Scouting and Venturing are all about personal responsibility, leadership, and making good choices. No place is this more important than in the outdoors. Scouting and Venturing have a long, proud tradition of conservation service to the Nation. How do we preserve that tradition? By heeding the challenge in the Outdoor Code:

As an American, I will do my best to -
Be clean in my outdoor manners.
Be careful with fire.
Be considerate in the outdoors.
Be conservation minded

In addition to the powerful guide set by the Outdoor Code, Scouting and Venturing have adopted the Principles of Leave No Trace to build upon the ethic in the Outdoor Code and to provide more specific guidelines and skills when acting in the outdoors. Through the Outdoor Code and the Principles of Leave No Trace, we can take responsibility for our own impacts, provide leadership to those around us to reduce their impacts by making good choices, and together help preserve and conserve our rich environmental heritage.

            To learn more about the Principles of Leave No Trace, click here.

Scouts and Venturers who embrace the Outdoor Code and the Principles of Leave No Trace often find that they wish to give back and help protect the environment that has given them so much.  Some may find that they are “wild with love for the green outdoors—the trees, the tree-top singers, the wood-herbs and the nightly things that left their tracks in the mud” in the words of Ernest Thompson Seton, the first Chief Scout.  These Scouts and Venturers have begun to feel what Aldo Leopold called “the Land Ethic.”  The Land Ethic extends our concern beyond our fellow Scouts and Venturers, our families and friends, and even humanity itself to the entire environmental community of which we are a part—the deserts, forests, fish, wildlife, plants, rocks, oceans and web of life encompassing them—what Aldo Leopold called “The Land.”

            To learn more about he Land Ethic, click here.