Before you snap a nature 'gram this summer, think about what you're doing to the environment

Kristin Scharkey | Palm Springs Desert Sun

Scroll through photos tagged in Joshua Tree National Park, and the Milky Way inevitably flashes across the screen. Night sky photography is a popular attraction in this boulder-laden landscape.

But in addition to the iconic rock formations, some photographers are heading out to capture the stars reflected in various bodies of water throughout the park. What they may not know – or choose to disregard – is that a lot of these places are sensitive and thereby protected as day-use only.

"They might have access to water for wildlife, and we like to limit humans going there," explains JTNP Social Media Specialist Hannah Schwalbe. "We want the wildlife to have a chance to access that water without a predator being around."

Night sky photographers heading into day-use-only areas is one example of an issue within the national park that Schwalbe says "is more likely" heightened by social media. The popularity of the shot may create a potential clamor for "retweets" and "likes," and yet the process of capturing it infringes on the limited water sources available to the park's wildlife. As more and more people are getting out to explore the wilderness, public lands across the country are feeling similar environmental tolls.

These days, outdoors experts are considering the role social media is playing – and can play – in amplification of behavior.

SIGN UP FOR FACEBOOK NEWS ALERTS: Message us here to get started

“A downside of social media is we are now accustomed to instant gratification delivery,” says Casey Schreiner, founder and editor-in-chief of the popular website Modern Hiker. “Especially in something like the outdoors, where landscapes are very fragile, there’s a lot of things that you need training for, or at least [to] be aware of in terms of safety. I feel like when you just drop someone off in the middle of the woods, it’s a recipe for a problem.”

Geotagging, for example, has increased awareness of trailheads, overlooks, et cetera – and made their locations easy to find for a significantly wider audience. Users can simply plug in a location and go – without needing to reference trail guides, hiking manuals, visitors centers or informational websites like Modern Hiker.

In Joshua Tree, one Instagram account @naturetroller has taken to commenting with national park etiquette on posts depicting "bad" behavior, like visitors standing on Joshua trees (or hanging their hammock from them), dogs on hiking trails and more. Some park-goers may be willfully ignorant – others simply don't know what they don't know.

Schwalbe, who is hired through nonprofit Great Basin Institute, says her team tries to strike a balance between Leave No Trace messages and more inspirational or "human management" (like parking spot availability) shares. Last year, the team launched an #ExploreResponsibly campaign that's racked up more than 6,000 Instagram posts.

"I see my job, a lot of the time, as an educator," she says, "not just to inspire the public to love the park, but also how to visit."

CONSIDER THIS: Is the Instagram generation filtering Joshua Tree's true character?

NEW RECORD: Joshua Tree National Park has another record-setting year, but some say that comes with an environmental toll

RIPPLE EFFECT: As Joshua Tree tourism booms, nearby creatives are looking to serve high desert locals

Taking preventative action

This issue of social media and the outdoors is one that Schreiner has "been paying attention to" for a long time (he's currently writing a book about it) and says is only "going to become more important to the outdoor community." He recently wrote a post with three guidelines for digital Leave No Trace principles to help teach newcomers "the responsible way to recreate outdoors" with their social media.

Schreiner's recommendations include: conscientious tagging (be vague), being mindful of what you're showing (responsible behavior), and setting a good example (showing yourself picking up trash, for instance).

5 ways to decrease your digital footprint Thinking about exploring nature soon? Here are five ways to decrease your digital footprint.

"Take a minute before you post and think about what message you’re sharing with your community," Schreiner explains. "You may just think, 'Oh, I’m just putting this online to get some likes and feel good about the hearts that are coming in under my photo, but you have an opportunity to teach people some pretty amazing things – sometimes they can be good and sometimes they can be bad."

