Conservation Leaders Discuss Outdoor Recreation, Equity and Conservation Funding
Highlights from CWP’s live podcast episode at the Outdoor Retailer show in Denver
The Center for Western Priorities is taking our “Go West, Young Podcast” on the road this summer, highlighting key conservation issues across the West and featuring local leaders in their own communities. We launched the podcast road tour at the Outdoor Retailer show in Denver with a panel of experts focusing on the growing impact of the outdoor recreation industry on conservation. The Outdoor Retailer show is the largest outdoor industry trade show in North America, gathering industry brands, retailers, and suppliers and providing a natural forum for conversations around the importance of public lands and conservation efforts to the outdoor recreation economy.
Our guests on the panel included:
Nathan Fey (right), Director of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office
Angelica Rubio (center), New Mexico State House Representative, District 35 (Las Cruces)
Meghan Wolf (left), Environmental Activism Manager at Patagonia
CWP’s Deputy Director, Aaron Weiss, hosted a lively discussion with all three panelists at Patagonia’s booth inside the trade show. Below are some of the key take-away’s from our conversation.
The following excerpts have been edited for clarity.
On the importance of the outdoor recreation industry as an economic driver:
Nathan Fey: “I’m a little tongue-tied when I think about the numbers. We are over a $60 billion industry in this state alone — it’s 10% of our GDP. We employ over half a million people, nearly a fifth of our workforce in this state. It’s not insignificant, and it’s not just the manufacturing space, it’s also the service providers, the guides and outfitters, it’s the ski industry…I think we can cast an even bigger net when we factor in hotels and restaurants.”
On taking care of the places we play:
Nathan Fey: “One of the things we’re grappling with at the state is how do we disperse the use. We’ve got 54 14'ers and they’re on everybody’s to-do list. It’s the bucket list to check them all off. But we have all of these 13'ers, you know, 13,999'. It’s the same vista right across the valley, it’s the same experience, but there’s nobody on that trail. We’re looking at all sorts of different ways to ‘market’ that we have more opportunities than just the icons in the state. Eastern Colorado is ripe for tourism but it’s a different kind of experience than your 13K peak, or 14k peak. There are opportunities for rivers, trails, road cycling, bird watching…those are places that are ripe for an investment. And then in western Colorado we still have these communities that have been focused on coal or oil and gas and they’re looking in their backyards and they have these wild and scenic rivers in Moffat County. We have a trail system that is not on anybody’s radar, but it’s world-class. Same with the western end of San Miguel or Montrose County, we have coal fired power plants and coal mines being shut down and communities wondering what are they going to do for the tax base they’ve lost. 80% of their tax base is gone, but then they’re looking around saying, ‘We’ve got all this fantastic rock, and slick rock, and canyon country, and we’re no different than Fruita.’ So we have this natural capital that we should be leveraging. Those are the places where it’s going to happen.”
Meghan Wolf: “It’s not that we’re loving these places to death, it’s that we need to really be out there educating and to start younger, and to start with communities that are more negatively impacted by extractive industries.”
On support for New Mexico’s (and the nation’s first ever) Equity Fund and why it’s critical for the outdoor recreation industry:
Angelica Rubio: “We came up with this really great idea of what would it mean to not only create this division of outdoor recreation but also work towards it benefitting young people and creating a new generation of stewards of our land so that it’s not just about bringing tourism in, and having them enjoy our land, but to actually have our own access to the public lands.
“That happened particularly because over 40 organizations statewide came together [with the support of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham], including folks like REI at the national level and in private industries, folks like the Wildlife Federation who came on board and said, ‘We will not support a division of outdoor recreation unless an equity piece is included.’ And so it was part of a grassroots movement that we had and it continues today through implementation.”
Nathan Fey: “You can’t protect what you don’t know, and relating that back to the equity fund in New Mexico, that is the opportunity that is going to introduce a whole new generation, probably beyond just one generation, of folks that have all of these natural attributes out their back door but have not had the chance to explore them, to identify with them, and develop kind of a sense of stewardship or an ethic around those places. It is so important to create programs like this that advance the experience, and that experience leads into an ethic of conservation stewardship.”
On why protecting public lands is vital to Patagonia’s business:
Meghan Wolf: “At Patagonia, we are in business to save our home planet. We have seen an increased awareness around our work. There’s some initiatives we’ve taken, such as when the [Trump] administration wanted to shrink the national monuments and we took a bold step to sue the administration. We felt like that was an attack on public lands, which are for all U.S. citizens, all of us that play and recreate and…someone has to step up. Because of our strength in the industry and the success we continue to experience, we feel our customers support the positions that we’ve taken, and each time we’ve done things like this it’s been a positive result for us. It’s woven into the fabric of who we are, our DNA as a company.
