Recreation

Most of us enjoy our time outdoors.  If we have followed the Zeitgeist long enough, we were afraid there aren’t enough people out there (Nature Deficit), then there were too many people out there (Covid).. but today the Society for Environmental Journalists came up with these for story ideas; maybe these stories will help reduce overcrowding.. or cause generalized depression.. or both. Note that flesh-eating bacteria have not been linked to climate change, nor sewage overflows.

For environmental journalists, summer is sort of like Mardi Gras and Christmas combined. At least it used to be, before it became an occupational hazard and a meme at the same time. In fact, it’s the hottest summer so far in human history. And yes, there will be worse-than-ever hurricanes and wildfires.

So no, summer isn’t what it used to be.

Historically, it was the time for having fun outdoors. In some beleaguered states, the outdoor recreation industry was as profitable as the oil and gas industry. The Commerce Department says it is worth $563.7 billion or more annually.

That means if you are looking for story ideas, you should consider the impact of climate change on your local outdoor recreation industries. Here are some possibilities for your reporting.

• Summer festivals: Nowadays, thanks to warming weather, many of the biggest summer music festivals in the United States, like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza don’t happen later than May or early June (last summer in the Southern Hemisphere — November to the rest of us — a fan at a Taylor Swift concert actually died of heat illness). But there are still so many lesser festivals going on across the country (maybe near you) in the hottest part of summer. This year, the Chincoteague wild pony roundup starts July 20. How are your local festivals adapting?

• Summer camps: Those of us who are working parents often send our kids to summer camp, even if it’s just an outdoorsy kind of babysitting. Except the heat may be so bad that it needs to be indoorsy. How are summer camps (whether day camps or away camps) in your area adapting to the latest heat wave?

• Fishing: People in many parts of the United States spend time during their lazy days fishing. But the fish aren’t always happy about the heat. Trout, salmon and some other species don’t want to live in hot water. Drought, common during summer in many parts of North America, may reduce streams to a trickle. Check in with local tackle shops to get insight. Also, are your fishing waters more polluted in the summer?

• Hiking: Because summer is when many people have the time, they want a walk in the outdoors. This can be perilous during extreme heat. Hikers need to understand the risks and to adapt and plan accordingly. Visit trailheads for both longer routes (like the Appalachian Trail) and shorter local day hikes and talk to hikers both before they go out and return.

• Swimming: People swim to cool off. Many seek out nonchlorinated waters like those at a beach or lake. But the opportunities for serious water pollution and hazards often increase during the hot summer weather. There are sewage overflows, stormwater events, algal blooms, vibrio (cholera-like) outbreaks, jellyfish and all kinds of other health threats — not to mention the flesh-eating bacteria. Talk to the lifeguards, if any.

• Canoeing, rafting and tubing: Depending on the water and vehicle, these trips can last for a few minutes or a few days. Even though people think they won’t be going swimming, they usually do. It can be a good way to cool off in hot weather, but the hazards of heat and polluted water may remain. Check in with the guides and outfitters who support these activities.

• Picnics, cookouts and barbecues: When it’s Fourth of July, a cookout may be mandatory rather than optional. No matter how hot it is. But there is that old saw about leaving potato salad out in the hot sun (it will spoil slower if you skip mayonnaise). Go to a park where people picnic. Ask them about their extreme heat experience.

• County and state fairs: You probably have both, probably in the later, hotter weeks of summer. Fairs are fun — but the extreme heat can be a health threat for vulnerable people. Visit your fairgrounds and talk to people about their heat experiences. Is it cooler atop the Ferris wheel? Hydrate.

Thanks to Nick Smith for this one.  Interesting headline in the Salt Lake Tribune.

“Plans to build more roads on public lands will help disabled Americans, Mike Lee says. Disabled hikers disagree.”

Can we imagine that some disabled Americans prefer roads and others prefer trails?  Are there people who can honestly say that no disabled Americans will be helped by more roads?  Of course, headlines are silly but…

Many TSW-ites are more familiar with all this than I, but I will state one thing I’ve found in my years of federal lands work- it’s different, and more difficult,  for federal decisions to stop allowing something, than to turn down a request to start something new.   One reason is that there are people who are using or doing it who support the activity.  The other is that the environmental effects are known.   Therefore,  “building lots of new roads” is substantially different from “keeping existing roads open.” So let’s start there,  because there seem to be two conversations going on in this piece.

