16. 7Rs: Remove with National CleanUp Day

In episode 16 of the Outdoor Minimalist Podcast, we will be discussing another one of the 7Rs of Outdoor Minimalism: remove.

You are likely familiar with some of the Leave No Trace ethics and guidelines, and the idea of “leave it better than you found it.”

Well, remove encompasses a lot of those ideas as well. We want to pack out what we pack in but we also should remove other things that don’t belong even if we were not the ones that put it there.

To help me discuss the importance of trash removal and cleaning up our natural spaces, I’m happy to introduce Steve Jewett and Bill Willoughby.

Steve is a serial entrepreneur who has started four successful companies in business supplies. He invented two products that enjoy widespread use. He also held a leadership position in a large business. Steve grew up in flat Kansas City and moved to Colorado after catching the ski bug. One thing led to another and he started climbing fourteeners. Steve has climbed all the fourteeners in Colorado and most in California.

He has summited on Denali though it took two attempts and also Aconcagua in South America. Steve has also summited peaks all over the Western United States and in Europe, having been over 13,000 feet more than a thousand times. In addition to climbing, Steve has helped many people in the wilderness through mountain rescue. He has led rescue efforts as a mission coordinator in Eagle County, Colorado, and served as the equipment officer for many years. He has been helping out in the backcountry for many years and considers the effort to keep the trails clean his “pay it forward.”

Bill has over 30 years of experience in international business development and has senior industry experience in positions that include digital technology, telecommunications, e-cycling, industrial manufacturing, and software publishing. Bill is a third-generation native of San Francisco, California. While working in the telecommunications industry, he lived and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. While working and living in remote parts of Alaska, he has also hiked the fabled “Silk Road” in Southern Thailand to the border of Myanmar.

His love for hiking and going places started at a young age while he was living in Missoula and Helena, Montana where he would take long treks into the backcountry. Being taught at this age to conserve the wilderness for others to enjoy has led to his concern for keeping all trails free of litter.

#nationalcleanupday #cleantrails #plogging #trashtag #152andyou

Join a CleanUp

Website: https://www.nationalcleanupday.org/en/join-us

Clean Trails: https://www.cleantrails.org/

National CleanUp Day: https://www.nationalcleanupday.org/ 

KAB National Litter Study: https://kab.org/litter

This transcript was edited to remove some filler words and phrases and is not verbatim according to what is spoken in the audio recording.

Meg: So, thanks, Bill and Steve, for joining me on the Outdoor Minimalist Podcast. I'm excited for you both to be here.

But before we jump into the topic of removing trash and litter from our trails, can you tell me a little bit more about your experience in outdoor recreation and the outdoor industry, and how you started to care so much about litter?

Steve: Meg, thank you so much. We really appreciate being on here. And, uh, I'll go first—this is Steve.

Bill: Oh, yeah. This is Bill.

Steve: So, Bill and I have both done a lot of work in the outdoors. My experience primarily started with skiing, hiking, and climbing all over the world, mostly high-altitude stuff. I also did search and rescue for many years. Doing cleanups and things to support the environment in a variety of ways is one of the ways that I pay back for what I’ve gotten.

Bill: Well, I did a lot of stuff in the outdoors, too. I worked with electronic systems, been on top of mountains, and traveled a lot worldwide. And, again, I kind of want to see the world be a nicer place.

Meg: And you've definitely done a lot of hiking. You also lived in Montana for quite a while, right?

Bill: Yeah, I grew up in Montana and learned to take care of the landscape there.

Meg: Awesome! And how long have you two known each other now?

Steve: So, uh, Bill and I have been hiking and climbing in Southern California and up in the Sierras for probably 15 years—maybe 18 years. It's been quite a while.

Bill: Yeah, definitely enjoy getting out and doing stuff.

Steve: We’ve solved all the problems of the world, right, Bill?

Bill: (Chuckles) We would talk—well, I’d talk, and Steve had to listen to me—when we were hiking.

Meg: Just as a little backstory, I've worked with Bill and Steve for, I don’t know, like a year and a half now, maybe? So, I already know the origin story. But for listeners, what’s the origin story of Clean Trails and National Cleanup Day?

Steve: Yeah, thanks, Meg. So, one of the things we did was hike some of the same trails on a regular basis in San Diego. One particular trail was called Iron Mountain.

