Our responsibility
What we ask of everyone who comes out with us
None of this is optional on a Foundation outing, and none of it is complicated. It is briefed at the start of every event and it is the reason land managers keep letting us come back.
Stay on designated routes
Legal, mapped trails only. One shortcut through wet prairie leaves scars that last decades and closes the trail for everyone behind you.
Respect seasonal closures
Water levels, hunts and prescribed burns change what is open week to week. Closures exist to let the land recover. Check before you go.
Follow land management rules
Permits, group size limits, camping rules and hours. The agency's regulations are the terms of access, not a suggestion.
Never create a new trail
No new lines through slough or marsh, no bypasses around a puddle. Cross water at established crossings, slow and steady.
Pack out your trash
Everything that rides in rides out, food scraps included. We leave campsites cleaner than we found them, every time.
Respect wildlife
Distance, quiet, and absolutely no feeding. A fed alligator loses its fear of people, becomes a danger, and usually ends up destroyed as a nuisance.
Mind your fire
Rings or containers only, never during a burn ban, always dead out before you sleep. Florida pine flatwoods carry fire fast.
Educate other recreationists
If you see someone about to do damage they do not know is damage, say something kindly. Most people want to get it right.
Support land managers
Report damage, share trail condition information, and show up when an agency asks for volunteer hands.
The principle
Leave it better than you found it.
Pick up litter that is not yours. Fill in a rut somebody else cut. Report damage when reporting it will actually help. The standard is not "we did no harm", it is "the place is measurably better because we were there".
Stewardship projects
The record, kept in public
Every completed stewardship project gets documented the same way. This is the evidence a land manager, a sponsor or a grant reviewer can actually check, and it is the reason we bother counting.
What every project record contains
TemplateLocation and managing agency. Date. Number of volunteers. Total volunteer hours. Partner organizations involved. Waste removed by weight or volume. Photographs, including before and after from the same position. A plain description of the environmental result, written without exaggeration.
First project records are pending. The Foundation is new, and we would rather publish an empty section honestly than fill it with the community's older trips relabelled as conservation work. The first documented stewardship projects of the Foundation era will be posted here as they are completed, with photographs and figures attached. If you manage public land in South Florida and want volunteer hands, tell us what you need.
The honest version
Does vehicle based recreation belong in a conservation mission?
Unmanaged off road driving damages habitat. That is true, it is well documented, and pretending otherwise would make everything else on this page worth less.
What we argue is narrower. The people already driving these trails are going to keep driving them. Whether that traffic stays on legal routes, respects closures and packs out its trash is decided almost entirely by what the group they learned from considered normal.
So we teach. Educated recreation is the practical alternative to the damage done by the uneducated kind, and a community that polices its own standards protects more ground than a sign at a trailhead ever has.
Bring gloves. We will bring everything else.
Cleanups and stewardship days are the easiest way into the Foundation, and no experience of any kind is required.