Stressed public lands need volunteers more than ever

By Phoebe Sweet

Saturday, Sept. 29, 2007 | 7:24 a.m.

Last year more than 1 million people visited Red Rock Canyon, a national conservation area near Las Vegas, and each one left a little something behind.

They brought about 800,000 cars, as well as PowerBar wrappers, water bottles and booted feet.

As on the rest of the nearly 48 million acres of public land in Nevada, a few federal employees are responsible for making sure the debris is deposited in its proper place, that historic and prehistoric artifacts such as petroglyphs are protected and that sensitive desert plant and animal life is safe from the effects of an increasing number of visitors.

But as federal budgets for care of public lands shrink, so do the numbers of employees protecting the land. The burden of picking up trash, monitoring cultural artifacts and repairing vandalism increasingly falls on volunteers.

"We really rely on ... the public's help," said Jolynn Worley, a public information officer with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada. Looking out for people dumping trash or destroying cultural sites, she added, is "really difficult to do with one law enforcement ranger to cover a huge expanse of land."

Today the bureau is expecting help from about 100 volunteers who are to gather at Red Rock to rebuild the Red Springs boardwalk, torched by an arsonist last year.

The effort marks National Public Lands Day, when about 100,000 people will volunteer at about 800 publicly owned sites nationally.

The effort began 14 years ago with 700 volunteers on three sites and has grown each year along with public use and awareness of public lands and shrinking federal stewardship budgets, according to the Conservation System Alliance, a coalition of nonprofit conservation groups.

Elyssa Rosen, a spokeswoman for the alliance, said pending federal legislation would help protect the best and most beautiful of the natural resources overseen by the BLM, some of which do not have protective conservation designations by the president or Congress. The National Landscape Conservation System includes 26 million acres of national monuments, wilderness areas, rivers, trails and historic sites, including Red Rock Canyon, that are prized by conservationists, sportsmen and preservationists.

In the meantime, the BLM is relying on cleanup efforts such as the one today.

"I don't think the (federal) agencies will ever have the budget or the personnel to do everything that needs to be done to keep our public lands healthy," said Brian Beffort, associate director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness, an education and advocacy group. "That's why we the people need to step up. They are our lands, and we need to be responsible for taking care of them."

Beffort said that as budgets have shrunk at the BLM, which controls most land in Nevada, the agency has reallocated resources.

And the bureau must deal with the added pressures of urban growth abutting public lands in Nevada. Mark Struble, a public information officer and volunteer coordinator with the bureau's Carson City field office, said housing and other development in Las Vegas and the Reno area have reached the doorstep of public lands.

The BLM is "not adequately staffed and never has been to deal with that kind of urban growth," Struble said.

He said BLM law enforcement is overwhelmed with reports of trash dumping, rampant use of all-terrain vehicles in sensitive habitats and defacement of cultural resources.

That's where volunteers, such as those who plan to be at Red Rock today or the more than 200 people who showed up in the rain last Saturday to remove more than 150 cubic yards of trash from the Carson River in Northern Nevada, have an important role to play.