This Land Is Your Land…
A lone mustang traverses the Bottle Creek Range in northern Nevada, 2009.
National Public Lands Day fell on Saturday, September 26th this year. It’s an annual event started in 1994 to celebrate public spaces and provide an opportunity for people to get reconnected (or, for many first-timers, connected) to the outdoors. Most notably, National Parks offer free admission to encourage people to get outside.
For us, we’ve been celebrating national public lands for far longer. At the ripe old age of six months, our parents took Ed to Acadia National Park. Although he doesn’t remember anything about the trip, it set off a lifetime of love for the outdoors.
The first national park visited. Ed in the carrier.
Growing up, we were fortunate enough to live at the edge of the neighborhood. Across the street from us were acres upon acres of woodland. Throughout the year this was a place of refuge, of solace, and countless shenanigans. In the winter we would use the hiking trails for sledding. In summer, we’d be out building forts, catching fireflies at night, or just simply using our imaginations. We were frequented by deer, raccoons, bears, skunks, opossums, bats, flying squirrels, and a host of birds. The trees provided shady respite from the oppressive summer heat and the quiet of the woods allowed for introspection and our own version of meditation.
As we got older, our summer vacations started to stretch further into the west. They were of course filled with requisite visits to as many national parks and monuments as we could stomach: Gateway Arch, Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, and Glacier. Of the now 62 national parks, we’ve covered more than 25 and countless monuments and national historic areas.
As east-coasters with packed cities and forested hills, we were absolutely confounded with the vast expanses of the west. When Ed moved out to Nevada for work, he took as much advantage as he could of his time off to go visit new areas: Crater Lake, Yosemite, Olympic, Lassen, Redwoods, and Death Valley. He was initially only supposed to be out here for a three month assignment, so he needed to get to as many places as he could before he headed back east. He’s still (strangely) out here and he uses his central location as a jumping off point to new places: Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Mesa Verde, and Arches.
Kivas at Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde National Park, 2014.
But it’s not just national parks that we seek out. The United States has approximately 640 million acres that are owned by the government, or roughly 28% of the country. The bulk of that acreage is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Department of the Interior. The western states in particular are heavily covered by federal land. For example, slightly more than 80% of the state of Nevada is public land. A friend once visited and could not comprehend the wide swathes of land with nothing on it. “Who owns this?”, they asked. “Everyone.” This affords Nevadans and visitors alike the opportunity to hike, bike, camp, hunt, fish, stargaze, and off-road to their heart’s desire.
Kayaking down the mighty Humboldt River, 2019.
When this year’s National Public Lands day rolled around, I packed a backpack with some water and goldfish (the snack, not the fish), grabbed my camera, and took the kids on a hike in the nearby mountains. As we wandered through the aspen groves, we marveled at the height of the trees and listened to the wind whistling through the leaves. The late afternoon sun dipped behind the mountainside and we were bathed in the cool, crisp autumn air. The kids got the opportunity to run around in the woods, look at and touch the trees, and listen to me ramble on about how groves of quaking aspen are a single organism. I’m not sure if they’ll remember much of the latter, but I hope the rest of the outing is something memorable. These are the kinds of experiences that people need to have more often.
Fires burn in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in northern California, 2008.
Our wild places are under threat. This is the first administration in the history of the country to remove more federal lands than were protected. We’ve lost more than 31 million acres of public land in the past three and a half years. That’s almost the size of Florida. Environmental protections for air and water have been rolled back. Wildfires driven by poor management and a changing climate have decimated forests across the west and are still burning. Suburbs continue to encroach on pristine lands. Soil degradation from intensive agriculture has reduced arable land in the Midwest.
We need action.
National parks, monuments, and federally managed public lands need to be protected. These are places that are uniquely American. We, as a society, should be proud of the natural beauty and refuge that they provide for all living things. If we want to “Keep America Great”, we should be funneling more money into preservation, conservation, and environmental protections. We need to re-establish areas of natural beauty, ecological importance, archeological significance, and sacred places to Native peoples.
We need to find a way to strike a balance between economic growth in the form of resource extraction and preservation. The technology driving the green revolution will be borne on the back of mining for precious metals and rare earth elements. But we can do both. We can conduct sustainable mining through diligent stewardship of the land and the mineral deposits, protecting waters and animals. Technology can help on both fronts.
The Bingham Canyon Copper mine in Utah is the largest man-made excavation in the world, shown here in 2010.
We need to recognize that ecotourism is a powerful economic driver. We’ve discussed the benefits in some of our Africa blogs, but there’s a good documentary we watched recently called “Public Trust” that highlights the booming outdoor economy at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. We highly recommend it.
The key to all of this is education. The age of the pandemic and perpetual lockdown has people escaping in droves to the outdoors. While it’s good that people are reconnecting with nature and piling into national parks, many are unaware of outdoor etiquette and so we’re seeing some exceptionally selfish behavior exacerbated by underfunded public land management systems. There’s been an uptick in littering and vandalism in parks and along trails in many parts of the country. During the 2019 government shutdown, irreparable damage was done to national parks as staff were reduced and unable to enforce the law. In Joshua Tree National Park, scientists estimate it will take 200-300 years to recover from the vandalism that occurred there.
Joshua trees silhouetted at sunrise, 2010.
We need to teach respect: Respect for nature, respect for community, and respect for other people trying to enjoy the outdoors. People travel to these places for the quietness of a forest or sublime views. They don’t want to have people blaring heavy metal in a campground or finding litter along the trail in the woods.
In our opinion, a Leave No Trace course is a great opportunity for the uninitiated to learn how to enjoy the outdoors properly. Leave No Trace covers seven principles and we’ll dive into them in another blog at some point, but the most important one is “Be Considerate of Others”. To us, it covers all other principles and puts the onus on the visitor to ensure that they do not ruin the experience for others. A course like this would provide people the right tools and understanding of how to behave in the wild so that they and others can enjoy the great outdoors.
As photographers, we act as stewards of nature. It’s not the federal government that should be solely responsible for protecting the nation’s wild places. That responsibility lies with every person that visits the outdoors. If you remember nothing else from this blog, remember our mantra:
Take only pictures.
Leave only footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
-Ed & Greg
The sun sets over the Nevada high desert from the Blue Lakes Wilderness Area, 2020.