Leave No Trace Pod ensures that we leave the land as beautiful as it was when we arrived. We encourage everyone to pack out what they bring on to the site.
Leave No Trace (LNT) is a set of ethics promoting conservation in the outdoors, working to prevent and minimize people’s impacts on nature. At Intention we’d like our community to espouse LNT at the local (event) and broader global (planetary) levels during their time at our gatherings and beyond. We want participants to think about, encourage, and support LNT actions as active collaborators in a democratic, participatory, and progressive way of caring for nature.
Principles of LNT that apply to our community:
1. Plan Ahead and Be Prepared: think about your needs and how those may impact the environment and others (people and species). For example, do you need to drive or can you carpool, take transit, or bike. Can you share items like a tent, stove, meals, and water.
2. Minimize, Collect, and Dispose of Waste Properly: please reduce or pre-manage the waste from items you bring to Intention before coming (e.g., minimize consumption, purchase low waste items, pre-dispose of waste packaging at home). We ask participants to not litter and to pick up any waste they see at the event, even if it’s not theirs. We’ll have a limited number of bins onsite for items such as compost and some recyclables (e.g., hard plastics, metal containers) to help manage our waste in a coordinated manner. There won’t be any garbage bins except for a few in the washrooms. Smokers should pack out their butts.
3. Use Designated Areas: Summer Intention is set in nature but is also designed to minimize further impacts to the area from groups like ours. Please avoid impacting undisturbed habitat and ask an organizer if you’re uncertain about using an area. We ask people to use designated areas and durable surfaces for walking, camping, workshops, dancing, fires, sitting, etc. Camping can be in the field, the orchard, in the forest around the first driveway, and beyond the north end. *Please no camping in Faery Meadow (temple area in front of caretaker’s cabin) or in garden area.
4. Leave What you Find: we ask participants to avoid and minimize actions that alter the area such as cutting branches, hammering nails into trees, permanently clearing an area of rocks or wood, digging holes, collecting wood, picking plants, or removing natural objects. Please remove any ropes and tarps from trees that you use.
5. Be Aware of and Respect the Area’s Wildlife and Ecology: we’ll be staying in an area that’s home to other species such as plants, birds, squirrels, and bears. There’s also a creek on site with its associated species (e.g., fish, invertebrates). We ask that participants take precautions to avoid disturbing species and habitats by not placing your tent, belongings, and yourself in areas occupied by plants or sensitive habitats (e.g., wet areas, creek banks), putting your smelly items in designated areas (i.e., not your tent), not leaving food unattended, and not disturbing animals (e.g., feeding) or environments (e.g., using natural soaps and not bathing or swimming directly in the creek).
Overall, we ask that you:
- Keep the environment healthy and respect its plants and animals.
- Use designated areas.
- Minimize, sort, remove, and dispose of your own waste appropriately, encouraging LNT and Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle action at the personal level.
- Fix or replace any broken furniture or equipment or ask for help.
- Return areas to how you found them (e.g., campsites, field structure, fire circles, picnic benches).
- Clean up any waste you see, especially at the end of the event.
- Help take some of our communal waste home for proper disposal as we’ll have limited space with our existing communal supplies (deco, kitchen, etc.). Help is deeply appreciated.
Our overall goals of LNT are to ensure we leave the land as beautiful and healthy as it was when we arrived, ideally improving it, and extending that ethic and overall care to our planet and community.
Our Pod is open to input, constructive criticism, encouragement, and assistance so please come talk to us or send us an email at LNT[at]intentiongathering[dot]org