We'd hike up Iron Mountain, solve all the problems of the world, and I would pick up litter and trash that I’d see on the trail and put it in my pocket.

Bill: Actually, he would pick it up with his hands and put it in his pocket.

Steve: Right. (Chuckles)

Bill: So, while we’re solving the rest of the world’s problems, Steve finds this to be kind of disgusting, and says, “Why don’t we do something a little bit different?”

Steve: So, I actually went to my barbecue set. My wife still doesn’t know that I took the barbecue tongs out of that barbecue set yet—but I went to the barbecue set, picked out a pair of tongs, and started putting the trash into a bag.

What I found was that the tongs didn’t work very well, so we spent a lot of time figuring out which tools would work best.

Bill: And what’s funny is we were playing a game where I would spot the trash, and Steve would pick it up. If I missed something, Steve would say—

Steve: (Interrupting) In the most annoying voice I could muster—"You missed one!"

Bill: Right. So we had fun with it, and people joined us, because we kind of “Tom Sawyer-ed” them into doing it. They joined in, and that’s when we decided to start Clean Trails.

Steve: And one of the things we focused on with Clean Trails was the infrastructure. We had a lot of success with that. And then, we also worked on some of the tools, like the tongs and the litter boxes.

Bill: Yeah, and after about a year and a half, maybe two years, of working with Clean Trails, we came up with this crazy idea. After we got the 501(c)(3) for Clean Trails, we decided to start National Cleanup Day. That led to a lot of great collaborations with other groups.

Steve: And what we do now is focus primarily on supporting the organizations that actually do the cleanups worldwide. Of course, in the United States is our primary focus, but it’s really grown into a global effort.

Meg: And I always get this confused, but are you guys also part of World Cleanup Day, too?

Steve: Well, funny enough, on a Wilson update, we helped them get started. That was, uh… you were over in Estonia.

Bill: Yeah, and now because I’m old and slow, Steve nominated me before I could nominate him to be on the board of World Cleanup Day.

Steve: Right. So Bill is now on the board of World Cleanup Day. He helped write the business plan and takes care of North America for World Cleanup Day.

Bill: Right. Also, we work with Earth Day and their great global cleanup efforts.

Meg: How long has Clean Trails been around then? Because you said Clean Trails kind of came first, became a 501(c)(3), and then National Cleanup Day came around. When did that start?

Steve: Correct. So, we actually have seven websites that we operate, all with the same exact focus. Clean Trails started in 2013 as a non-profit. Took some time to get that going, but, uh… thank you, government.

Bill: Yeah, so 2013. Then, in 2017, we held the first National Cleanup Day. Again, we spent quite a bit of time actually planning and thinking about what we wanted to do and what we didn’t want to do. We launched Cleanup News, of course, in late 2020.

Steve: Yeah, a year ago.

Meg: That’s a lot of projects going on! But obviously, you’re both really passionate about cleanups and keeping the planet clean.

So can you both elaborate more on why that’s important and why more people should care?

Steve: Personally, it has to do with the ethos of being in the outdoors and having the ability to say, "No, we want to keep this as our forefathers saw it."

Bill: Yeah, actually, when I was in Montana when I was younger, we were basically taught that if you want your kids to see the same thing that you’re seeing, and you want your grandkids to see the same thing, you’ve got to take care of it.

Steve: Exactly. Our ethos is, we’re here. The world is on loan to us, and we’ve got to pass it on better than when we got it.

Meg: And do you see cleanups as the primary way to do that, or more as a reactionary response to a larger problem?

Bill: Well, it’s one of the ways. When we say “primary,” there’s education, cleaning up, and the government is involved in it. But cleaning up is a way that a normal person can go out and make their habitat—or her habitat—clean.

Steve: Yeah, and once you’ve done that, you want to keep it that way.

Bill: Right. We call it community-based social marketing. The science behind it is real clear: if you want to have environmental advocacy or changes in what people are doing, it’s based in the community.

It’s getting the word out there, but ultimately, we want people to stop littering and trashing the environment in the first place. That’s the education side. And we work with a number of partners, including Leave No Trace.

Meg: Yeah, so what is kind of the impact that you have seen since you started doing all this? Even before Clean Trails, what has the impact been like as the organizations have grown, education has spread, and more cleanups have been put into place?