First is Mike Lee’s bill.

Here’s what his office says about it in the one-pager.

Senator Lee introduced the Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure that public land is accessible to all Americans, not just the able-bodied. This legislation defines “disability-accessible land” as one square mile with at least 2.5 miles of authorized roads accessible to motorized vehicles. It directs federal land management agencies to coordinate with state, local, and Tribal governments to determine which roads offer access to diverse recreation opportunities and prioritize access to those roads. The bill also requires that local stakeholders be involved in decisions regarding road closures in their communities.
Bill Specifics
• Defines disability-accessible land as one square mile of public land with at least 2.5 miles of authorized roads accessible to motorized vehicles or offroad vehicles
• Requires the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture, acting through the Chief of the Forest Service, to prioritize updating travel management plans and motor vehicle use of the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service
• When developing motor vehicle use maps, the Secretary concerned must:
Account for the length of roads in each square mile of public land under their management
Prioritize roads that provide access to diverse recreation opportunities
Coordinate with federal agencies, state, county, and local governments, and Tribal governments to determine which roads offer the best access to disability-accessible land
Have the authority to revise routes on public land in response to changes in local conditions
• The Secretary concerned may not close roads that would disqualify land from disability accessible status unless the road was for temporary emergency access or it is a threat to the
health and safety of visitors
• The Secretary concerned will provide notice of any proposed road closures, allow for a public comment period, and conduct a public hearing regarding the closure
• For any roads closed, the Secretary concerned will nominate and establish a new road
• Road closures and new roads will be categorically exempt from NEPA
• Nothing in this Act establishes new roads or trails or prohibits the Secretary concerned from establishing new roads or trails on public land for motorized and off-road vehicles

I could be wrong, and I ‘m sure folks will tell me if I am, but it doesn’t sound like building new roads, but keeping access to existing ones.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee is spearheading legislation he says will allow more people to access America’s natural wonders — by building more roads atop them.

While Lee contends the Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act will make outdoor access more equitable, some disability advocates told The Salt Lake Tribune that the effort felt disingenuous and played into stereotypes they are trying to dispel.

Syren Nagakyrie, founder and director of the nonprofit Disabled Hikers, called the bill “a blatant attempt to scapegoat disability as an excuse to build more roads.”

“People who already oppose disability inclusion and accessibility already blame disabled people, saying that what we want is to ‘pave over the wilderness,’” they said. “That is absolutely not what we want in any way, shape or form. This bill really is just leaning into that.”

I’m always interested in the groups reporters choose to interview.  Disabled Hikers seems like a great group, there’s an NY Times story about them here, and they produce guides to trails for disabled folks.  Still,  Nagakyrie seems to be saying  that the bill is bad because third parties will think bad things about disabled people because of it. That is, people who already oppose disability inclusion and accessibility.  So.. some disabled people should not have what they want.. motorized access.. because some other people who already think bad things will think more bad things about disabled people.   It seems to be that’s a restriction on disabled peoples’ agency.   Why can’t (disabled) hikers hike and OHVers ride? Doesn’t inclusion mean… well.. inclusion?

The BLM released a new travel management plan for the Labyrinth Rims/Gemini Bridges Travel Management Area in late September. The update closed 317.2 miles of routes in the 300,000-acre area that were previously open to off-highway and passenger vehicles. The plan left 800 miles of routes open to motorized use.

Lee’s legislation would have the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service develop and update travel management plans to prioritize accessibility. Roads on public lands should, according to the bill, allow access for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, off-roading and other recreational activities to “ensure the public land is disability-accessible land.”

The legislation defines “disability-accessible land” as land with at least 2.5 miles of roads accessible to motorized or off-road vehicles per square mile.

Lee’s bill also specifies that the agencies should not close roads to motorized vehicles on public land to the extent that people with disabilities cannot access it.

In its plan for Labyrinth Rims/Gemini Bridges, the BLM said that it closed roads to protect wildlife, preserve sensitive watersheds and safeguard cultural sites. The agency also cited conflicts between motorized and non-motorized recreators, like off-road vehicle users and river-runners.

“Federal land managers are required to analyze the impacts of their decisions on dirt, but they have no requirement to ensure that their decisions don’t hurt disabled Americans,” said Ben Burr, executive director of the recreation advocacy group BlueRibbon Coalition.

“Every time decisions are announced to close more of our backcountry roads, I hear from our disabled Americans that they feel discriminated against and ignored,” he added.

