Protecting Nature's Beauty

When Enjoying Outdoor Recreation, Remember: Leave No Trace

Concerns about the trash being left behind as outdoor recreation expanded led to the creation of Leave No Trace guidelines. (Courtesy Photo)

Hiking and other outdoor activities in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, such as boating, provide plenty of opportunities to enjoy the beauty of nature, but with that freedom comes a responsibility for preserving the natural world around us.

Outdoors enthusiast Rebecca Sperry puts it well when she says, “Even though we have been led to believe that there are no rules in outdoor recreation, being outside and spending time enjoying nature should not be a veritable free-for-all where we do what we please, go where we feel like going, and assume that the wilderness will always be there. We have a terrible habit of thinking that just one person won’t have a big impact on the destruction of our lands, but we are very wrong in that assumption. Our responsibility as a community of outdoor recreation enthusiasts is to self-govern and educate each other about the importance of outdoor ethics and the seven principles of Leave No Trace.”

The Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that now holds a copyright to the seven principles that were developed over decades by various groups interested in ensuring that wilderness areas would remain wild amidst ever-increasing recreational use. Yet the concept of leaving no trace dates back to the indigenous peoples of North America who respected the land and sought to live in a way that would not permanently alter the areas they depended upon for food and livelihood.

David N. Cole wrote in the International Journal of Wilderness, “Something like the Leave No Trace program would eventually have developed if it had not developed in the manner in which it did. However, the program we know today can be traced to a particular event — much the way the Smokey Bear program can be traced to August 1944. In the summer of 1985, Jim Ratz — executive director of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) — invited a small group of Forest Service (FS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) managers, researchers, and academics to join him and a few NOLS employees on a three-day backpack into the Popo Agie Wilderness, Wyoming.”

Ratz outlined his goal of sponsoring wilderness research in partnership with the federal land management agencies to promote what NOLS called Conservation Practices. “All agreed it was time to systematize the message and institutionalize the delivery of that message,” and David Cole, a private researcher affiliated with the Forest Service’s Wilderness Management Research Unit in Missoula, Montana, was put in charge of developing a single set of recommendations based on scientific research.