Hi All, Climate Master John Fischer here with KLCC's Living Less Unsustainably.
A long trip can certainly use a lot of resources - my recent four week float with friends down the Grand Canyon was no exception.
Driving down was big, and some food got wasted - since you carry it all from day one, you don't want to run out. Once you hit the water, your propulsion is all current and arms, but the impact of 25,000 people a year floating and camping in the same spots day after day requires careful, well thought out techniques to make sure that each visitor finds pristine camps instead of trashy stinky sites.
The easy is obvious: pick up and pack out everything - including human waste. Required mats in cooking areas catch food scraps, special boxes hold trash, and leftover food gets packed out too.
And it works - because everybody does it. I found a guitar pick, a rubber band, and a few pieces of a plastic bag over a month where 5,000 people had been over the last year.
The lesson I take away is that we can do good, almost perfect work if we set our minds to it.
On your next picnic in the park, or bike ride by the river, be the person who picks up a forgotten soda bottle, and don't be the person who leaves something behind.
I was camping with friends a few years ago and the site was littered with bottle caps and cigarette butts. You-know-who started the impossible task. Thirty minutes of work made our next few days far more pleasant - and hopefully made it harder for the next group to start trashing things again.
It took 12 of us in the canyon working with each other to make sure things got done right. There are a quarter of a million of us in the south valley, imagine how clean we could make it if we all worked together instead of leaving the clean-up for somebody else.
I'm John Fischer with Living Less Unsustainably
