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No pay? No problem!

By Michael Wolcott

Found in: | Wildlife |

C'mon, who really wants to work for free?

More people than you might think.

Consider National Public Lands Day. On Sept. 27, this annual orgy of outdoor volunteerism, now in its 15th year, drew more than 100,000 people to parks, preserves, and forests across the nation where they donned gloves, picked up tools, and pitched in.

It's not just once a year. Every day, throngs of Americans go to work on public lands, for free. Their donated labor and skill help to keep cash-strapped conservation and outdoor recreation programs functioning. Each volunteer has a set of reasons, but for most there is a sense of proprietorship.

In fact, if you were looking for a volunteers' theme song, "This Land Is Your Land" might work. Listen to Anthony Quintile, of Flagstaff Biking Organization, which sponsors trail work days and a "mobile trail crew" on the Coconino National Forest:

"I'm a bit of a fan of co-managing the forest," Quintile says. "People will recreate. If they don't have a trail, they'll make one. I'd rather see it done right."

Across the Southwest and all around the country, volunteers are "co-managing" recreation on forests, deserts, rivers, and mountains. Like Quintile, they make volunteerism a form of advocacy. They see treasures in their backyards and want to take care of them. It's worth doing for free.

A growing number of volunteers are expanding their outdoor resum�s, learning new skills that range from botany to trail design - effectively becoming field technicians - to deliver more bang with each volunteer buck. Along the way they have a blast, learn a lot, and get their shot at saving some small patch of the world.

This "new volunteerism" also includes trying fresh tricks at the institutional level - innovative partnerships among land management agencies, recreationists of all stripes, environmental organizations, and the private sector.

This new wave of public-spirit-replacing-public-money comes at a time in the United States when war, a tottering economy, and several other large problems have pushed conservation and recreation to the approximate bottom of the Beltway totem pole.

(The White House's proposed 2009 federal budget, for example, recommended an 8.1 percent cut in Forest Service funding. Further tightening the fiscal screw on recreation is the high priority given to fire suppression, which bleeds money from other critical programs - to the extent that it threatens the agency's overall mission, according to a recent letter signed by five of its former chiefs.)

While some people complain that the federal government is shirking its responsibility to adequately fund public lands (and others consider alliances between green groups and the government to be inherently unholy) most people close to the action say that when it comes to caring for the places we love, partnerships and volunteerism are the best tools in the shed. At least for now.

Recreation budgets are typically "chicken feed, compared to what's needed," said Jim Vaaler, a long-time Sierra Club volunteer trip leader from Phoenix. "There's such a huge amount of work out there, volunteers can only put a dent in it."

After two decades of rounding up volunteers to fix trails and pick up trash on the Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves forests, Vaaler has very few kind words for decision-makers back East who make so much volunteerism necessary.

"It's like the politicians in Washington are trying to put these agencies out of business," said Vaaler. "Levels of volunteerism have gone way up, but there's no way we can expect volunteers to take the place of paid staff.

"In the long haul you can't just keep asking volunteers to give and give."

Maybe not. But volunteers are doing what they can to fill the breech, inspiring the gratitude of harried land managers.

"Our recreation program would not be successful without the involvement and energy that our volunteers provide," says Brian Poturalski, a recreation officer on the Coconino's Peaks and Mormon Lakes ranger districts. "Every day our volunteers save (the agency) thousands of taxpayer dollars."

The impact of volunteers on the Coconino is "huge," Poturalski said, but more importantly, "these people feel so strongly about stewardship of the land that they give of their time and resources. That is where the real value lies."

This sense of responsibility motivates Flagstaff's Denise Hudson, who has been on five multi-day volunteer trips since retiring from the U.S. Postal Service last year.

"I love to get out and be useful," said Hudson, who volunteers on ecological monitoring and restoration trips with the Flagstaff-based Grand Canyon Trust (GCT). "It feels good to give back to this beautiful landscape. It's a lot more satisfying than writing a check."

So far, Hudson has worked on the North Kaibab National Forest, in Grand Canyon National Park, and on BLM-managed land along the Paria River. Meanwhile, she has been notching up her skills through the Trust's "Budding Botanist" program - learning to identify and collect plants, mount herbarium specimens, and assist professional botanists in the field.

