Paradise Lost and Louder

Did Aristotle get it right when he said, “Change in all things is sweet”?

Over the summer, my family’s weekend camping getaway was, after years of a near solitude, suddenly teaming with gaggles of people, cars, RVs, and 4-wheelers. It’s a ubiquitous theme: your own private Garden of Eden is suddenly “discovered” and overrun by the masses.

“Change is the only constant,” I repeated to myself as I heard a blow dryer emerge from an RV near our campsite early one morning. In the evening while huddled among dueling generators, I cheerfully espoused everything good about the newly popular (and newly noisy) wilderness experience: “more people and more kids in the outdoors can only mean better personal health, robust family relationships, an enhanced connections to nature, and thus eventually, stewardship and care of the natural world. I worked hard to convince myself that my paradise lost was actually better for the common good. Though Leave No Trace was not at the forefront of this explosion of people and vehicles, I told myself that all paths would eventually lead to the program and its ethics.

By mid-August my carefully tuned belief system that balances conservation and personal determination began to crumble. Consequently, here at work we were being challenged with the issue of Leave No Trace’s role in the national drive to increase participation in the outdoors. Making a case for Leave No Trace never seemed more relevant as public health organizations, land management agencies, foundations and others scrambled to get people outside.

We certainly are focused on ensuring that basic Leave No Trace skills and ethics are infused into the participation push. I can only hope that the leaders involved in this national conversation bring Leave No Trace along for this journey and any resulting policy.

Susy Alkaitis