Campground Etiquette

On my New Year's trip to Arches National Park I stayed in the only campground in the park. It has nice, well-maintained, spacious sites with spectacular views. They are pretty close together, though some are semi-sheltered by large rocks and juniper trees. In the winter it is only half open, but at peak season it could easily have 300 people or more at any time. As it was, the available spaces were almost filled every night. It also had trash disposal and some recycling collection as well as modern bathrooms with dishwashing space. Unfortunately it also is a mixed tent/RV/trailer site with no designated areas for different types of camping and, at least in winter, little to no enforcement of noise and generator curfews. This significantly detracted from the overall experience, especially since we had initially planned on trying to get a backcountry permit at the park office. They are available but there aren't any designated sites or areas and in the winter we didn't want to deal with that without doing a bit more research. Perhaps next time we are out there.

Unless you happen to live in the vicinity, you are going to need to stay somewhere when you visit a park. Generally the options are camping in some form in the park, camping at a BLM, Forest Service, or state park in the area, or staying at a hotel in a nearby community. In the case of Arches, all are options and the town of Moab is actually a neat place, at least in the winter when it isn't overrun by tourists. It even has identifiable local businesses and eateries that actual residents support. However, many people, myself included, view camping as a major reason for visiting a park and an essential part of the experience. While sleeping in a tent and cooking on a stove or fire is real camping, it is not for everyone and there are different degrees of alternatives. Some involve elaborate tent cities and grills. Others involve unpowered camper trailers or truck bed campers. Some people use RVs or powered trailers. All of them do have conceivable uses and some people actually do other things in a park besides sit in or around their vehicles (though I did see some who appeared to spend the entire time in their trailer). But there are some guidelines people should follow to maximize the enjoyment of everyone that come down to basic courtesy and common sense.

• Keep the electronics to a minimum. Yes, I know you really want to listen to the Cowboys game or have a dance party or watch a movie on your laptop, but you can do that at home, or in a motel, or anywhere else. You may not appreciate the experience and the location, but there are many others around you who are trying. Don't disrupt them, and if you cannot last, keep it quiet and use headphones.
• On the same topic, lots of the ridiculous things you might have brought and inexplicably find essential require power. If you use your car or a generator please try to park in a cluster with others in a similar situation and leave at least part of the campground free for those who want a quieter experience and absolutely abide by the posted curfews for shutoff. Yes, it's a drag having to use a flashlight or firelight or even sit in the dark or sleep once the sun goes down, but that's part of the deal. There are great stars in the world's darker places, try looking at them.
• Please keep your pets on leash and clean up after them. I love and own dogs and have gone camping with them, but in a campground even the best behaved ones can create a problem if not controlled, especially if there are several. They love playing and exploring and it can quickly create a culture where other polices slip, waste accumulates, and the quality of the campground deteriorates. Campgrounds, especially in parks, are often islands in a sensitive ecosystem. While many people don't take warnings about fragile soils seriously, animals have no awareness of it whatsoever, nor do they have any reservation about digging or hunting indigenous wildlife. As for the people who have cats in their campers, that's just weird.
• Get your kids involved. Good for you bringing your kids out to experience the natural world, even in one of its Disneyfied, theme park forms. Now try to build an appreciation by getting them to engage with different aspects of the experience. Star gazing. Fire building. Assembling a campsite. Cooking on a stove. Taking nature walks (at Arches there is a great one that essentially leaves from the campground and can take all day if you do it in its entirety, another one gives you a few hours). Get them to do things they couldn't or wouldn't do at home. Kudos to the family that brought their bikes with them so they could take the road through the red rocks. That was much better behavior than our neighbors at the campground who brought their gymboree in their pickup and let their kids watch DVDs all night (probably to alleviate the screaming fury that resulted from any dissatisfaction).
• Clean up after yourself. At Arches the campground was generally pretty clean but I've been to some where there is garbage everywhere (don't burn it, for a lot of reasons) and it is repulsive. Additionally, just because something is food doesn't mean it is "natural" and doesn't mean it will "compost." Composting takes time and some things will not decompose in all ecosystems. You also don't want to attract animals to campgrounds. They can be nuisances and it can be unsafe for people and for the animals (many get hit by cars after being attracted to food). It is also bad to get them acculturated to human food in some seasons only to have it disappear later in the year.
•  Finally, everyone likes sex, but if you must have sex in a campground, remember that it is a semi-public space and you are in close proximity to others with very little sound barrier, so have some discretion. Loud, screaming sex is generally inappropriate for such a campground. If you want to engage in that, pick a remote, backcountry site or a hotel.

