I suppose with “Be Prepared” still one of the guidelines of my life (on the negative side, probably an aspect of being a control freak), it was only natural that as a youth I got involved in the Boy Scout movement.

I don’t recall being in Cubs long, but I did attend for a time. Squatting down with fingers to ears chanting “A-Kay-La!” didn’t inspire me that much I guess, but I did take more to the older Scouts themselves, and remember proudly being a patrol leader and wearing a silver scout emblem on my mountie-like hat. Carving a particularly nice walking stave was also something I liked. I recall it was marked off in feet for the first five or six, and then about six one-inch markings on the top, useful for measuring all kinds of things. Likely now the pole is gone (insurance rules to avoid injuries) and the marking would have to be metric.

There were only Cubs, Scouts, and a just started Venturer group in my home town at that time. We Scouts seemed to be teenagers, and the Cubs just kids, but I later noticed with the continual desire to create more groups, Scouts has been relegated to 11-14 year olds, with a couple of groups above and below it.

As an adult I was one of the leaders of a Beavers group for a few years, mainly because my son was moving through it, and as usual they threatened closure unless some parents volunteered to be leaders. It was a good time, however, and I adopted the leader name of “Malak”, the meaning of which has been lost to me over the years.

Unfortunately, on its 100th anniversary, the Scouting movement is in crisis in Canada, as a lot of such groups are. If we go back fifty years, they were declining then, and despite a little spurt as the Beavers group was created for younger boys in 1974, the decline has continued, and accelerated after 2000. “Crisis” comes from the figures— the decline was about ten or fifteen percent through the decades, but Canadian Scouting has fallen 40% since the year 2000. There are myriad reasons, perhaps all summed up by Dylan in the catch-all “the times they are a-changing”. I’ll mention only a few.

The demon computer, as many can imagine, is suspected of striking the latest blow. Video games, the Internet, and the unending list of technological advances are certainly behind the post-2000 precipitous drop. Instead of adventures with the gang in the woods— hiking, camping, detecting flora and fauna, the boys are stuck in their rooms gazing at the one-eyed monster. And what sense of primitive adventure is there in the woods anyway, when you have your cell-phone on your belt (was that a text message I heard?), your I-pod stuck in your ears, and your handy GPS to get you easily home again?

I said “boys”, and the scouting movement is still mainly boys. In 1992 in Canada girls were welcomed into all areas of scouting, but have taken little advantage of that. (See “Guiding” for girls, and a similar crisis situation.)

Those inside the business point to internal problems, though I doubt that contributed too much to a decline that was already on the way. The penchant over the years to continually sub-divide the groups into Beavers/Cubs/Scouts/Venturers/Rovers/ and adult groups seemed to confuse the issue for many, as did the constant uniform and program changes that were attempts to “stay current”. The famous mountie hat went out the window quite a while ago for scouts, replaced with things like peaked caps. Many of those in the trenches of local leadership are aware of Scouts Canada having a national leadership salary budget of over ten million dollars, unchanging despite a youth membership that is less than half of what it was, and computerization that should have resulted in efficiency, and that their only response to a crisis in membership is to generate more programming.

Certainly there were a few scandals here and there with leadership, and that didn’t help. Tragically, one of the leaders of the Beaver group I was with admitted to me (following his leaving his wife in favor of male companions) that he was only in the movement because of liking young boys, beyond what would be considered the norm. Looking back as an adult to my own scouting days, I can see that a stalwart leader of the movement in my hometown probably had more interest in young boys than might be expected, at the expense of any wife or family of his own. Thankfully, neither situation resulted in any harm to boys in the groups, to my knowledge. In a day of heightened awareness of this stuff in youth groups, many parents are more protective and turn away from participation by their children. You can’t blame them, although the majority of leaders are fine people who are in leadership for the right reasons– or perhaps because they threatened group closure without them!

As the movement declines and struggles, we’re left to decide if something wrong is happening. Certainly something is slowly disappearing from our society, joining the hoard of things that are fading. My wife and I took a drive yesterday through Upper Clyde, a mainly gravel road that skims along the side of the Clyde River, eventually crossing it at a bridge that is always good for a view of rippling water and trees blazing with fall colors leaning their branches down over the water. Just before the bridge is a small cemetery where a number of people who loved the area are buried, some of them authors and naturalists like Bonnycastle Dale, who valued the sanctity of the silent woods over the stress and demanding life of the modern world. It’s a quiet place and a peaceful setting, with the river just in the distance.

But what do our kids care? Halo 3 has just been released for the X-Box 360! Get them while they are still available!