Schreiner no longer geotags specific locations – only the larger park, for example, or a neighboring mountain. Joshua Tree National Park Association Executive Director Jacqueline Guevara says her team has taken the same approach with the organization's Instagram account. "We mix photos of the flora and fauna with landscapes, and there is always a lesson attached," Guevara explained via email. "We give people information on native plants and animals, along with tidbits on the geology and history of the area. Safety tips are always a favorite." Another technique, she says, is to share photos of spots where visitors can do guided hikes and lectures via JTNPA's Desert Institute.

When publishing a trail write-up, Schreiner says he’ll include the name of the trail in an Instagram post as well as the link to the Modern Hiker article, where interested visitors receive substantial background information – including trail ethics – and driving directions. It's always been important, he says, to "make things accessible to people but arm them with the information they need to have a good time and have a good time responsibly."

Land stewards are more strict when it comes to archaeological or sensitive sites. In a post about JTNP's Carey's Castle written by Shawnté Salabert, for example, Schreiner did not publish the driving directions and GPX coordinates typically included in Modern Hiker posts. Specifying the locations of sensitive sites, he explains, invites vandals and looters.

Schwalbe, too, advises avoiding geotagging "especially really sensitive areas or those secret spots [in] the park." Because so many places are now extremely popular, she says it's important for wildlife and vegetation to still have areas that see little visitation.

As for her team's approach to the park's social media accounts, Schwalbe says they "like to show instead of say." For example: "It's really cool for us to see someone who's tagged us that has put up a hammock appropriately," she explains. "So, if you attach a hammock to a rock that is not in a campground [fixed lines are not allowed in campgrounds since they can be a tripping hazard], that is A-OK and you can get a beautiful photo. ... We like to share that and say, 'Look, you can do this.' "

Not just a problem, but a solution

Notably, the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics updated its own website with social media guidance in June. Education Director Ben Lawhon says that in the past six months, he received numerous emails, letters and phone calls requesting that the organization add an eighth principle addressing social media to its foundational seven. Since joining the center in 2001, Lawhon says he's seen a number of "hot button" issues like geocaching, personal locator beacons, spot devices and drones illicit a similar reaction. Ultimately, his team made the decision not to create an eighth principle, but to address social media under the existing seven.

These new social media guidelines are designed to "help people be part of the solution," Lawhon says. He tried to create guidelines that empowered people, instead of using negative words like 'don't.' Examples include "Tag thoughtfully," "Be mindful of what your images portray," "Give back to places you love," and "Encourage and inspire Leave No Trace in social media posts."

"Social media is a tool like any other," Lawhon says. "You can use an ax for good or you can go cut down a bunch of trees for bad. Social media's no different. Think if every social media post had a stewardship message or had Leave No Trace information in it, what a different situation we'd be in."

Every two years, the center sends out a Biennial Land Manager Survey, and approximately a quarter of this year's respondents indicated social media was leading to additional impact and an increase in visitation to their public lands. (Lawhon says the results are more "armchair science" than publishable data.) While he doesn't know if social media is a "fanciful trend," he does think "we may see less egregious promotion of places than we have in the past."

"I think we are going to see a pull-back on social media promotion of the outdoors because even the casual user is now starting to see the unintended consequences," Lawhon says. "The hardcore users, for example, realized some time ago that, 'Hey, if I put a geotag on this photo, somebody's going to easily find this place."

There is a downside, Lawhon warns, to the wrong type of safeguarding in these conversations. "One of the risks we run is if we make the outdoors too exclusionary, who's going to come to its defense when it's on the chopping block?" he explains. "How do we find that balance point so that we do encourage people to enjoy our public lands, but we also need to figure out how do we promote these with a stewardship message?"

Many outdoors experts feel the same. In an interview last year, former Mojave Desert Land Trust Executive Director Danielle Segura said tourism is "just another wave here like renewable energy or mining," and yet it provides for "a different kind" of opportunity: "The wind farms don’t have a voice."

LIKE WHAT YOU'RE READING? Subscribe to Kristin Scharkey's weekly newsletter

For Schwalbe, that balance between encouraging visitors to love their public lands while also doing it responsibly is something she thinks about daily.

