National Park visitors

As more Americans have visited national parks, more farmers markets have opened across the country, a correlation that paints a portrait of a nation simultaneously rediscovering both the outdoors and the concept of buying vegetables from a person who grew them. The coefficient is 0.923 across eight years, during which both trends rose, fell off a cliff in 2020, and recovered with the determined optimism of activities that require leaving your house and being near other people. The correlation is almost too wholesome to qualify as spurious.

National park visits grew from about 307 million in 2015 to 312 million by 2019, crashed to 237 million in 2020, and rebounded to about 312 million by 2022. Farmers markets followed a similar pandemic-disrupted trajectory. Both are outdoor, in-person activities that track the same variables: consumer confidence, leisure time, gas prices, and the general mood of a population deciding whether to leave the house. The shared variable is not nature or agriculture but mobility: when Americans feel comfortable traveling and gathering, they do both. The pandemic disrupted both simultaneously, creating an artificial but very real statistical trough that amplified the correlation.

Eight years of park visits and farmers markets growing together—with a shared pandemic crater in the middle—is a story about what Americans do when they feel free: they go outside, they drive to beautiful places, and they buy tomatoes from strangers in parking lots. Both activities resumed as soon as circumstances allowed, which suggests they satisfy the same basic need. The trail and the market stall are different destinations on the same impulse.