So there are some general rules of etiquette for large campgrounds. It's not exhaustive and not particularly original, but you would be shocked how many people don't realize that they are doing anything inconsiderate at all. Perhaps this will help.

P.S. Despite our immediate neighbors, the rest of the experience in the Arches campground was fantastic and I give it (in its winter form) a solid four stars, segregating tents from RVs and enforcing generator limits are the only major things I'd change.

Yet another news roundup

More substantive posts are coming, I promise, now that work is back to a normal level.

This is an interesting development, and one I think is very promising. The federal government is the largest landowner in the nation, and the biggest consumer of energy. Within that, the Department of Defense is by far the biggest, representing 80 percent of all federal energy use and 1 percent of the entire nation's. It has also made clear its desire to move in a more sustainable direction for both economic and security reasons. So it is very promising that they are seriously discussing developing large scale solar installations on DoD lands, many of which are already "disturbed" and therefor unlikely to harbor endangered or threatened wildlife. Whether used to satisfy base needs or sold to the grid (which would require very little new infrastructure as bases already well connected), it would be an excellent way to scale up the idea of the parking lot "solar grove" that has been proposed by other would-be renewables developers. Also, as a massive landowner and supplier/purchaser and research funder, the DoD would be able to leverage a huge gain in solar efficiency and productivity with comparatively small (when looking at private R&D) investment.

Farms (and logging/silviculture) have long been a source of water pollution that is difficult to regulate under the Clean Water Act. CAFOs (feedlots) are generally considered point sources, but the the others generally are not subject to the same permitting and data requirements and so relatively little is known about specific contributions and even less is often done to reduce agricultural runoff, a serious problem that causes huge dead zones at the mouths of major rivers worldwide. While it is only a tentative first step, and doesn't go very far, it is good to see that Minnesota is making a small effort to induce farmers to clean up and reduce their runoff voluntarily. Count me as a skeptic. I hope that it works, I really do, and that it proves to be a wildly successful program that can be a model for other states, but I strongly believe that it will generally be a disappointment for a few reasons. First, the funding is far too low to have any major impact. Second, the funding is uncertain going forward; there really isn't any long-term commitment to keeping this program running. Third, enforcement will be difficult without either more staff to do compliance testing or much better data collection with stiff penalties on those trying to game the system. Good for Minnesota for making a small effort, but it has the ability to do so much more given its position as a 100% headwaters state.

Are you sick of motherfucking snakes in the motherfucking Everglades? (I apologize for that.) If so, you will be happy to learn that the Fish and Wildlife Service is officially listing four species of constrictors as "injurious" and prohibiting their import, export, or transport and/or sale across state lines. While it won't result in the pythons in the Everglades magically dying (though recent cold weather in Florida is certainly a helpful occurrence) it will create a ban with some serious enforcement teeth. From the moment the regulations become active, it will be a crime under the Lacey Act to buy, sell, bring into the US, or transport across a state boundary, any of the four species listed (Burmese python, northern and southern African python, and yellow anaconda). That in and of itself is a positive development. We haven't gotten rid of the invaders yet but we are have now taken real, enforceable steps to stop making the problem worse.

News Roundup

Kind of a lazy post, I have a series of more substantive topics that I hope to post soon but have been very busy this past month (when I wasn't on vacation in beautiful Arches National Park, which I will write about in depth with pictures soon). I'm hoping to write more frequently this year, maybe making that commitment on the internet will help? We shall see.