But again it seems like the bill is not so much about building but about keeping open.

Nagakyrie said there are better ways to increase accessibility on public lands that don’t require road-building, like increasing access to motorized wheelchairs.

But who decides what is “better”? Do other disabled people get a vote?

Staunton State Park and Great Sand Dunes National Park, both in Colorado, offer them for disabled visitors to experience those landscapes.

“From a public lands perspective, forcing the BLM and Forest Service to add thousands of miles of roads across otherwise pristine land is a terrible idea,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of conservation nonprofit Center for Western Priorities, “and does not actually do anything to increase accessibility.”

“This bill seems like a stunt,” he continued.

Again, it doesn’t seem to be about adding roads. It may well not go anywhere. Still, it seems to me that if the FS and BLM are closing roads, keeping them open would increase accessbility compared to closing them.

In an email, a spokesperson for Sen. Lee pointed to support for the bill from the off-roading group The Trail Hero, which “specializes in providing motorized access to the outdoors for people with special needs, veterans, and others who require mobility assistance.”

“These user groups are not asking to forge new trails,” said the group’s founder Rich Klein. “They just want to keep existing routes and trails open so that they can get the same therapeutic experience from nature that able-bodied citizens have access to.”

If I’d done the reporting, I would have tried to figure out exactly what in the bill was about making new trails versus not closing ones people already use. Otherwise folks like Klein and Weiss seem to be talking about different bills.

Op-ed linked here.

Here are some excerpts:

As a United States senator, I sponsored and helped to pass new Wilderness protections for Colorado’s James Peak Wilderness, Indian Peaks Wilderness, and Rocky Mountain National Park. These bills became law thanks to a united coalition of advocates for conservation and recreation. In my experience, the two cannot be separated. The time we spend outside is what defines every conservationist I know.

Protecting Wilderness requires careful management that allows primitive recreation activities that are compatible with preserving Wilderness characteristics. Over the last decades, the management of fixed anchors in Wilderness areas has been ad hoc. It’s varied from area to area, often causing confusion and conflict. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act (PARC Act) would clarify for the land agencies, the public, and climbers where fixed anchors are appropriate, when they can be replaced, and where they are banned.

By resolving the ongoing debate over fixed anchors, our public land managers can devote their priceless time to the serious, existential, and quickly progressing impacts to America’s Wilderness Preservation System. For example, air pollution and climate change don’t respect boundaries on a map. In fact, 96 percent of national parks “are plagued with significant air pollution problems.”

If we’re going to take a proactive approach to protecting America’s last pockets of Wilderness, we need a new generation of advocates to lead the way. Supporting sustainable climbing access to America’s Wilderness areas will help ensure that climbers—long-standing wilderness champions—are part of that coalition.

Here’s what I think: saying advocates for conservation and recreation “cannot be separated” is one of those generalized expressions that glosses over the fact that certain forms of recreation on the Pyramid of Pristinity are often kicked out or never allowed in Wilderness.  Also, that even those activities allowed can have serious environmental impacts. But maybe that’s still conservation? By definition?

The fact is that our “public land managers” “priceless time” will probably not be spent on cleaning up air pollution nor reducing “climate change.”  I heard one of my colleagues say “perhaps the best things federal lands could do for climate change is to not allow recreation of any kind because of the transportation and fuel impacts” and I’m not sure it was tongue-in-cheek.

His last argument is fairly pragmatic.. although I’m not sure what a “proactive approach to protecting” means… more Wilderness, or fewer things allowed, or protecting via reducing pollution and decarbonizing? What do they need climbers for, and why stop with them?

Volunteer John Flood, M.D., staffed the Green Lakes Trail Head
Information Station for several summers.

By Les Joslin

“Now I want you to recruit and train and supervise wilderness volunteers to work at the trailhead so you can get back on the trails,” Marv responded to my written report on the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station’s first summer of operations.

With this license, and eschewing such terms as “trailhead host” and “information kiosk” used by Marv and others, I set about recruiting a small group of volunteer “wilderness information specialists” possessed of first-hand knowledge of the Three Sisters Wilderness to operate the “information station” as uniformed Forest Service representatives. The station would be open nine hours daily from July 1 through Labor Day and on weekends into the fall.

