Wild and Free: Forest Service Recreation Moonshot

Mike’s comment about the shared Volunteer Coordinator on the Rio Grande reminded me of part of my essay in the 193 Million Acres book, edited by Steve Wilent.  My ideas were partially inspired by talking to folks about the Volunteer Coordinator position. I may have posted this part of my essay previously, but it is still relevant, plus there are many new readers out there. I put my updated thoughts  in italics. I focused on dispersed recreation, but the ideas are relevant to all recreation.

One Giant Step Forward: Every Forest Needs Friends

Everyone needs good friends, and when it comes to recreation, friends are perhaps the Forest Service’s greatest need. The agency already has lots of friends. At the national scale, the National Forest Foundation was chartered by Congress in 1993 to “bring people together to restore and enhance our National Forests and Grasslands.”

Numerous local groups focus on their specific national forest or ranger district. In Colorado, the Friends of Dillon Ranger District (fdrd.org) are one example: “Friends of the Dillon Ranger District (FDRD) leverages the power of volunteers to make sure that your national forest lands, that are enjoyed by millions of people each year, are not negatively impacted by their popularity. By volunteering with FDRD, or supporting us by becoming a member or making a financial contribution, you benefit your national forest that makes Summit County a world-class destination.”

In California, the mission of the Stewards of the Sierra National Forest (sotsnf.org) is “to unite the many people who enjoy the diverse recreation activities available in the Sierra National Forest, promoting responsible recreation and use of forest resources, through conservation and education, and ensuring public access to the forest in the present and for future generations.” In Illinois, the Friends of the Shawnee National Forest (shawneefriends.org) is a “nonprofit organization that supports the Shawnee National Forest by promoting land stewardship,  nvironmental education, and responsible outdoor recreation.”

Friends groups can accept donations for supporting a forest or district— donations the agency cannot accept. I am going hiking tomorrow on a national forest. After I use about $30 worth of gas to get to a trailhead, I think it’s fair to donate $10 to the district Friends group. I’d like to do so via a collection box at the trailhead or perhaps online. But with no Friends, the
$10 sits in my pocket despite my best intentions.

What would it take to organize grassroots groups for every national forest, or even every forest district? If recreation were the “One Big Thing” for the 21st century Forest Service, a “Friends for Every Forest” campaign would be a major step toward getting there. And establishing a friends group could be among the duties of a jointly established and funded volunteer coordinator for each national forest. If the full cost were $70,000 per annum for such a position, and it was split between the Forest Service and its partners, then for roughly $5.5 million per year the outdoor industrycould make a difference on a moonshot scale. One corporation with stores nationwide, Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) gives $1 million to the NFF via its REI Co-op MasterCard (www.rei.com/h/shared-values). REI and outdoor gear retailer Patagonia support Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, as do numerous other companies, foundations, and groups (voc.org/sponsors-partners). Patagonia gives 1 percent of its sales to a variety of grassroots groups via its “1% for the Planet” program (patagonia.com); since 1995 it has donated $89 million in cash and in-kind donations to a variety of not for profits.

It is not too difficult to imagine that without undue economic pain, corporations that profit from the ready supply of free outdoor recreation on the national forests could give back in game-changing ways by focusing some proportion of their donations directly on national forests, BLM, and other lands where so many people recreate.

If the CEO of a major outdoor recreation corporation were to ask me “What’s the one thing our industry could do to help that would have the biggest impact?”  my answer would be to sponsor a volunteer coordinator and a friends group on every forest, all 154 of them. Many in the recreation industry have incredible assets and are now in the right place at exactly the right time. They have a network of local businesses, technological knowhow, marketing and media skills, and unfettered creativity compared to agency employees (that’s in terms of fetters, not creativity). Just being able to collect donations at trailheads and funneling the money back to the local unit through a not-for-profit would be a powerful step forward.

What if the outdoor industry put its financial, human, and technical resources behind building nonprofit capacity to support Forest Service and BLM programs? They would be choosing a leadership role of uniting, not dividing, something our country greatly needs. What would this look like?

Here’s one possibility. The outdoor industry could set aside some percentage of their profits to give back to public lands, but at least an amount equivalent to the $5.5 million for the volunteer coordinators. The first step would be to support the development of nonprofit, nonpolitical (how counterculturalis that?) friends groups for each forest or unit of the BLM. In fact, the
San Juan Mountains Interpretive Association (sjma.org) does that for an area that is a mix of Forest Service and BLM. What that does is remove the soul-draining bureaucratic distinctions and focuses attention and work on what needs to be done.

