News from NARRP This content is generated by members for members. Please send us your news, reports, job announcements, manuals and personal updates that may be of interest to other members. The National Association of Recreation Resource Planners Request from a member Our City is preparing to revamp the way in which we justify our existence. The new format is called Budgeting for Outcomes. Are you aware of any resources that speak to the necessities and justifications of park/natural resource planners as opposed to having local govt's simply move all planner functions into typical urban and neighborhood planning divisions Donnie Underwood Parks & Greenways Planner 215 Church Ave Roanoke, VA 24011 540.853.1166 Fax 540.853.1287 A Recreation Balancing Act by Cynthia Wilkerson Each year over 440 million visitors recreate in national forests and national parks (1), and untold more on BLM lands. They hike, bike, swim, fish and canoe across the hundreds of millions of acres we are lucky to call every American’s birthright. In fact, recreation is the main reason a lot of us get out on our public lands. People also get inspired to care for wild places when they directly experience them, and recreation is an important way that critical connection is established. That is why The Wilderness Society wants to engage everyone who visits and cherishes our public lands. We envision deep, broad, and varied constituencies – traditional and new together – working to promote widespread and sustainable enjoyment of natural places. Only by doing so can we ensure broad public support for protecting America’s public lands for all time to come – and at the same time ensure that future generations of Americans will also be able to enjoy these experiences that we hold so dear. PRINCIPLES FOR ENSURING SUSTAINABLE RECREATION When The Wilderness Society launched its Recreation Program, it was apparent that we needed to define a set of principles to guide our work because recreation activities, while providing enjoyment and lasting memories of a successful adventure, also bring impacts on the land. In developing our principles we sought to encourage Americans to visit and play on public lands, while protecting those lands from being loved to death by encouraging responsible and sustainable recreation management. The principles not only apply to remote wilderness areas set aside by Congress for more primitive recreation, but also to our most popular parks visited by people from around the world in cars and campers. After numerous discussions, both internal and external, we developed our principles of sustainable recreation: 1. Connect to Nature Through Public Lands Embrace outdoor recreation and encourage a connection to nature in a variety of ways for people with different interests and skill levels. 2. Conserve and Respect our Natural, Historic and Cultural Heritage Respect the land and America’s rich natural, historic and cultural heritage by preserving the integrity, health and resilience of these unique ecosystems, and cultural and historic assets. Encourage use of and access to public lands that inspires respect for and pride in their beauty, health, diversity and special value to the nation and to the world. 3. Promote Enjoyable and Safe Recreation Ensure enjoyable, safe and sustainable recreation through sound land use planning. The art of making these principles work is to balance meeting recreation needs with ensuring that public lands are sustainably managed to protect the quality of experiences for generations to come. BRINGING SUSTAINABLE RECREATION TO LIFE One area where The Wilderness Society is bringing its principles of sustainable recreation to life is in the rural community of Roslyn, Washington. Nestled in the foothills of the North Cascades, this charming town is rich in both history and beauty. Once known for its logging and coal mining businesses, Roslyn is now known as a gateway to a variety of outdoor recreation opportunities. The town boasts access to the spectacular Alpine Lakes Wilderness, one of the most-visited wilderness areas in the United States. The town of Roslyn also owns 300 acres of land within its boundaries that must be managed to enhance recreation opportunities while protecting forests, wildlife, fisheries, and historical and cultural assets. The Wilderness Society is working with the city’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee to develop a recreation and trails plan for the Roslyn Urban Forest that will balance conservation with recreation opportunities for hikers, bikers and horseback riders. The existing trails are a haphazard collection of old road remnants connected by user-created routes, so one desired outcome is to create a more functional trail network that will better serve everyone’s needs. To date The Wilderness Society and the Citizen’s Advisory Committee have established a goal statement for the recreation and trails plan, contacted a series of local, regional, and national conservation and recreation stakeholders and user groups, sent a survey to the citizen’s of Roslyn through their monthly water