AZ & USFS Struggle To Balance Protecting Nature & Letting People Enjoy It – CleanTechnica

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During the summer of 2025, there are going to be more visitors than ever before in the forests and mesas of Arizona, just as there will be anywhere. Outdoor recreation is a massively growing industry, and the economic growth it generates is not only vital to the communities people go exploring near, but for the economy as a whole. It’s also important for responsible people to get out there and gain a better appreciation for nature, especially young people, because it will increase their desire to protect the environment.

The importance of supporting outdoor recreation for all of these reasons isn’t lost on government officials. Money from the Infrastructure Law (the same law that funded charging stations) even helped pave new roads and otherwise increase public access, including in Arizona’s mountains. While this is great for protecting nature (again, people will better appreciate that which they can be aware of), the dark side to this is that some visitors aren’t responsible stewards of the environment yet. And, with the overall rise in visitor numbers, the number of bad apples risks spoiling a larger and larger barrel.

The newscast starts with the COVID-19 pandemic, which is reasonable, because the growth of outdoor recreation really took off. The rise of remote work really helped many people to be able to spend significant time unchained from a job pointlessly performed in a cubicle, and many other people found meaning in getting out there when other forms of recreation were closed up.

But, it’s important to keep in mind that the seeds of increased interest in the outdoors were already being planted in the 2010s, and the proof is in the proverbial pudding. If this all about COVID, the growth wouldn’t have continued for almost five years after the lockdowns and closures ended. In other words, COVID was just a shot of fertilizer for something that was already growing!

Whatever the cause, the downsides are hard to ignore. On top of the obvious things like morons leaving trash and broken glass from beer bottles behind, there’s also the problem of needing to make improvements to support additional visitors. This can change the entire experience, causing people who want a more wild or challenging experience to lose out (especially along Camino del Diablo near the Mexican border). And, of course, even responsible visitors will begin to have a greater impact as numbers increase. Traffic alone can become a problem.

People on both sides of the issue present this as a battleground where access and nature must compete, and that finding a “balance” is the answer. But, that’s a bit of a punt, and indicates common journalistic practice of “bothsidesing” an issue. This approach makes sense on many issues, but when nature loses in the legislature after visitors lose access, there really isn’t a balance to be had. Nature can’t be presented with a “Heads I win, tails you lose” scenario; it simply can’t defend itself from that.

To be wise stewards of these public lands, we need to get into more outside the box thinking. Clean technologies are certainly part of the answer, as are things like internet connectivity (Starlink, anyone?) which can enable innovative management plans (e-permits, geofencing, etc). Instead of seeking out an elusive balance between a false choice of competing interests, we should be seeking out win-win scenarios.

Featured image: a photo of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeast Arizona’s sky island region. Image by Jennifer Sensiba.