Why is it so important to protect open spaces and wild places? Because you never know what you will find there. The latest discovery is a brand new species of snake, the Matilda's Horned Viper, recently discovered in Tanzania (the exact location is being withheld from publication due to the rarity of the species and the threat posed by a sudden rush of collectors, trophy hunters, and other miscreants to what appears to be a very small population. Most new discoveries are small organisms, insects or microbes, but there are still large species that turn up from time to time.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has officially extended a moratorium on new mining claims around the Grand Canyon. I wrote about this issue last year in a piece critiquing media coverage of environmental issues. I'm not at all surprised by his decision, though he certainly didn't do much to publicize or celebrate it. In fact it looks like he is trying to hide it based on the timing (right before the New Hampshire primary when all media attention will be directed elsewhere). Look for various mining interests and their shills allies in Congress to continue complaining about this and making absurd claims about jobs created, minimal environmental impacts, and other outright falsehoods.

And speaking of hiding from the media while doing something laudable, today President Obama visited the EPA to give a campaign speech pep talk to agency employees on the importance of the work they do and the value of a clean environment. From the brevity and content it sounds to me very much like test driving campaign talking points for use against a republican opponent who will have spent years trying to be more anti-environment and anti-science than any other and not like a president actually praising an agency and its workers (remember, he let his Law and Economics friend and OIRA head Cass Sunstein kill the proposed smog rule based on industry lies and exaggerations about economic impact and without properly considering the value of health improved and lives saved, not to mention jobs created via regulatory forcing (it takes a lot of research and manpower to update all those factories and plants or replace unsustainable capacity)).

This is a light, yet interesting, article about what one of John Muir's great-great-grandsons is up to with the family name.

Yet another reminder that even once renewable energy projects are built or capacity installed it still needs to be connected to the grid and that can be a hassle. Sometimes its logistics, sometimes its infrastructure, and sometimes its corporate resistance or regulatory turf battles. The point is, renewables aren't like Field of Dreams, it takes more than just building it for the power to come.

Update 1/12: Today's NYT has an op-ed today by two fisheries scientists about some of the problems with the General Mining Law and some very needed updates and safeguards. There's not a chance of any of them happening any time soon, but it's important to keep raising these issues and building awareness for when conditions are more favorable. What struck me is how many of their proposals would bring hard rock mining into much closer alignment with coal and how that mining process is managed (the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act is a much more effective statute that raises more revenue for the sovereign, allows more land use flexibility and prioritization, and has much stronger and more effective environmental safeguards. If SMCRA were simply expanded to cover all mining that would be perhaps the biggest public land reform since FLPMA, if not ever and would be a huge accomplishment).

Park Economics

As is all too obvious, we are stuck in a recession/depression that will be very difficult to extract ourselves from given the current desire for savage budget cuts and senseless austerity. I have previously mentioned how a program like the CCC would do wonders to improve park infrastructure and facilities, clearing the massive maintenance backlog, while also providing work and income to thousands of unemployed Americans who are otherwise sitting idle. On the heels of that comes this project by Headwaters Economics to push for more parks and protected spaces generally, arguing that they provide economic boosts to the areas surrounding them. Among the 100+ signers are three Nobel Laureates in Economics, so it's not just a bunch of third-tier hacks pushing this. While this is not the first time that this argument has been made (see this essay from 2004 about Olympic National Park and how community feelings towards it and logging protections in the surrounding forest have changed as one example), it is nice that there is now institutional, academic support for this belief. It's a long way from shaping policy but it's important to lay the groundwork first.

Lake Maria

This post is very late but I'm finally getting around to it. Back in mid-October I went camping with my boyfriend and his dog up in Lake Maria State Park. It's only about an hour on I-94 from the Twin Cities and has a surprisingly large number of trails and campsites for a park its size (though most of the trails do pass by at least a few campsites so if it's busy expect to hear/see lots of people). It also has a number of interpretive programs and trails including geocaching (a GPS based program present in many MN parks). We went up at the height of fall colors but because of the high winds almost all the leaves had been stripped off the trees. Still, it is a very pretty park and a stop on one of the migratory flyways so it is a good location to see migratory birds in spring and fall. The campsites were well maintained and spacious (available by reservation or first-come basis). It also has cabins and group sites. While it has year-round programs, if you aren't a fan of winter camping it might not be the park for you because it is a decent drive out of the Cities for just a few hours, though definitely worth it.
A view of the wetlands.

