Civic Recreation: Outdoor Recreationists as Advocates, Stewards, and Managers of Natural Resources

Recently, groups representing the human-powered outdoor recreation community are playing an important role in natural resource management and conservation. Such civic recreation—recreation-based stewardship and advocacy aimed at preserving, creating, and restoring recreational resources—offers promise in an era of limited capacity on the part of land managers and efforts to promote innovative, participatory, and collaborative civic environmentalism. Despite this growing trend, little research has looked at these civic recreation organizations or their role in natural resource management. Drawing from a mixed-method research design combining an exploratory case study of local civic recreation organizations with survey research, this article aims to describe civic recreation in practice and explores how it fits into natural resource management of the twenty-first century. Specifically, the goal is to understand why, how, and to what end these organizations emerge and function. The findings reveal that civic recreation organizations often emerge as grassroots initiatives to either address a threat to access or implement the vision of an innovative leader who seeks to create a recreational resource. These organizations primarily focus on direct stewardship, collaboration with land managers, and innovative private−public partnerships for the purposes of preserving or creating recreational resources. Outcomes and benefits span environmental, community, and management domains, offering promise to an era of collaborative and community-based natural resource management.