“Working alone or in pairs,” my recruiting brochure and news releases advised, “volunteers will assist wilderness users and other national forest visitors by providing information and explaining the wilderness permit system, regulations, and etiquette. They will also gather visitor statistics and maintain trailhead facilities. Additional duties may include trail patrols.”

I laid out the details, and did so in a way that set the tone I intended as it assured potential volunteers they would not be just hanging out at a trailhead but doing a real Forest Service job for free.

Qualified persons at least 18 years of age who can commit at least one day per week may apply. In addition to familiarity with the Three Sisters Wilderness, volunteers should possess strong interpersonal skills and be physically capable of performing the full range of trailhead duties. Additional qualifying experience might include previous Forest Service or similar public contact service and relevant education. Current first aid and CPR certification also is useful. The Forest Service will provide supervision, pre-season and first-day on-the-job training, uniforms, and equipment. Volunteers are not considered federal employees, but they do receive legal protection as well as insurance for work-related injuries and reimbursement for certain expenses.

“The Forest Service,” I assured them, “needs reliable volunteers to supplement its small wilderness ranger force.” People who “are qualified, enjoy working with people, and would like serving as a ‘friendly face and a helping hand’ in the Three Sisters Wilderness this summer,” were invited to contact the Bend Ranger Station or me.

This challenging invitation attracted a few good volunteers from all walks of life. Two who proved the most active were Bend residents Larry Robertson, a retired General Motors executive engineer and former head of the Mount Bachelor ski patrol, and his wife Marian. Larry, a native of Corvallis, Oregon, and an Oregon State College aeronautical engineer who served as a U.S. Navy aviation maintenance officer during World War II and later helped design the Corvair and defend it before Congress from Ralph Nader, served at the trailhead station two or three days a week that summer and the next. As the summers went by, others included both active and retired Central Oregon doctors, lawyers, armed forces officers, and other professionals and retirees. Still others were college students who—along with Central Oregon Community College and Oregon State University, for both of which I taught part-time—eventually added another dimension to the project.

Training those volunteers—whom I referred to as Wilderness Information Specialists—at the trailhead station, staffing the station myself when no volunteer was scheduled, and patrolling trails while continuing the campsite surveys I’d begun in 1990 put me in the field for fifty-nine of the seventy-four days the station served over six thousand visitors that second summer.

Even after the previous summer’s shakedown, a few issues remained to be resolved. One of these was overnight wilderness permits. Day-use permits were self-issued at the trailheads, but overnight permits had to be obtained from a forest officer at a ranger station, and that could mean a sixty-mile roundtrip to Bend. On July 3, I made the case for trailhead volunteers to issue overnight permits to the Deschutes National Forest community affairs staff officer when he visited the station. “To the public, this is a ranger station.” On July 9, the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station was authorized to issue overnight wilderness permits. A few years later, overnight permits, too, were self-issued at trailheads.

The success of the volunteer program begun at the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station that summer of 1993 is reflected in statistics for the fourteen years during which a total of ninety-five uniformed volunteers I trained and qualified worked with me to staff the station for 997 days—8,560 hours—during which they represented the Forest Service and the wilderness concept to about 82,500 wilderness visitors and served another eight thousand Deschutes National Forest visitors who stopped by the station for other assistance and information. Add to those numbers the many wilderness visitors served by these same volunteers who staffed the Devils Lake wilderness trailheads about fifteen to twenty days annually for many of those years and patrolled wilderness trails, and the positive presence of these wilderness volunteers well exceeded ten thousand hours of service to more than one hundred thousand visitors served.

We’ve seen some stories about this before, but hunting season definitely brings this to mind (exceeding limits and leaving unoccupied RVs in the forest). This was an issue that I noticed in the Bighorns even ten years ago, so it can’t be easy to solve. I’d be interested to see from current employees (1) is it a problem where you are? (2) what have you tried to deal with it? and (3) what kind of help or resources would you need to deal with it?. I think about Forest travel management and how “bad actors” off-trail ruined it for everyone, in some respects. As Jon said in his post: “The goal was to reduce resource damage from unmanaged motor vehicle use off that road system.”
Hopefully this won’t happen with dispersed camping.

This is a more comprehensive story on the issue, but was published in the Cowboy State Daily, so that’s the Wyoming connection.
Here’s a link. Thank you Cowboy State Daily for no paywall! You can always donate to them if you appreciate their reporting.

A Forest Service official also told Cowboy State Daily that the problem is ongoing across the West.