Steve: Right. So, we've actually seen some significant drops in certain types of litter in places. Obviously, with the pandemic that occurred, there’s been more PPE out there, but many spaces are getting cleaner.

It’s a gradual process in some places where we have the infrastructure in place and some of that education. For example, in the Wildland-Urban Interface Trails, where there’s some infrastructure and education, we’ve worked on that, and we’ve actually seen some significant decreases in trash and litter. It’s still an ongoing process, though.

Also, we’ve gotten partnerships with groups, and by doing so, we’ve enlarged their sphere of influence. People are getting more and more aware of what’s out there and how to help out.

When people say they want to save the world, that’s nice, but if you say, “What if you just cleaned up a little bit? What would that impact be?”

Once people find out that just a simple cleanup of a park or something can make it so much better, we find more and more of that happening. People are taking more responsibility for their local areas.

Meg: Makes a lot of sense, because it’s like the more that it directly impacts their personal experience, the more they seem to want to engage in that behavior.

And you guys always encourage people to have fun. So if they’re having fun while they’re doing it, then it’s even easier to want to continue.

Bill: Actually, our battle cry is: “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong!”

Meg: That's true! I couldn’t remember exactly what it is you guys always say, but yes, it’s brilliant.

Bill: I came up with that one. It’s a good one.

Steve: And what was the other one, Bill?

Bill: Oh, yeah. “What would the world be like if everyone picked up one piece of litter?”

Meg: Yeah, that’s on the National Cleanup Day website. I think it’s a good concept to consider. That reminds me of— is it the Keep America Beautiful campaign? What’s the one with the 152?

Steve: Yeah, the #152. What that is— to expand on it briefly— is they did a litter study in 2020 about the amount of visible litter in the environment. It was primarily in cities, streets, and highways, but they used that to extrapolate for other areas as well. It came out to 152 pieces of litter per person in the United States, all together.

Meg: Per day, right?

Steve: Exactly. So, essentially, if every single person picked up 152 pieces of litter and didn’t litter again, there wouldn’t be any more litter. It’s a solvable problem.

Meg: Yeah, and that's such a low number. I think sometimes people don’t even have to pick up one piece every single day of the year.

Bill: Correct, it’s simple. Well, a lot of people see the problem as overwhelming. They’ll go on a trail and they’ll see all this litter. What they don’t understand is, if you think about how many people are on that trail—if everyone, whether it be five people or a hundred—if they just picked up a couple of pieces of litter, it would be clean in no time.

It’s a question of getting people started, and education is the hardest part. Most people, when we did our marketing and research, thought it was the state, federal, or local government’s responsibility to clean up.

Steve: Wait, you mean to tell me, Bill, they don’t send somebody out after I go on a hike to follow me?

Bill: (Chuckling) Yeah, follow you. (Laughs)

Steve: And the problem is, once we explain to them, “No, you’re responsible,” they’re willing to do it. So, a lot of this is just the lack of education. We weren’t taught growing up that you're responsible to clean up after yourself, but it doesn’t seem like that’s being taught as much for trails and the outdoors anymore.

Meg: Right, yeah. That’s another point, too.

Bill: Yeah, maybe it’s a combination of both.

Steve: It’s like that "leave it better than you found it" rule. The Scout’s rule. It’s more of a—I don’t want to call it an "older school" saying, but...

Meg: Exactly. It seems like fewer people who are entering the outdoor space right now are aware of those types of unwritten rules. Like, there needs to be that infrastructure at the beginning of the trail and throughout the trail to remind people, "Don’t litter, because of XYZ."

Steve: Well, you are correct. When people aren’t aware of it, it’s not that they’re bad or evil; they’re just not thinking about it. We find that a lot. Surprisingly, the easiest way to prove this is when people go out with a doggy bag. They’ll very consciously, very nicely, pick up the dog poop and put it in a bag—and then forget about the bag when they come back down the trail.

Bill: Yeah, assuming you’re in a mountain or on a trail, and there’s not a trash can in between.

Steve: Exactly. What actually happens a lot of times is they’ll put it on the trail with the intention of picking it up on the way back down, and then they forget about it. So, in any case, they just forget about it. Or, they’ll drop something out of their pocket, thinking they’ll pick it up later, but they just don’t think about it.