On the importance of fully funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF):
Angelica Rubio: “LWCF is very, very critical, particularly to communities of color and folks with very little resources because there are parks in places like Las Cruces and in many of our rural areas across the state where…they have been created because of this fund. Every state around the country has benefited personally by what the LWCF has done for their own communities, and so I think it is really crucial that as we’re talking about equity that we’re also talking about why it’s so critical to push for reauthorization and enough funding for [LWCF].”
Nathan Fey: “There isn’t a single county in Colorado that hasn’t benefited from an LWCF funded project. It has a huge impact. Having permanent reauthorization is good, having that fully funded will give us a whole different set of resources to do really good things for youth engagement, for improving our talent pipeline, for improving conservation of our urban parks and revitalization of our rural communities. It’s a priority for this industry.”
Meghan Wolf: “The bigger question in my mind is what kind of communities do we want to create? What kind of country do we want to have? We’ve long loved our wild spaces and our wilderness areas or our lakes, our parks…this fund contributes to all those things.”
On collaboration with state outdoor recreation offices:
Nathan Fey: “I look at the work that Meghan is doing with Nevada to build an office of outdoor recreation. Same thing in New Mexico. We see a confluence of states and more and more states turning to form these offices of outdoor recreation so they can within their own abilities grow their slice of that pie, or grow the pie so that we can all share it. What we’re seeing is increased interest — not just in the West, it’s national — and increased interest in coming together to really start to direct changes on national policy.”
Meghan Wolf: “An office of outdoor recreation is another mechanism by which we can spread that influence and get people, and other businesses to see how outdoor recreation is important to them, recognizing that those areas need to be protected, so this is where the conservation piece comes in.”
On outdoor recreation contributing more to GDP than the oil, gas and mining sectors combined:
Angelica Rubio: “Our dependency on extractive industries has been one that has kept us from thinking outside the box for a really long time. Up to 40% of our budget depends and relies solely on extractive industries. When we talk about the outdoor equity fund, or when we talk about the division of outdoor rec and what that can do for our economy, we’re not even just talking about what it can do in that aspect, but how it’s going to change the trajectory for so many of our young people who are in survival mode. These numbers are critical to push back on this narrative that we need oil and gas.”
On how Patagonia engages its customers on public lands advocacy and inspires other businesses:
Meghan Wolf: “We use our brand muscle, essentially, to talk about the issues that are happening to help engage customers in activism as well. We started a platform called ‘Patagonia Action Works’ to help our customers get more involved with our nonprofit partners, our grantees, who are doing a lot of work on issues across the country. These are highlighted on the platform, so customers can interact with them that way. We do it through our catalog, through our digital media, there’s a lot of channels by which we are telling these stories. We use the business to fund these groups and support our real mission. We are firmly in business to help the groups that are doing the work, on the ground, in the field to do conservation and protect our lands.”
On the economic value of the Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument designation:
Angelica Rubio: “It has been such a great boon for our local economy there in Las Cruces. You know, being New Mexican we already wear that as a badge of honor, we tattoo it all over ourselves, or we wear our state flag…it’s because we have so much pride for it. The Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument added onto so much of this pride, and we’ve seen so many different businesses that have come about, they’ve named their businesses after the Organ Mountains, their brand IS the Organ Mountains…it’s a very slow journey, but it’s one that I believe is not only financially prosperous for a lot of people throughout our region, but it’s also something that we are very passionate about, and that we love.”
On what’s next for the outdoor recreation industry:
Nathan Fey: “I think we will see this industry create very innovative programs that protect recreational landscapes, protect water in our rivers, because we are a headwaters state we’ve got to do that, it’s critical to the growth of this state as a whole…my crystal ball also tells me that in five years there’s a very good chance we will have 51 offices of outdoor recreation in this country, we will be innovative as an industry as a whole, where we will create programs that we are just now starting to talk about that will affect all of us, and we will have a much louder voice in national policies, here at home and in D.C.”
Meghan Wolf: “I think what’s happening is the nonprofits and conservation groups have long been at the table, have long been lobbying and visiting representatives, now it’s time to really push on the businesses to show up and to share their voice because there is this economic argument…this is a part of our operating costs — without these places we can’t be as successful. I think more and more businesses are coming to the table.”
Stay tuned for details about additional podcast tour stops throughout the summer and fall on CWP’s Facebook page. If you have suggestions, please send them to podcast@westernpriorities.org.
For more information, visit westernpriorities.org. Sign up for Look West to get daily public lands and energy news sent to your inbox, or subscribe to Go West, Young Podcast.
