May We Should Apply Love

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” So spoke Jesus, according to a book I read, and while I am not in any way religious, it has always seemed to me that regardless of spirituality these rules offer the best path to living a meaningful life and, as a byproduct, a happy one. Love may be occluded at times, but it is embedded in all of us, a north star that never dims, and one worthy of more than a little attention.

John Muir, the great, flawed evangelizer of the Sierra Nevada, saw god in every tree and rock, and while I don’t share his faith (and I find his writing distractingly breathless), I, too, am whelmed with emotions when I’m in nature. They range from awe to appreciation to fascination. In the face of photosynthesis, or a wolverine, or a creek roaring with spring melt, I can’t help but feel humble and grateful and full of the joy of it all. What I feel is, yes, love for the creation and whatever created it, love for our miracle world, and love for our luck at living in it.

But love, actual love and not just the enjoyment of something, is not passive. It requires action. When my first child was quite small, I went to Greenland for three weeks, and upon my return I was shocked at how much of his development I’d missed. Not yet a toddler, he probably didn’t even notice I was gone, but still: that was when I decided I’d never take such a long trip again. Every year, my friend Ace would invite me on an expedition to Nepal or Tibet or Pakistan and every year I’d turn him down. It hurt to say no, but it was better for my family and for me.

Most of us, most of the time, probably think about “love” in terms of what we love to do. I love to ski powder. I love to ride my bike. I love to swim in the ocean. But what about when love means not doing something? What about when love means giving up something you enjoy for the benefit of others? True love, after all, isn’t self-seeking. It means sacrifice, or at minimum, compromise. Anyone who’s been in a successful long-term relationship knows this.

For many years, one of the goals of the outdoor industry has been to increase the number of people recreating outdoors. At this, the industry has been successful beyond its wildest dreams. Recreation is booming, and has been booming, for a decade. The issues have shifted from not enough people playing outside to too many people playing outside—or, at least, too many people playing in the same place at the same time.

Until now, one of the most reliable tools for guiding responsible recreation has been the framework created by the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. But, as Ryan Stuart reports in this issue, LNT is proving to be a blunt instrument, one perhaps not finely tuned enough for today’s exploding use of public lands and the new communities coming to the outdoors. What to do, for example, when someone from a traditionally underrepresented group feels that Leave No Trace rules discourage them from enjoying nature? Do you relax the rules? If not, how do you communicate them without turning into a gatekeeper?

Or consider the highly fractious case of mountain bikes in wilderness. There are mountain bikers—and I’m friends with a lot of them—who insist that because bikes are people-powered, they’re perfectly appropriate to ride in federally designated wilderness. For a long time, one of those mountain bikers was Mike Ferrentino, a former colleague from Bike magazine, who elsewhere in this issue shares his journey from inveterate poacher of wilderness to respectful, non-poaching citizen. “I stopped riding in wilderness areas,” Mike writes, “when protecting wildlife habitat, biological diversity, and the simple existence of ever-disappearing natural spaces came to mean more than my perceived right to recreate.”

Our challenges are complex, and some seem intractable, but I can’t help but wonder how quickly we might find solutions if we bring love into the mix—if we work with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds and all our strength, if we abandon our selfishness in the interest of others, if we put our neighbors, human and not-human, ahead of ourselves. Yes, when you do something you love, you feel great. But when you do something for love, you help make the world great. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it is always right.