These botanists-in-training - and all the other people who like to work for free - are critically important to many GCT projects, according to Kate Watters, the environmental group's volunteer coordinator. And they keep her motivated.

"The volunteers we work with are a constant inspiration to me," Watters gushes. "They come from all over the country, the world sometimes, completely ready and willing to jump into whatever situation is put before them."

In the past year, she said, Trust volunteers have donated 14,000 hours of help - the equivalent of six full-time employees.

Much of that volunteer sweat has been shed on pioneering projects that show how green groups are finding new ways to work with federal agencies on the ground - as opposed to against them in court. Not coincidentally, this gains them a better seat at the oversight and management table.

In 2005, GCT partnered with The Conservation Fund to purchase the Kane and Two Mile Ranches north of Grand Canyon, taking over active grazing permits on about 850,000 acres of Forest Service and BLM land. The Trust's "K2M" restoration projects - vegetation surveys, fencing out riparian areas, removing invasive plants, and other labor-intensive jobs - are being accomplished largely with volunteers.

Another new Trust project is an invasive-plants purge in the Paria River canyon, which drains into the Colorado just upriver from Grand Canyon National Park.

"We're partnering with the BLM and getting funds from the Arizona Water Protection Fund to remove invasive tamarisk and Russian olive from a 17-mile stretch of the Paria," Watters said. Last spring, volunteers and field technicians worked side by side to do baseline ecological monitoring.

"The data we collected will help determine how removal of exotic plants will affect native vegetation recovery, channel form, and breeding bird populations," Watters said. "The removal work will go on for five years. Mostly we'll depend on volunteer labor."

Trust volunteers have also partnered with Navajo tribal members to identify and protect medicinal plants along a visitors' trail overlooking the Little Colorado River gorge. Watters said GCT volunteers are revisiting plant transects where data has not been collected in 30 years and surveying plant communities in the Fishlake National Forest.

"We couldn't accomplish these things without volunteers," Watters said.

This year GCT launched a statewide effort to document Arizona's plant diversity, partnering with Arizona Native Plant Society, Desert Botanical Garden, the Forest Service, Northern Arizona University, and the Museum of Northern Arizona - a project sure to employ plenty more budding botanists.

In Colorado, the San Juan Mountains Association keeps volunteers busy year-round. This nonprofit group has been working with the Forest Service since 1988 to provide conservation education, interp programs, and volunteer work trips on national forest and BLM lands.

SJMA's volunteer trips make it unique among public-land interpretive organizations in the U.S., according to the group's volunteer coordinator, Kathe Hayes. Such groups typically operate bookstores and do educational programs, but do not run on-the-ground volunteer projects like trail building and exotic plant removal.

The group shares a roof with BLM and the Forest Service in Durango at the San Juan Public Lands Center, and receives agency funding. Part of SMJA's approach to strengthening volunteerism is cooperation with other groups. Its "Southwest Trails Round Table" brings together the area's interested groups to share inspiration, plans, and ideas.

"We meet once or twice a year with the agencies to discuss accomplishments," Hayes said, "but also see where we can assist each other."

In 2007, volunteers supplied more than 50,000 hours of free labor on the area's public lands, according to SMJA and federal agency Web sites.

In order to round up enough volunteers for backcountry projects that require multi-day commitments, "creativity is important," said Hayes. Sometimes it's difficult to get the numbers "so we cast a broader net."

"Folks want to give back," she says. "It's just that our society is so much busier than in the past. You really have to capture the volunteers' interests and attention in order to gain their support."

Enter a hot new buzzword: "voluntourism" - the packaging of volunteer outings to attract out-of-state or even international participants. Voluntourism has become a mainstay for smaller non-metropolitan communities with limited volunteer pools, Hayes said.

"The volunteer vacation was invented to entice volunteers from out of the area to come and see some different country," Hayes explained. "Of course, the project has to have some glitzy appeal."

A good example, she said, was SMJA's multi-day vegetation project last spring on the Gunnison River.

"We needed 50-plus volunteers to assist with tamarisk removal and tree planting, Hayes said. "The hook was a fully guided canoe trip for only $100." By teaming up with BLM, Centennial Canoes, and Denver-based Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, SMJA was able to stage the trip and attract a full crew.