Meg: This is the problem—education. Yes, you should think about it.

Steve: One comment there, too, is our friend Stephen Reinhold from Trash Tag. He started Trash Tag because he accidentally littered a receipt. Wasn’t it, Bill?

Bill: Yeah, it fell out of his pocket, I think. Or maybe out of his truck window or something.

Steve: I’m sure Stephen had that on his podcast earlier. But, yeah, he accidentally littered. I’m sure Bill and I have accidentally littered, too.

Meg: I know I have.

Steve: Yeah, I know I have, too. And what it means is that, even if you're an advocate for no litter in the outdoors, it still happens to you. A piece of your shoe might break off, or a lid might fall off your Yeti—whatever it is.

Bill: Right. And so, one of the things that occurs is that, as advocates, we need to take that outdoor ethos, that ethic, and say, "Now, we need to remove the litter that's out there to help others, and to show others to do the same thing."

Steve: You know, and to help somebody who makes a mistake. It’s just like when you’re playing golf on the greens—people will put divots in there, and even though you didn’t make that ball mark, you fix it.

You see professionals on TV fixing divots from other players, too. It’s the whole idea that it’s not about saying you’re evil for doing it; it’s like, "Okay, you made a mistake. Let me help you fix it."

Bill: Exactly. It’s all about helping out.

Steve: And one of the things, too, is that there’s a lot of litter out there. We were talking about the 152 pieces of litter per person. Most of the plastics that end up in the ocean— that a lot of people are concerned about from the science side—are coming from land, almost exclusively from land: from rivers.

And it’s not just 10 rivers; it’s thousands of rivers. Remember, the oceans are downhill from everything.

Meg: Yeah, and that bigger picture consideration is often lost, too. Especially, I don’t know, like I don’t think about that every single day when I'm walking my dog and maybe see a piece of trash on the ground.

Or when you see all of the dog poop bags at the trailhead or something—you don’t think about the process that that trash goes through to become microplastics and enter the ocean. So I think that’s a good reminder.

Steve: One other thing to mention is that, when I go to a trail, what I do oftentimes is actually pick up the litter around the parking area or the street nearby.

One of the reasons I do that is because litter begets more litter. If you see a lot of litter, and someone drops something, they’ll think, “Oh, I’ll just leave it there. The city’s going to take care of it.”

Meg: Right, so they feel less responsible for it.

Steve: Exactly. But if you drop something and there’s no litter, you think, “Oh my God,” and you’ll pick it up. That can extend to the hiking trail, or a street, or an alley—it all goes downhill. It’s the whole city, the whole county. People will see it.

If they don’t see litter—like if you go to a parking lot of a grocery store, for example—if you don’t see any litter, and you drop something, you’ll say, “Oh my God!” and pick it up. But if you see it’s full of litter, you think, “Well, somebody else is going to pick it up because there’s so much of it.”

Meg: Right. It’s just a different mindset.

Steve: By the way, who takes care of picking up litter and trash at a grocery store? Is that me and you?

Meg: I guess ideally the grocery store does it.

Bill: And some of that is just people being there. Some of it is accidental, depending on the area. About 75 percent of litter is not done intentionally, though we do have a term for people who litter intentionally. We call them "ill literates."

Meg: (Laughing) That’s funny. I could see that being offensive, but it’s funny.

Steve: Yeah, it’s a funny term.

Meg: So National Cleanup Day is every year in September, right? Is it the first Saturday of September? I forget.

Steve: No, National Cleanup Day is held every third Saturday in September. In 2022, it’ll be September 17th. By the way, that is also World Cleanup Day.

Meg: That’s right, it’s happening in 180-plus countries around the world, right?

Steve: Yeah, exactly. We also do the same thing for Earth Day with the Great Global Cleanup, which also happens in about 190 countries. One of the things about National Cleanup Day is that, for public lands, we actually recognize the entire month of September.

Part of it is because we have Public Lands Day on the fourth Saturday of September, but also because in a lot of areas, especially those with weather-related or tidal influences like rivers flowing into the ocean, it’s better to have your cleanup during low tide on a Saturday. So, sometimes they’ll move the date to another day to avoid getting washed away.

Bill: Right, I know Leave No Trace recognizes it during that week, and the river groups do their cleanup for the entire month.