bill and submitted a grant to the National Park Service’s Rivers Trails and Conservation Assistance Program for support on the project. We are planning workshops in the fall and winter to develop a regional assessment of recreation opportunities and to map out the layout of the desired trail network and supporting infrastructure. Through this work, we’ve learned that it’s difficult to find the expertise needed to define the resource capacity, which is the basis for determining where and how many trails to place on the landscape. We are fortunate to have found some local expertise in a State Park employee, but are grateful that NARPP is working to enhance the professional resources available for this kind of work. We welcome feedback, input, and resource references from NARPP members. Ultimately we see the work in Roslyn as creating a model for the application of our principles of sustainable recreation that can inspire and inform similar efforts in gateway communities throughout the North Cascades and the rest of the country. We are excited to be working with a local gateway community to explore new ground balancing conservation and recreation. We look forward to reporting back on our progress to secure the conservation values and recreation opportunities for future generations in this beautiful part of Washington State and to share the lessons learned so they can be applied elsewhere. For more information or to provide input or expertise on this project, please contact Cynthia Wilkerson, Washington Program Manager of The Wilderness Society, 206-624-6430 ext 226 or [email protected]. (1) Data compiled from the National Forest Service’s 2009 NVUM report and 2009 recreation visitor statistics for the National Park System. National forests and grasslands accounted for over 170 million recreation visits; National parks accounted for over 276 million recreation visits. Call for Sessions – Park Pride Conference Park Pride, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to lead and inspire action for parks and greenspace, is accepting proposals from high-quality presenters for innovative and dynamic educational sessions to be presented at the Park Pride 10th Annual Parks and Greenspace Conference at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens on March 28, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. We seek high-quality speakers with case study examples of park and greenspace solutions that specifically address our mission and the conference theme, Parks: Bridging the Future. As Park Pride enters into its 22nd year, the conference seeks to expand the knowledge and awareness of the importance of greenspace and park land in the future of our communities. Presentations should focus on concepts, visions and case examples of how a community, city or region will use and/ or depend upon this amenity in the future. All submissions must be sent electronically as an Adobe PDF or MS Word document to Walt Ray, Director of Park Visioning [email protected] by 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time on October 8, 2010. For more information, please visit www.parkpride.org. Back to School: Back Outside. During NBC’s “Education Nation” event this week there will be robust discussion of positive ways to achieve academic excellence in schools starting with a Today Show interview with the President. An overlooked, but vitally important, aspect of this discussion will be the growing effects that today’s “indoor childhood” has on stifling American educational achievement. In a new report: Back to School: Back Outside we have assembled and summarized the research on how added outdoor time and outdoor education consistently boosts a child’s academic performance, learning aptitude and scores on standardized tests. Many of you are familiar with parts of this research but there are many new findings in the mix. The positive effects are really stunning even in the face of some of the worst schools and educational circumstances. Check it out: http://www.nwf.org/Get- Outside/~/media/PDFs/Be%20Out%20There/Back%20to%20School%20full%20report.ashx Kevin J. Coyle, JD. Vice President, Education and Training National Wildlife Federation 703-989-6020 [email protected] www.nwf.org OIA Homegrown Listening Sessions and Outdoor Nation Report asks Obama Administration to Boost Environmental Education Courtesy of Outdoor Industry Association If you want to foster future conservationists, tighter families and fitter kids, focus on the schools. That is one of the main recommendations in one of two reports sent to President Obama at the end of August by the outdoor industry. The Outdoor Foundation (established by OIA) compiled the 27-page “Outdoor Nation: A Special Report America’s Great Outdoors” using input gathered from 500 delegates who attended the Outdoor Nation Youth Summit in New York City last June and its own online surveying tools. OIA also submitted the 9-page “America’s Great Outdoors Homegrown Listening Sessions” with recreation policy recommendations based on eight “homegrown” listening sessions held across the country this summer.