"It was a huge success," Hayes said. "Volunteers are willing to pay some fees in order to participate in a unique situation."

While some volunteers may be willing to pay to work "for free," some recreationists complain about deteriorating trails and other signs of decline on public lands, and do not feel called upon to volunteer. "We already pay taxes," the argument goes, "so why should we donate labor, too?"

This frustrates Quintile, who has been leading volunteer efforts in Flagstaff for six or seven years. Most people, he says "don't really understand" the complexities of public-land management and budgeting. "But they have very strong opinions," he added.

"Look, recreation money is limited," said Quintile, "There's Iraq, there's Katrina. Do we want to help co-manage our lands, or not?"

Quintile sees practical advantages to recreationists taking responsibility for the places they play in: "There are more of us out there all the time," he said, and therefore recreationists know precisely where the problems are.

Quintile also thinks volunteerism has long-lasting benefits for the community. He likes to get sometimes-wary user groups - stock users and mountain bikers, say - working together, talking to each other. For several years, Flagstaff Biking Organization and the Coconino Trail Riders, a dirt-bikers club, have staged mixed-use trail maintenance events on the forest, where members of different user groups come face-to-face.

The most recent one, in late August, attracted about 50 volunteers. With the Forest Service providing tools and logistical support, the group upgraded a two-mile section of trail just south of the San Francisco Peaks. And forest users - motorized and not - got the chance to know each other a little better.

After all, every public lands volunteer story is, first and foremost, a story about people and the land. Vaaler, whose volunteer career scrolls back more than two decades, understands this better than most, perhaps.

He recalls his early Sierra Club volunteer outings, ground-truthing # Wilderness Study Areas for the 1984 Arizona Wilderness Bill - being out there on the ground, working on projects he believed in, gaining a sense of accomplishment.

From the beginning it has been a labor of love. "I volunteer in some of my favorite places, Vaaler says, "places of real personal importance." He stresses the importance of "putting something back."

"It does something for you. There's a sense of accomplishment. And you build a relationship with the land."

Jennifer Mitchell would no doubt agree. The last volunteer interviewed for this story, Mitchell is a lecturer at Northern Arizona University and Sierra Club volunteer. She, too, emphasized a sense of responsibility - and the connection with place: "I think that we, the people who like to play on public lands, should step up and take responsibility for maintaining and preserving them," Mitchell said, adding that groups like the Sierra Club should continue to energize local activists and keep pressure on public agencies to take care of the land.

Mitchell also offered a singularly compelling reason for why so many people choose to work for free. Here's her story: "I started volunteering with the Sierra Club about 10 years ago, when I was still living in the Midwest," she says. "My first service outing was a trail-building hitch outside Ketchum, Idaho."

She remembers the trip as a physical and social adventure, a personal exploration. "It was an introspective period in my life. I wanted a new experience that would expand my mind. I wanted to join a group and meet people who were nothing like me."

She was not disappointed. That stint of trail work led to two others, spaced a couple of years apart, in northern Montana. Then Mitchell moved out of the country for seven years. Now she's back in the States, in Flag now, and volunteering again.

"I wanted to use my free time to give back. Giving money is easy, but giving up time is more personally rewarding for me," she said.

She remembers those early trips with the Sierra Club, how good it felt to swing a Pulaski up there in Glacier National Park, among the grizzlies and wildflowers. She had come from the city, burnt-out from traffic, noise, and a too-fast life. Glacier was good juju.

Her volunteer gig, whacking all those logs with her Pulaski, was almost a form of wilderness therapy: "I sure let go of a lot of anger, stress, and aggression," she says.

"Several chapters later," she says, "I'm doing what I love to do, where I love to do it. I volunteer with the Sierra Club locally to do a variety of projects on public land, and I now use the land for recreation. A perfect combination."

Settling into Flagstaff has been easy, she says. And it would not be stretch to say that volunteering on public lands has given Jennie Mitchell the new home she loves.

"It was a long journey," she says, "and it might have turned out differently if I hadn't taken that first Sierra Club service trip."

There it is: volunteering can change your life.

What more could you ask for?