There is a swan in the center of the frame

 Not one of the rare turtles that live there, but it was sitting right in the middle of the trail (and was very fast in getting away).

 

Izzy the Dog at our campsite.

Corporate Influence

I know this is a few weeks late but it's an important and interesting issue that continues to arise and will only become more common as park budgets continue to suffer from the misguided axe of austerity for a department with a $10.8 billion maintenance backlog that could easily provide work for thousands of unemployed Americans as was done during the Great Depression. A small amount was done, but it was a mere drop in the bucket and that funding is largely out of the system and cuts are back on the agenda. While some groups like the National Parks Conservation Association do fundraising and provide other forms of support, there is only so much they can give and in the absence of governmental support for public goods, it comes to panhandling to corporate America. However, once that money is taken, it should be no surprise that there are strings attached.

This is clearly the case (though the NPS denies it) at the Grand Canyon where the NPS killed a proposal to ban the sale of bottled water in the park after Coca Cola objected. Other bottled beverages would be unaffected and there are ample free water stations in the park to refill reusable bottles so concerns about visitor safety in a desert climate are clearly pretextual. When you also consider that the holder of the concessions contract in the park was in favor of the ban and that bottled water is an inherently ridiculous, wasteful, and predatory "commodity" designed to scam the stupid, it becomes even more obvious that Coke is calling the shots on at least some park management issues and overriding decisions made by local administrators who are veterans of the system.

I know the NPS needs money, but it is important to be wary of the sources it is able to find and vigilant about making sure that such "philanthropy" is just a way to get good press and not a backdoor into influencing policy. In this age of misguided budget cuts it would be all too easy to lose our parks to private speculators and profiteers, if not in name then certainly in character and practice.

The LATimes also jumped on this issue and was appropriately harsh and wasn't shy, like the NYT was, about drawing the connections (especially confusing since the NYT had emails essentially confirming the need for Coke's permission). It also connected this to the increasing commercialization of state parks and the spread of noxious outdoor advertising that can accompany their perpetual need for cash. The actions in California's state parks are troubling enough, there is no need to expand them and multiply them across the entire country and through the crown jewels of America's natural heritage.

Update 12/2: Thanks to FOIA some more information has come out about this and it makes the NPS look even worse.

Amazon in Danger

This is an excellent Op-Ed by a Brazilian journalist about the threats the Amazon faces. What makes it so interesting is that it goes beyond recitation of distressing facts about rate of destruction, assassinations of activists, displacement of indigenous people, soil depletion and erosion, and the myriad other disasters the relentless expansion of sugar, cattle, and soy have caused. What caught my attention was the argument currently playing out in Brazil about its sovereign right to develop autonomously without interference and how the author used Brazil's history to counter it quite effectively.

While the "right to develop" is a common argument by some development theorists, and one that has a large amount of moral suasion--after all, why should the world's poor stay poor because rich countries now value the environment they spent centuries destroying as they developed--it is ultimately unsatisfactory. For starters, we now have technological options that can help developing nations bridge the gap over some of the dirtiest technologies. This is particularly true, ironically, in some of the least developed nations, such as Laos, where there is very little infrastructure that needs upgrading or replacing. One of my friends just finished a year working with a Laotian company that is working on installing small, locally assembled solar panels for off-grid villages. There are many other efforts do similar things on both small and large scales. There is also the substantial question of whether it is right to say that societies must develop, need to develop, and, most importantly, need to follow the pattern of the Industrialized West. While that is a very interesting and complicated philosophical and ethical question, it is not really what I want to discuss right now. Besides, there are much better places you can get a thorough examination of it.

Really what I wanted to highlight is the way Leão Serva takes the argument and demolishes its purported moral and nationalistic force by exposing both the corrupt corporate interests behind it and comparing it to another shameful piece of Brazil's experience: it's reluctance to abolish slavery and its claims that outsiders who condemned it had no right to meddle. He does it well, with grace but to devastating effect. Perhaps this will help clear the eyes of some who are less responsive to environmental concerns for their own sake (or their very real human consequences).