America, the Beautiful?

“Each and every American owns our public lands. They provide so much: wildlife habitat, clean water and energy, food and timber, solace and recreation, and more. Balancing these values is the job of the Bureau of Land Management, for both current and future generations.” – Tracy-Stone Manning, Bureau of Land Management

The Bureau of Land Management may be charged with this task but isn’t it the job of all of us? The image with this article must have never been visited by humans. There’s not a plastic bottle, a used diaper, or a beer can anywhere in sight.

Of course, the image with this article hasn’t ever been visited by anyone. It’s not real. It’s idyllic. It’s AI-generated. It’s the way we envision our forests and national parks when we go to visit, pristine. It’s not the way we find them.

In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, volunteers collected over 10,000 pounds of trash in just one year. Contaminated water can harm not only wildlife but also human populations who rely on these water sources for drinking and recreation. Campers upriver from our cabin thought it would be practical to cantilever an outhouse over the river that provided drinking water for everyone for miles downstream.

In some areas, human-caused wildfires account for up to 85-90% of all wildfires. The Rim Fire, started by an unattended campfire, burned 257,314 acres in California in 2013. The burn scar still serves as a reminder to visitors. My aunt said, after the fire, “Oh, it’ll grow back.” It may, but when? The scar from a small Gold Rush fire was the meadow we used to play in more than 100 years later. Everyone downhill loses.

In 2018, National Parks reported more than 5,000 incidents of vandalism. We spend millions of dollars annually on repairing and restoring vandalized sites. Vandalism comes in many forms, from spray painting graffiti to ripping out plumbing. The National Park Service asks us, if we see acts of vandalism, to take down license plate information, leave the area, and call 888-653-0009 or send an email to nps_isb@nps.gov to report the incident.

Don’t be an unwelcome visitor. Leave the place you visit better than you found it.