens either reigned themselves in, or fell out of visibility. Karen posts, which dominated feeds in 2020, have now completely fallen out of trending topics.

The Last Line of Defense

I’m obviously being a bit tongue-in-cheek about our cultural need for Karens. But they did help hold the line of social standards in a way that no one else seems to bother doing any more.

• Litter on the trail? None of my business.

• Campers violating a fire ban? None of my business.

• Illegally parked hikers blocking emergency vehicles on a mountain pass? C’mon man, that’s none of my business!

If the erosion of society begins with the individual, so too does the renewal. At the end of the day, “society” is built from our shared heritage, traditions, and beliefs.

In other words: we get what we tolerate.

The straightforward solution is to collectively and vocally rebuke behavior that degrades our natural resources. To that end, need to bring back shame for the following behaviors:

• Littering

• Defacing environment (e.g. carving rocks, trees)

• Out of control animals

• Abandoning pet waste

• Harvesting flora

• Harassing fauna

• Unsafe or improper fires

• Off-trail trespassing on private lands³

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

More polite corrections are probably warranted for honest mistakes that come from a simple lack of knowledge, rather than willful disregard for our shared resources. Things like setting up camp a little too close to a river, for instance.

We should also be demanding accountability from our local law enforcement and elected leaders, as to why certain already illegal and societally caustic behaviors go unpunished.

Many of the above behaviors are also against the law, and practitioners might think twice if there’s a real fear of punishment.

Case in point: in our documentary, The Alpine Amusement Park, Quandary Magazine found that a dangerous crowding problem at a popular trail was solved overnight with a crackdown on illegal parking.

NOW PLAYING: "The Alpine Amusement Park"

There are also behaviors that are damaging, but frankly dangerous for an individual to try enforcing without law enforcement backing. We should not have to endure drug use and vandalism in our parks, for example, and public officials should be made to answer for lackadaisical enforcement of the rules.

I recognize that this solution is going to be uncomfortable for many people, particularly the more introverted or live-and-let-live types.

The alternative will be worse: more broad-brush crackdowns that unfairly impact all outdoor lovers — even model stewards of the environment. Unless we self-police, I expect a massive ramping up of trail closures, cumbersome reservation systems, and new or increased use fees to name a few.

Personally, I don’t want to have to pay for the privilege of going outside. I certainly don’t want to be penalized for the actions of poorly behaved hikers, and you shouldn’t want that either.

If the price of protecting our community is telling off some jackass for tossing crushed White Claws on the side of the trail, I’ll gladly pay it.

If you agree, I hope you’ll share this post on your social platform of choice.

Thank you for reading. The issue of outdoor stewardship is a complicated one. I’d love to hear your thoughts down below in the comments!

1. Notice: despite the female-sounding species designation, Karens can be both male or female.

2. The second-order impact of anti-bullying campaigns is its own topic — one that’s out of my niche — that I’ll leave for a better positioned writer to tackle.

3. This is both an issue of safety and access. The Rockies are full of old mining claims. This means that going off trail can come with serious risk of falling into an open pit, or unstable subterranean tunnel. Some of these old claims are on private land that public trails pass through. If the owners have reason to worry you might wander off trail and hurt yourself, they may cut off public access to reduce perceived liability exposure. This is routinely what happens with the DeCaLiBron loop.