Steve: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of activities going on in September. The people in the Great Lakes area have theirs around the same time, and they don’t have tides, so it’s easier to plan.

Meg: Do you have the data from 2021 about the impact of National Cleanup Day or National Cleanup Month?

Steve: Yeah, so during National Cleanup Month, we had just under a million people participating. That’s actually a little bit down from 2019, when we had over 2 million.

But this has been kind of a hybrid year because of the pandemic. People are just getting back out there. A lot of parks and recreation folks had to be reassigned during this period or were not allowed to hold public cleanup events.

Meg: Right, it’s like restarting.

Steve: Exactly. That’s okay, though, because there were still a lot of people doing it individually. A lot of those people don’t report it back, though.

Bill: One interesting development over the past year or so is that we now have a global cleanup map. A large number of organizations, including Earth Day, Keep America Beautiful, and World Cleanup Day, are participating in that single global map, and it’s not just the big groups—there are small groups as well.

Steve: Oh yeah, right. So, individual nonprofits, individual cities are participating—small companies, companies that just want to get their name out there.

We’re really happy with some of the developments on that map, and we have new improvements for 2022 that should include the ability to load up pictures directly onto the map.

Meg: So, can anyone organizing or participating in a cleanup add it? Like, if they have a company and there are companies doing a cleanup, can they put it onto the map or upload it? How does that work?

Steve: Absolutely. It could be a company, a small group, a special interest group, a nonprofit, a city, or even just a group of people wanting to clean their block. It could even be a single person who wants to do it. Actually, there are a lot of single individuals who do this.

Bill: Yeah, we really ramped up through a tailored cleanup program with companies. For example, there was a company in Canada—a very large company with about 8,000 employees—who participated in 2020.

They did cleanups all over the United States and Canada, but they did it wherever they had offices and where employees were located. So, wherever the individuals were, they got involved.

Steve: So, you can have a large company with thousands of employees and engage those individuals in their neighborhoods and communities—either in small groups or as part of a larger organization focused on nearby cities, parks, or natural features.

Meg: And all on a larger scale.

Steve: Exactly.

Meg: One thing I’ve been seeing a lot in the news lately is the cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Have you guys seen that?

Steve: Yeah, so the Great Pacific Garbage Patches are really interesting. The first thing is that we don’t want the trash and litter to go into the Garbage Patch, right?

That’s the biggest issue. But we don’t swim that far out, so we don’t really take care of that. But that said, there’s a lot of things going on where people are trying to address it. There’s a company in, I believe it’s in San Diego, that’s working on a solution.

But there's also one in the Netherlands—The Ocean Cleanup project. There’s another company in San Diego that’s working on a small robotic device that does something similar, but on a smaller scale, focusing on marinas and harbors.

Bill: Yeah, that robot you’re talking about is actually a different one. The one in San Diego that I’m thinking of looks like a dumpster underwater. It picks up trash, and there’s a filtration system that also collects oil and cleans it before it gets out to the ocean.

Steve: We actually went to the grand opening of their machine, and it’s really effective. But to address the Great Pacific Garbage Patch directly, we really need to stop the trash and litter from getting there in the first place. Then, of course, you have efforts like what The Ocean Cleanup project is doing to help clean up the beaches and the patches themselves.

Bill: Yeah, but when the trash is already out there, in the Garbage Patch, it’s a lot of work to gather it. It’s a multi-year project.

Steve: Exactly, and this is what you guys are talking about too with neighborhood cleanups, trail cleanups, and everything else. Every individual can contribute to the cleanup of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by reducing litter where it starts. The ocean is downhill from everything—whatever goes in your sewer, ends up in rivers, which eventually leads to the ocean.

Bill: Yeah, so if we can stop it before it gets carried away by rain and streams, it won’t make it to the ocean. There’s a concept out of Australia where they’re working on a multi-layered strategy to prevent litter from reaching the ocean. Their goal is zero litter to the ocean—although that’s a pretty tall ask, it’s more of a vision.

Steve: Yeah, but the way it happens is by getting fewer people littering, more people cleaning up, and creating infrastructure, like stormwater drains with capture devices for plastic and litter. They’ve spent a lot of money on that. You also have capture devices at the mouths of rivers that pick up the remaining trash before it reaches the ocean.

