Greening outdoor practice

It’s a wild and beautiful day and you are walking in the hills – the Glyders, say – with a group of young people. Tryfan, Glyder Fawr, Glyder Fach; a horseshoe of craggy summits coming in and out of the clouds. Birds fly up, chattering and scolding as you pass. There’s a raven crarking over the sound of the river and, underfoot, mats of purple thyme amongst the rocks. The group is moving well and spirits are high. Just ahead of them, you pull over a small rise and there, spreading out in front of you... is a dirty great pile of litter. How would you respond? I’d bet a month’s salary and a bottle of Laphroaig that 99% of people reading this would stop and pick it up. You’d almost certainly engage the group in the task, and use the incident to open up a discussion about outdoor ethics. Litter is obvious; packing or not packing out poo considerably less so. Then there’s shutting gates, thinking how to minimise footpath erosion, and all those questions about where and how to camp. As outdoor professionals we are really good at this stuff. And it’s important not just because of the actual impact – visual, ecological and otherwise – of the litter or camping scars or misplaced sheep; but because of the message it sends out about caring for the environments we love to work and play in.