Some forests may already work with a variety of collaborative groups, Friends groups, and statewide interagency access councils or committees, such as the Montana Interagency Access Council. Many forests, though, lack some or all of this kind of external horsepower. The hardest part is probably just getting them started, and that’s where a major effort by the
recreation industry and the Forest Service could pay off, with support for generations to come. Nevertheless, the public’s role remains foundational.

As members of the public, we need to step forward and participate. To paraphrase President Kennedy, we should be asking not what our national forests can do for us, but what we can do for our national forests.

That One Big Thing

If having high-quality, diverse dispersed recreation was the Forest Service’s “One Big Thing,” what would be most important for the agency to address?
Here are a few suggestions:
• Focus forest and volunteer resources on an “every Forest has a Friend” program. Conduct a national conversation with existing Friends groups to see what they need in terms of support. Develop volunteer or paid mentoring cadres that travel to forests to help start new Friends groups and offer support to the groups. Support Friends groups and volunteer programs that are the equivalent of The Nature Conservancy’s Fire Learning Network, which “engages dozens of multi-agency, community-based projects to accelerate the restoration of landscapes that depend on fire to sustain native plant and animal communities,” Actively involve retirees and retiree groups in these efforts.

• Work with partners to fund a volunteer coordinator for each forest who will be the contact person for incipient friends efforts.

• Reorganize such that partnerships and volunteers are crucial parts of the organization and get serious about increasing volunteer and partner involvement—say, set a goal of 10-fold in 10 years. Think about striving for the equivalent of a moonshot for NASA.

• Work with BLM to benchmark other agencies that have been successful, and look for areas where working together with Interior agencies would increase efficiency and effectiveness. Because having a variety of dispersed recreation opportunities is the focus, choose partners that match the “wild and free” character of the Forest Service, with a bucolic, not “mall”-ic, atmosphere.

• Establish, with the Interior Department, a FACA group to review current agency practices and make recommendations for appropriately collecting fees, including possible changes to FLREA. This should include reviewing successes and failures across the country, developing best practices, and explicitly considering the idea of “pricing people out of their public lands.”

• Initiate an effort (with the BLM and states in appropriate locations), or piggyback on existing efforts, to improve mapping and feedback systems on the websites and phone apps for visitors.
These would make it easy to find locations across ownerships that both include opportunities visitors want as well as exclude those they want to avoid. The website and apps would also include information about the location and a place to give feedback and donate to local friend’s groups.

We now have some fairly excellent apps, but no links to give feedback to agencies nor to donate.

• Begin a program to phase out concessionaires from developed sites within 5 years, and replace them with paid agency staffers and trained volunteers.

I still believe agency presence and visibility is important, but given the cutbacks this year that don’t affect concessionaires, plus  their performance where I recreate, which is good, I’m not so certain about this.

• Encourage volunteers and retirees to work with the Forest Service to ensure access by providing support to land management staffs and increasing the agency’s capacity to litigate to open or preserve access to recreation sites. Montana’s Public Lands and Waters Access Association serves as an example of working with the federal and state agency budgets and donors to acquire or litigate access.

For example, some of us retirees are no longer at the “clearing trails” level of physical ability, but might be at the “writing documents under the supervision of a knowledgeable person” level for volunteering.

My vision for the national forests is that my great grandchildren will still find places where they can get away to camp, ride, hunt, fish, pick berries, and collect mushrooms and firewood. These are activities that our ancestors engaged in and that rural people today and tomorrow will continue to engage in. As US citizens, these experiences are our birthright. They should only yield to more restricted access for specific reasons, in specific places, when all enforcement efforts have failed, and with the local involvement and support of the communities.

The Forest Service has struggled with budgets that cannot keep up with needs and with organizations who think the easiest way to reduce costs is to keep people out and leave the land alone. I suggest that this is not what the majority of citizens want, even if they aren’t frequent users of the national forests, or even if they never use them. The Forest Service must take advantage
of the nascent groundswell of help and support and work to increase and expand it. The agency is not alone in this; it can and should build on the good work of friends groups and other volunteers. With their help, providing for a variety of dispersed recreation can become the agency’s new primary objective as stewards of America’s best experiences, and these precious
public lands can continue being wild and free.