In some other time, at some other place, going on holidays with a tent had the unequivocal association of going away from the crowds. The ideal day of such a holiday would be waking up, crawling out of the sleeping bag, and opening  the doors of the tent to a lonely swat of green forest. You and some nature, alone. Or perhaps with a few friends. Days later, when back at your own house in the city, the holiday would be reminded as "those beautiful days of rest" when "nobody was around".

Being a family man settled in Europe, I have tried to keep going on camping. Quite successfully indeed, since pretty much every free week that we have had in the last years, we have been sleeping in a tent, or about to. Starting with an scandinavian tour in 1997, and just coming back from the spanish Costa Brava past week, by now I could claim to have known camping sites in Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and The Netherlands, not to mention Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. Camping in Europe is a fascinating experience, if only to experience the very real and very different national idiosyncrasies in the flesh. Fresh croissants in France, ultimate pulchritude and order in Switzerland, late fiestas in Spain... The standard cliches of the European tribes become augmented and amusing, to say the least, when waking up in a tent on European soil. What you don't get, though, is the sense of solitude.

Differently than other continents, whatever might be called European nature is not only a natural resource, but a scarce and demanded one. Accordingly, is managed to reach the most people; which implies a level of crowdedness that surprises the neophyte. Forget the opening of your tent to some lonely forest: you are more likely to see the tent of some other people as first sight in the morning. Which launch the next question: what are all these people looking for? How comes that we leave our crowded cities each holiday to wake up in a crowded camping site?

Few years ago I thought up an economical hypothesis. Which of course, as any other guess of mine about europeans and their acts, turned out to be only partially true. What I thought then was that the camping holiday, I mean the european camping experience, was driven mostly by the wallet. If you compare with the costs of any other holiday accommodation in europe, camping is by far and large the cheapest. The simplest bed and breakfast is at least two or three times more expensive that a standard camping. So I thought that camping was, to put it simply, the last refuge of the proletarian. But with the pass of time, I have come to believe that our limited budgets do not explain the whole picture. In the last decade, with the boom of behavioral economics, we have learn that humans tend to be motivated by lots of other nudges -as Cameron and Obama would name them- than the plain economical ones. So I decided to go fully empirical in my wonderings, and begun to ask people, campers themselves. Why do they come to these incredibly crowded places? What do they expect to experience, what do they tell afterwards to their friends? The answers, perhaps unsurprisingly, are not so different than my own after hiking in the virgin rain forests of the Amazonas basin. People keep on talking about the peace and quiet, the nature, the clean water and the beautiful trees.

No doubt, I could go totally arrogant and paternalistic, and claim that my interviewed subjects, being europeans are simply ignorant. Because they never had access to the Real Peace and Quiet of the Real Nature, all these poor people does not know better, and have to be content with the impoverished lawns that pass by wild nature in this continent. But such a reaction would obscure a more deep, and interesting motivation. The fact is that independently of the level of wildness, disregarding biodiversity indexes of all kinds, people still love to go out and camp. If I am allowed to dramatize my own current hypothesis, people do need nature, and will take it in whatever way it is offered.

Which brings us to politics, green politics. For members of most green european parties, it is almost a dogma to believe that our parties are elitist and far away from what "the common men in the street" might possible want or understand. Deep in our minds sits the uncomfortable belief that all our discussions on global warming, or about natural resources policy, are a bit too far away from the relevant issues for european citizens. But what if we have caged ourselves in our own discussions, forgetting than in very simple, but very important decisions of europeans today -like the one of what to do for holiday- our party has a fundamental role to play? What if the drive to expend one or two months away from home and go camping is a drive that can be translated in voting green?

It is a stretch of imagination, no doubt. But being faced with the throngs of camping-goers all across europe makes me wonder. Would it be time to try some eco-populism?