"I can see the next generation – and I'm even counting my generation because I'm a millennial, too – not just as a problem but as a solution," Schwalbe says. "We're the ones who will be advocating. The next generation one day will have to choose: Do we give funding to these lands? Do we protect them? Do we visit properly?"

Schreiner, too, lives in the tension of also being "very empathetic" to first-time hikers, or those who don't consider themselves one. He "strongly encourages" people to get outdoors. Since starting Modern Hiker in 2006, he's received opposition from those who fear the publicity will "ruin" their trails. But Schreiner says if he can get 10 percent of the people who read his site to give back in some way, he's having a "net positive effect." The more people who are interested in the wilderness, the more voices there are to protect it. “If you don’t know about those landscapes, and if you don’t care about them, then you don’t care when they’re threatened or destroyed,” Schreiner explains.

The challenge with social media is that impacts are not only cumulative but also individual, Lawhon says. Everyone's frame of reference for the environment is different, depending on when they first set foot in a location. Earlier in his career, Lawhon says it was easy to become jaded by watching the same negative impacts happen over and over again. "Now I'm older, I'm a parent, you start to say, 'OK, not everybody's coming from this from the same place,' " he says. "You can't be hard on someone just because they don't have three decades of experience in a place or in the outdoors in general."

The key, Lawhon says, is to encourage visitors to pay attention to their surroundings. "Know that this place may have looked just like it did 50 years ago because people practiced good Leave No Trace, and it may look very different in five years because people aren’t practicing Leave No Trace," he says.

"Post a shot of a beautiful place on Instagram, and ... say, 'Here's this place today,' " Lawhon concludes. "Let's all do everything we can to make sure that when I post a picture of this place in 10 years, it looks just the same.'"

5 WAYS TO DECREASE YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

1. Avoid geotagging the location of your posts. “You don’t need to tag the specific trailhead,” says Casey Schreiner, founder and editor-in-chief of the popular website Modern Hiker. “You can tag the park, you can tag the region, you can tag a mountain, and then if someone wants to search for it, they can find it on their own. But in that process of searching, ideally they’ll go to a site like Modern Hiker which gives you some of the background, the information, puts some Leave No Trace ethic in you, and you’ll learn a little bit about what you’re not supposed to do on those trails.”

2. Include best practices in your caption. "If a place is really sensitive or hazardous to get to, it doesn’t hurt to mention that,” explains Rebecca Lowry, founder of Joshua Tree Art Innovation Laboratory. You don’t want to “encourage people to go out to places that they might not be equipped to get to.” Joshua Tree National Park social media specialist Hannah Schwalbe says that when choosing which photos to repost, her team gives "a huge preference" to visitors who "talk about the stewardship issues and protection within the park."

3. When driving, use official pullouts for taking photos. Particularly in the desert, off-roading can disturb and destroy cryptobiotic soil, crushing whole communities of organisms along the way. The same goes for trails, too. Simply walking around a slower hiker can create a social trail. "We encourage people to follow established trails instead of blazing new ones, so we can all protect the integrity of the ecosystem," says Mojave Desert Land Trust Interim Executive Director Rich Weideman.

4. Photograph vegetation as is. Taking a photograph lying in a field of flowers, for example, crushes that entire field of flowers. "The minute you're modifying the behavior of wildlife [or vegetation], you're too close," Lowry says. Further, pay attention to signage – be aware if the area you're photographing is sensitive, protected or day-use only.

5. No selfies with wildlife! "We like to follow a rule of thumb here that if you stretch your hand and arm out in front of you, and you put your thumb up like a hitchhiker, if that can cover the wildlife, that's as far away as you should be," Schwalbe says. "You can get closer to smaller wildlife like the tortoises and then the big horn sheep you have to stay farther away from." When her team posts close-up photos of animals for the park's account, Schwalbe says they always mention the shots are taken with a telephoto lens.

Kristin Scharkey is the editor of DESERT magazine and community content editor at The Desert Sun. Reach her at kristin.scharkey@desertsun.com or on Twitter @kscharkey.