“A sense of place is both the emotional attachment we experience and emotional bond we create with particular environments based on our own cultural backgrounds and/or personal perspectives” says Running for Public Lands (RPL) board president Vic Thasiah in a recent Q&A reflection on RPL’s Camp and Run event, held in our own Leadville, Colorado in June 2024.
Thasiah elaborates on how cultivating a sense of place is the middle layer of a metaphorical layer cake, which happens to be a delicious tradition in his own family, with the bottom layer being an activity of joy in the outdoors – for him, “running wild” – and with the top layer being pro-environmental action.
No doubt, we at HMI are both inspired by RPL’s mission and honored that they picked Leadville to host this event. Thasiah’s reflection echoes our own theory of change: that through the rich adventures in the outdoors, we deepen our connection to the place we’re in and to the people we share it with. Those connections become the catalyst for becoming the engaged, “thoughtful citizens” who populate our extended HMI community.
“A lot of people come to Leadville to try the hot objective – running the Leadville 100 or climbing Mt. Elbert, but they often don’t create the space to appreciate the richness of the place, the landscape, and its history,” says our own Laura Alonzo-Ochoa, who also serves on RPL’s board of directors. “What I love about running is the connection I feel to the land underneath my feet, and I love how RPL and HMI, in their unique ways, really try to inspire that for others. It starts as simply as learning the names of flowers that grow here, the birds in the area, and the ancestral land you recreate on. From there, almost every time, an individual’s passions and curiosity takes it from there.”
Final food (piece of cake) for thought: how do you approach the trend of outdoor recreation being a vehicle for developing attitudes of stewardship? It’s a topic that falls at the intersection of both RPL and HMI’s work (you can read more about how HMI grapples with it here).
According to Laura, “It really depends on who you ask; in terms of brands, the outdoor industry is a billion-dollar industry. Some are active and earnest in their efforts to support stewardship of lands we all recreate on, but some brands are about their bottom line or performative. This is why it’s important to support nonprofit organizations that are actually ‘boots on the ground’ doing the work. Unless you can verify by the dollar or by the project that brands have their names attached to, it’s important to know you can ‘vote’ every day on where you spend your money. Ultimately, I can support the outdoor industry’s influence on stewardship, but hopefully, the brand’s choices prioritize Indigenous voices/nonprofits/businesses: the original stewards.”