“Within the Rocky Mountain Region, which covers five states — Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota — abandoned campers and RVs and long-term recreational camping continue to be issues in national forests throughout the region. We tend to see higher rates during the summer and fall months and lower rates during the winter months,” said Nick Walters, the law enforcement patrol commander for the Forest Service’s regional headquarters in Lakewood, Colorado.

Is Private Management The Answer?
A long-term parking area was set up on the National Forest near Greybull in the 1980s, District Ranger Mark Foster recently told Cowboy State Daily. He oversees the Medicine Wheel Ranger District, which is based in Greybull and part of the Bighorn National Forest.

The system worked well at first, but then people started abusing it, leaving broken-down campers there for years — so long that animals started taking up residence inside some of them, he said.

Now, Foster wants the camper parking area cleared out.

Foster said he doesn’t want to permanently ban long-term camper parking. Instead, he hopes the Forest Service can convince a private concessionaire to take over the site.

They could charge a minimal storage fee and crack down on bad actors by seizing abandoned campers and immediately putting them up for auction, he said.

To sell or auction off abandoned campers, the Forest Service must go through a bureaucratic process that can take up the three months, he said.

Stinking Carcasses
Fawcett said that from what he’s seen in the Sheridan area, he’s convinced that people are flagrantly ignoring camp site time limits, and he doesn’t think the Forest Service is doing enough to crack down on it.

“It’s pretty obvious that the Forest Service and the users don’t pay attention to this,” he said.

Mosely said that as she and her husband have been making the rounds among campsites over the past couple of years, they have noticed some people who seem to have stayed in particular sites for months on end.

“We’ve seen people who stay in one spot for three or four weeks, or even months at a time,” she said.

And as hunting seasons open up across Wyoming and the rest of the region, a few hunters are campsite slobs, Mosely added.

“It’s not just the trailers, it’s the carcasses of animals that they won’t bury or properly dispose of,” she said. “When they’re done taking the meat from a big game animal, they leave the skin and the rest of the carcass just sitting out on the ground. The smell is nasty.”

Worse Near Big Cities
While Mosely said she saw people hogging good campsites at Flaming Gorge, Walters said Wyoming might be spared the worst of the abuses, which seem to take place near large metro areas.

“We see more recreational use on the National Forests that are close to highly populated cities or towns. With this use comes an increase in long-term camping, abandoned campers, vehicles, trash and waste. It’s hard to say if any one place is worse than another. These activities impact each forest or ranger district where they occur,” he said.

“We tend to see more extended use near the Denver Metro area, but we have resources available to assist with removal. The more remote district offices do not tend to have resources immediately available, so several abandoned campers could significantly impact those areas,” Walters added. “I am not able to respond to the question of whether there has been an increase or decrease in this activity from previous years.”

Check Local Regulations
To avoid annoying other campers, or possibly getting on the wrong side of the law and having their RVs impounded, people should double-check camp site time limits in whatever area they’re headed to, he said.

“Since most forests have slightly different stay limits, I suggest that individuals reach out to the Ranger District office that oversees the area they plan to visit. The Ranger District will be able to provide the most up-to-date rules and regulations for that specific area,” Walters said.

I’d just add that (in my experience) it’s not always easy to access human beings at Ranger Districts to ask questions via phone or email.

Naturally, like probably all TSW readers, I am a big fan of, and participate in, recreation on National Forests.  It’s been interesting to observe the media concern loop on “outdoor recreation” over time.  First people weren’t getting outdoors enough (“nature deficit”); then people were getting outdoors so much that it created conflict and environmental damage; now the Outdoor Industry Association is worried again that there won’t be enough people recreating.  It’s always confusing because sometimes they count things like soccer balls as part of “outdoor recreation”; and of course RVs and boats and OHV’s and so on.  So sometimes it’s hard to tell what exactly what kind of outdoor recreation they are talking about, and how that relates specifically to FS and BLM lands.

Interesting story in the Colorado Sun.

A few years ago, the outdoor industry was struggling to get more people outside after several decades of participation studies showing nearly half of Americans did not go outdoors to have fun.

The pandemic changed that and the latest study by the Boulder-based Outdoor Industry Association shows a record 168.1 million Americans — 55% of the population ages 6 and up — went outside for recreation in 2022. That’s a 2.3% increase over the previous record in 2021. Since January 2020, 14.5 million more Americans went outdoors to run, hike, bike, camp and participate in all sorts of other activities.