Bill: As that infrastructure builds up, we really do have the possibility of preventing polluted litter from getting into the ocean. But it’s not just about cleanups—it’s also about education. People need to be educated not to litter. And as people start picking up litter on trails and in cities, it reduces the amount that ends up in the ocean.

Meg: Exactly. So, what are some of those infrastructure pieces that cities, municipalities, and even park services can implement to prevent litter and encourage people to pick it up?

Steve: There’s a bunch of things that can be done, like providing gear and equipment at trailheads, parks, and in storm drains. We’re working on that, and there are manufacturers already making some commercially available solutions.

We spoke to one company yesterday in Canada that’s developing a device to clean beaches using a suction system. It picks up microplastic and sorts it from other debris. It’s a small system, but it’s really efficient.

Bill: The larger systems pick up trash as small as a cigarette butt, but this new system can pick up microplastic, which prevents it from getting out to the ocean.

Steve: And another thing we’re working on is proposing a national cleanup plan. This will take several years and involve many organizations, both locally and nationally.

Meg: Can you share what that would look like?

Steve: It’s still in the early planning stages. We’re working with organizations like Earth Day, Keep America Beautiful, and National Cleanup Day, as well as local groups like Tennessee Wildlife.

We’re also talking to the University of Colorado, where they’re incorporating the program into a master’s project. This is going to be a large, multi-organization effort. Right now, it’s in the planning phase, but we’re getting a lot of support from other groups, including universities like UC Riverside.

Bill: It’s a grassroots start, but it’s definitely growing.

Meg: That sounds really exciting! I’m interested to see how it all plays out. A plan like that is definitely needed right now.

Steve: We’re looking forward to seeing it develop too.

Meg: So, aside from larger scale planning and infrastructure, how can individuals get more involved in their communities?

Steve: It’s really easy for an individual to get involved. You can go out and safely clean up in your neighborhood. My wife and I do walks all the time, and I pick up trash along the way. I don’t do it every single time, but it’s really simple and easy. It just involves picking something up and putting it in a bag.

Bill: Yeah, one of the reasons we came up with National Cleanup Day is because, when I had kids, getting them to clean their room was almost impossible. But we thought, “What if we just did it for one day a year?”

So, what we’re trying to do with Earth Day, National Cleanup Day, and World Cleanup Day is get people started. The easiest way to start is by looking for cleanups in your area. You can visit our website and find cleanups near you or start one yourself. Whether it’s a park, a street, or wherever, you’ll feel good about yourself for helping out.

Steve: Right, and it doesn’t have to be an ongoing thing. You don’t need to clean up every week or make it feel like homework. Just do it when you feel the urge. If it’s a sunny day and you’re feeling good, go out and make the world a little bit happier. You can do it once a week, once a month, or whatever works for you. Just keep it simple.

Bill: Exactly. It’s easy, and it doesn’t take much.

Meg: Can you guys share your website so people can find more information?

Steve: Sure! Our website is https://nationalcleanupday.org, and you can find everything at Clean Trails as well. It’s all integrated and really easy to navigate.

Meg: I’ll also include that link in the show notes. So, when people are cleaning up, do you use any specific hashtags to encourage people to share their efforts on social media?

Steve: Yes, we use #NationalCleanupDay and #CleanTrails. Of course, we also support everything that Steven Reinhold is doing with #TrashTag. We’ve also worked with a group out of Europe for #Plogging. For those who don’t know, plogging is doing a cleanup while jogging or walking.

Bill: It’s a great way to combine exercise with helping the environment. It can be hard to stop and pick things up, but sometimes, if you’re tired, it’s a great excuse to take a break.

Steve: Yeah, I think it would make a great Olympic sport—running as fast as you can while picking up trash! Just don’t fall down.

Bill: Haha, right, don’t try that while racing!

Meg: Well, it sounds like a fun challenge for sure! Thank you both for coming on today and sharing all that information.

Bill and Steve: You’re welcome.

Meg: If you want more information about National Cleanup Day or Clean Trails, check out their content in the show notes and sign up for your very own cleanup in your community.

Cleanups are one way individuals can make a tangible impact—they’re a stepping stone into a lower-impact lifestyle and a great way to get your community, hiking buddies, or family more engaged in taking care of the outdoors.