Making an Impact and Leaving No Trace

I was very lucky to grow up in a family that was centered on farming and outdoor recreation.  We learned from a very young age to pick up after ourselves, leave the outdoors better than you found it, no one should know we were here type of ethic.  Leave No Trace seems so common sense and basic, yet not everyone has been lucky enough have grown up with mentors that lived and breathed land conservation and sustainability.

I discovered the Leave No Trace organization as an adult and became a Master Educator to help mentor the importance of outdoor ethics.  Leave No Trace is more than a set of Principals, it is a CHOICE, and is the goal for outdoor activities and truly, daily living.  The principles are simple but significant: Plan & Prepare, Travel & Camp on Durable Surfaces, Dispose of Waste Properly, Leave What You Find, Minimize Campfire Impacts, Respect Wildlife and Be Considerate of Others.  Basically, leave the areas you are in better than you found them, and no one should know you were there; it seems like common sense and intuitive, yet unfortunately, not everyone takes it to heart.

Our WisCorps crews are teams of AmeriCorps members that work on Conservation Projects with our partners at a local, regional, state, and federal level.  They construct new trails, make improvements to existing trail networks for safety and ease of navigation, improve habitats by managing invasive species to maintain biodiversity, and do restorations and erosion control work. All of this means multiple trips in and out of an area, some demolition and/or construction, chainsaws, shovels and pick axes, and getting off the beaten path.  They camp for weeks, setting up tents, camp kitchens and gear storage. Yet, they practice Leave No Trace.

WisCorps makes an impact, and leave no trace – that statement certainly sounds contradictory, but it is part of the plan for our Conservation Projects. So, how can our crews follow these principles while working on their conservation projects? The WisCorps AmeriCorps crew members all participated in a Leave No Trace Certification workshop to become immersed in principals and learn to make lifestyle choices to Leave No Trace. We hiked and observed the established trails and the impact that taking short-cuts has made on the network, selected camp sites, started campfires and learned to properly extinguish them, talked about how to minimize impacts when going off trail, food storage and handling food waste and yes, we talked about bathroom breaks in the outdoors.  We acted out scenarios to demonstrate contact with wild animals and interactions with others on the trails and campsites, trail etiquette (who yields to who and why) and how we can apply these principles to everyday living. We know our crews will travel off trail, and we give them the skills to do so with minimal impact to the land and the vegetation. Our crews are the ambassadors for both WisCorps and Leave No Trace as they interact with people on the trail networks and at the camp sites, and they can communicate the simple changes we can make in our everyday life that helps us Leave No Trace.

Yes, you can make Conservation Impacts and Leave No Trace. WisCorps is a Leave No Trace Community Partner and incorporates Leave No Trace principles and ethics in our Conservation efforts and Education Programming. All our Conservation Staff has some level of Leave No Trace training, and we provide Leave No Trace Certification to all of our Conservation Crews.  For more information on Leave No Trace, visit Home – Leave No Trace – Leave No Trace (lnt.org)