5 Ways to Take Your Love of the Outdoors to the Next Level
1. Fix the Trails
Most trails are maintained by volunteers and always need extra hands to clear debris and restore the paths. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy offers volunteer opportunities, while the Pacific Crest Trail also needs volunteer crews to keep more than 2,500 miles passable throughout the year. Information about trail maintenance projects can be found at local parks or by visiting the National Park Service website.
2. Count Animals
Helping scientists count animals and preserve other park resources is an easy way to merge a love for the outdoors with science. Park naturalists and conservationists depend on citizens, usually without scientific training, to help keep tabs on the health of the parks. Glacier National Park offers opportunities to count mountain goats, pikas, and butterflies. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park needs volunteers to monitor plant blooming and collect other data on flora and fauna.
3. Restore History
Passport in Time is a program sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service that connects volunteers with archaeologists and historians to work on public land projects. Volunteers can help with rock art restoration, archaeological excavations, and artifact curation. Projects can last anywhere from two days to several weeks and sometimes involve backcountry camping. Some activities are also kid-friendly, encouraging entire families to join.
4. Take Your Activism Outside
Similar to last year’s Standing Rock “water protector” encampments, protest camps are in need of donations and organizers this summer. The Little Creek Camp near Williamsburg, Iowa, located on 14 acres of private land, was founded by Indigenous Iowa. The camp now focuses on Dakota Access pipeline resistance and fosters indigenous ideology to promote sustainability. In Washington state, the Backbone Campaign offers weeklong summer camps for training in nonviolent direct action, including “kayaktivism.” At the “Localize This!” camps on Vashon Island, participants join up with other citizen activists and movement organizers to learn how to “take action before everything we value or hold as sacred is extracted, exploited, and extinguished.”
5. Ditch the Car
Want to protest oil and gas leasing on public lands and fossil fuel infrastructure crisscross-ing sensitive ecosystems? Try a park that doesn’t require a car. Some are in urban settings that are easily accessible. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, for example, is 157,000 acres and the largest urban national park in the world. And parts of the park are accessible by bus from Los Angeles. Public transportation also works for national parks in faraway places. Yosemite can be reached from San Francisco entirely by public transit: Take a bus or light rail train to Richmond, transfer to an Amtrak train heading to Merced, then take the YARTS (Yosemite Area Regional Transit System) bus to Yosemite.
Melissa Hellmann wrote this article for The Sanctuary Issue, the Summer 2017 issue of YES! Magazine. Melissa is the YES! Surdna reporting fellow and graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. This article is shared here with permission from YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.
SHARE YOUR REFLECTION
3 Past Reflections
On Sep 3, 2017 deborah j barnes wrote:
Nature is who we are! I really am tired of the disassociative story that pitted the human species against the environment. This fear of "life" seems to have made it easy for the Western cultural story to abuse resources, trash ecosystems and generally make a mess of things. Appreciating natural beauty is great, but getting into an understanding of ourselves that leaps the old paradigm would really take us past this "Mad Hatters Tea Party" Facing the whole of who we are as humans in relationship to all living things in a living Uni-verse might just be what we need and want!
1 reply: Kristin | Post Your Reply
On Sep 3, 2017 Patrick Watters wrote:
This old anonemoose monk will be out on one of my favorite stretches of the PCT with shovel along to refurbish some areas prone to slides, etc. Oh, not to mention take in the silence and solitude. };-) 👍🏻
1 reply: Patrick | Post Your Reply
On Sep 3, 2017 Ginny wrote:
Thanks for the insightful and practical article here. It is a good reminder that our small efforts to get involved can make a difference for Mother Earth. This weekend I joined a group of citizen scientists at 5 am who are counting the dead or surviving birds that collide with buildings in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Lights Out (City Name here) is an organization that collects bird kills caused when birds run into lit up sky-rise buildings at night during migration. With this data in hand, building owners are approached and asked to turn off their lights during peak migrations to reduce bird deaths as they fly north or south. So far there are many cities across the US who have responded to this effort to save the birds and have turned off their lights during part of the night in spring and fall. Be hopeful and do something, however small it may seem. http://www.audubon.org/cons...
[Hide Full Comment]Post Your Reply