Leave No Trace Outdoor Ethics
Going Easy in Our Great Outdoors
Human impacts are part of the ecology of wild places and local green spaces. These impacts are indirect and direct. Addressing the indirect impacts is a large topic involving global sustainability choices. Our direct impacts are our footprints on and off trail and much more. Ecological readiness includes more than the names of plants and animals, awareness of your own impacts is essential.
The sum of our direct impacts; our migrating fire ring scars, compacted campsites’ soils, and invasive plants’ seeds riding our boot soles into the backcountry, and many more impacts, add up to our footprint on our favorite wild places and green spaces. Collective footprints of the many users of wild places and green spaces are destructive. Many of our favorite places are deteriorating under the pressure of cumulative impacts of our visitation.
Our individual footprint on wild places and green spaces can be large or small, our choice. We can be part of the problem or part of the solution. Get small, go LNT!
“Leaving your mark is over-rated”
Leave No Trace (LNT), is an outdoor ethics movement facilitated by the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, a non-profit organization supported through personal and organizational memberships and sponsorships and by inter-agency cooperation and academic research. Their mission is to reduce impacts in wild places and local green spaces through propagating outreach training. They support a system for training trainers everywhere to go out and spread the LNT message and help build the skills needed to reduce widespread impacts. Their guidance is backed up by multi-disciplinary research, particularly in the field of recreation ecology. Research results provide “authority of resource” supporting the guidance offered by the Center, much more reliable than the collective opinion and local lore so prevalent in outdoor recreation sub-cultures and industries.
Seven Principles of Leave No Trace
1) Plan Ahead and Prepare
2) Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
3) Dispose of Waste Properly
4) Leave What You Find
5) Minimize Campfire Impacts
6) Respect Wildlife
7) Be Considerate of Other Visitors
Your blogger is an LNT Master Educator, a trainer of trainers, and hopefully, a model for small footprint methods in wild places and green spaces.
Tom Bain, Outdoor Readiness