And those newcomers are increasingly diverse. The participation rate for Hispanic people reached 56% in 2022, up from 34% in 2015. The rate of participation for Black people reached 40.7% in 2022, up 5 percentage points over 2021. Last year 61% of LGBTQ people recreated outside, with more than 18 million participants, up from 15.8 million in 2021. And more seniors (defined as 55 and older) than ever before went outside to play, with 35% joining the ranks of the outdoor recreators, up from 28% in 2018.

There’s a lot to cheer about in outdoor recreation right now, but “don’t think we are out here doing a victory lap,” said Kent Ebersole, executive director of the Outdoor Industry Association. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

The latest participation snapshot shows storms on the horizon. Younger Americans — ages 13 to 24 — are not getting outside. Outings for families with children are declining.

Thank you for recreating outdoors. Please come again. And again.

Americans logged 11.8 billion outdoor recreation outings in 2022 and while that number seems huge, it’s troubling. The frequency of those trips outdoors is declining. Ten years ago the average number of outdoor recreation outings was 84.6 per participant. Now it’s down to 71.8.

The decline in younger folks getting outdoors to play harkens to the industry’s struggles around 2008 when participation in all categories was flat or declining.

Hard work to reach new outdoor recreation players and more diverse groups has helped, but still the industry is struggling to reach younger generations.

“Fast forward eight years when today’s 18-year-olds are 25. Will there then be three generations with anemic participation and does that spell a future where we go back to 2008 and are flat for a decade or more?” Ebersole said. “If we let another generation go by and we don’t talk to them and we don’t reach them, we are going to be in a world of hurt.”

**********

Land managers are adjusting plans to accommodate the growth in recreation. The Bureau of Land Management hosted 81 million visitors on its 245 million acres in 2022, up 40% from 2012 with almost a third of that increase occurring since 2020. The Forest Service counted 168 million nationwide visits in 2020, up from 160 million in 2012.

Both agencies are launching community-focused strategies around recreation.

The BLM’s new Blueprint for 21st Century Outdoor Recreation started last month with major shifts in how the agency prioritizes recreation on its 245 million acres. The BLM’s budget for recreation in 2022 was $60.2 million, or about 74 cents per visit, compared with 84 cents per visit in 2012. The new strategy will enable local land managers to partner with a growing roster of groups lined up to help ease costs or even fund recreational amenities and events.

The Forest Service a year ago launched its five-year “Reimagine Recreation” plan with this note: “Our public lands can also be a source of healing, inspiration, and purpose to bridge some of the divides and challenges our country has faced over the past few years.”

The challenge is to convert that growing army of outdoor users into advocates who can sway public policy, said Tania Lown-Hecht with the Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of national recreation and conservation organizations that pushes for legislation to protect outdoor spaces.

One thing that always confuses me is that these groups say that they want more folks outside, so they will act to vote to “protect” the spaces.  But many of the places “protected”, say Wilderness areas, don’t allow certain kinds of very popular recreation.. in fact, as Patrick McKay has pointed out, new Monument plans also disfavor certain kinds of recreation. So it seems like the OIA works to reduce access, and is also worried that apparently the right kinds of people won’t be doing the right kind of recreation (possibly involving buying things from their associated companies?) sometime in the future. Would it be so bad if there were fewer people in the woods, grasslands, shrublands? Not so bad for other people recreating, it seems to me.  Not so bad for wildlife.  Not so bad for climate- for all the carbon people expend getting to recreation sites. Simple observation of interstates or other main routes to federal lands on Friday evenings suggest that recreation can have quite a carbon footprint.

Of course it might be considered bad to sell more recreation goods that would otherwise be bought… often made out of fossil fuels, transported from Asia and so on.  It’s interesting to me that environmental advocacy is often about pointing fingers at other industries and ignoring their own industry’s contribution to climate change or reducing biodiversity.  Of course, that’s human nature, but who knew that business institutions had those kind of human tendencies?  And media folks don’t seem to report on that much for whatever reason.

Anyway, I took a look at the OIA policy platform and they have some interesting trade-related policies …plus this

Require the United States Forest Service (USFS) to develop a 10-year outdoor recreation strategy for national forests under the forestry title.

I’ve seen many strategies come and go in my time, or don’t actually go, but sit around unread and unused. And as we have seen, both the BLM and the FS currently have new recreation strategies. Perhaps someone out there knows what the goal of this requirement would be?