What is Leave No Trace?
Leave no trace (LNT) is both an organization and a movement. The movement of LNT began in the early 60’s in response to the postwar boom in outdoor recreation and concern over wilderness areas being “loved to death.” The earliest forms of official LNT programming began as ranger talks at wilderness areas, and soon evolved into various booklets, rules and forms developed in collaboration between NOLS and the Bureau of Land Management.
Leave No Trace as a nonprofit organization began in mid 1990 and has been widely adopted since then.The center currently has a budget of over a million dollars and 60 full time employees. The Leave No Trace center is always tweaking ordinances and proper policy for various ecosystems, but the 7 primary guiding principles of leave no trace are:
- Plan ahead and prepare,
- Travel and camp on durable surfaces,
- Dispose of waste properly,
- Leave what you find,
- Minimize campfire impacts,
- Respect wildlife,
- Be considerate of other visitors.
These concepts are broadly applicable to every environment we visit as adventurers and vital to ensure continued access to recreation.
Why is LNT important?
We are representing a community:
We represent Shrpa to communities and other recreators. What we do as individ
uals has repercussions towards how we’re all perceived, as people and as a platform.
We are setting an example:
We are guiding people in more ways than just to a location. We are informing people on how to behave in that area, be it good or bad. If we are promoting a responsible precedent, we empower and inform others about that behavior, if we are promoting unsustainable behavior, others will be prone to do the same, compounding the negative impact we have on the area.
Some final words
Leave no trace is a collective action of abstinence from irresponsible activities outdoors. It’s not one person’s action that destroys an area, it’s the repeated and continued damage that destroys areas, habitats, and natural beauty.
The simplest summation of the entire Leave No Trace ethos falls to this: If everyone behaved in the same fashion, would it leave the area better or worse than we found it?
