Have you ever gone and played outside? Have you ever thought about the impacts that your recreation has on the surrounding environment? Well, believe it or not, outdoor recreation has the potential to have very detrimental effects on the surrounding environment. Whether it be hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, mountain biking, whatever the activity is has some impact on the environment.
While most outdoor recreation is considered non-consumptive recreation because activities, such as backpacking, don't remove anything from the area like hunting and fishing remove wildlife from their habitat, these types of recreation harm the underlying soil and vegetation. Soil compaction due to activities such as hiking/backpacking, mountain biking, and ATV us
ag
e causes water to not be able to percolate through the soil and reach underlying roots and micro-organisms that live in the soil. In regards to vegetation, if recreators do not remain on designated paths or trails and decide to walk off these paths or trails, vegetation is destroyed by the continuous trampling and the trails expand instead of allowing the trail to stay a narrow path to concentrate the usage into one small area.
Now, outdoor recreation does have potential negative impacts on the environment where the activities occur, it is easily controlled and can be continued as long as people know about the best ways to recreate without harming anything. There are programs that have been created to educate people on the proper ways to recreate in the outdoors and be environmentally conscious. The most notable program is
called Leave No Trace which is a code of outdoor ethics that contains 7 principles to abide by. The principles are plan ahead and prepare, travel and camp on durable surfaces, dispose of waste properly, leave what you find, minimize campfire
impacts, respect wildlife, and be considerate of other visitors. The founding group of the Leave No Trace program is known as NOLS which stands for National Outdoor Leadership School. This school takes people out into the outdoors and teaches them how to recreate in the outdoors while abiding by the principles of Leave No Trace so that the values are instilled in them and can their use can be continued after the course is over.
So while outdoor recreation is a lot of fun and is very unique, it is important to understand that they can have negative impacts on the surrounding environment. However, as long as the recreator follows some sort of outdoor ethics program, such as Leave No Trace, then the activities that are engaged in can be done in the safest way possible to both the person as well as to mother nature.
This article brings up many good points that can used for other things besides hiking and camping. Every year the drill field is completely grassy except for the designed paths; but every year multiple dirt paths form. If people realized the negative effects they were causing to the drill field, they might start using the actually pathways. I also connected this article to the disc golf course in Christiansburg. Whenever I go there to play, I see multiple empty beer cans all over the forest. If more people knew about the Leave No Trace program then more people would be environmentally aware.
ReplyDeleteI think the real issue here is not that outdoor recreation is impactful. We would have to be completely inert to expect that we could get through life without having an impact at all. The real issue is volume. Too many people. This might be a hard stretch linking population with outdoor recreation, but if we didn't have the sheer numbers of people going through consumer style outdoor recreation, most of the environmental damages you described could be avoided. Beyond that, one of the greatest ways to experience and respect nature is to be able to learn and love it without bounds. Cookie-cutter hiking trails, modern camp sites and the like all remove responsibility from nature while keeping you right in the thick of it. To set up blockades around nature in order to protect it is defeating the very genesis of the motivation to protect.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine the biggest problem with outdoor recreation involves smaller trails, campgrounds, or parks. Many of these places are left open to the public all year. Only bigger recreation areas have a full-time staff employed by the Park Service. The lack of official presence on a trail can prompt visitors to act in ways harmful to nature. Most the popular hiking trails around Blacksburg have have no personnel dedicated to environmental education and awareness. One solution to this problem is having the Park Service hire more people to monitor parks. Simply informing visitors of hiking/camping etiquette can go a long way in preventing the problems you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience as an active rock climber I believe that a signifficant amount of enviornmental degredation comes from people who have not been educated in LNT ethics. While hiring more park personel would probably solve the problem the national park service is painfully underfunded. A more economical solution would be to try to spread the word about LNT. Every park has its own set of ethics and inorder to preserve our natural reasources every effort should be made to educate people about leaving no trace.
ReplyDelete-John Marshall