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The Green Life From 2015 onward, new posts will appear only here: http://www.sierraclub.org/greenlife Recent Posts Hiking Guru Shares Perfect Paths Defending The F-Word Not Your Grandparents’ Road Trip: 5 Green Reasons to Visit National Parks How Can I Save Fuel on Summer Vacation Trips? 5 Blogs about Sierra Club History Complete Archive Categories Animals Art Ask Mr. Green Books Business and Money Current Events Education Entertainment Events Fashion Film Food and Drink Gardening Health Home and Design Media No Goods Outdoors Pop Corner Q&A Recycling Religion Shopping Social Life Sports Technology Tips Transportation Travel Urban Planning Work Read the latest issue of Sierra We love Adventure Journal Compass Daily Green Dot Earth (NYT) Ecocentro Earth911 Ecorazzi ENN Green Inc. (NYT) Grist Hey Mr. Green Huffington Post Green Inhabitat Sierra Club Insider Lay of the Land Los Angeles Times Environment Military Families Outdoors National Geographic NPR Environment Plastiki Scientific American TreeHugger Wired Planet Earth Yahoo! Environment News May 30, 2014 Hiking Guru Shares Perfect Paths Robert Manning is a hiking guru. At the University of Vermont, he researches and teaches park managment , which in practice means that he does a lot of hiking. With his wife, Martha, he cowrote the book Walking Distance (Oregon State University Press), which details 30 walks for any hiker's bucket list. Sierra spoke with Manning about his book, his experience with park management, and the best trail in the world . The subtitle of your book is Extraordinary Hikes for Ordinary People. Who's "ordinary"? I mean, what's the face of the American hiker today? I think it’s quite a cross-section, but the "ordinary people" part of the book is something that Martha and I feel strongly about. That’s the main purpose of the book, really: to get people walking more. Compared with people in a lot of the countries we’ve visited, not a lot of Americans are out there walking. With this book, we’re trying to do something about that, to get people to explore and create and ultimately protect these places . You have a strong connection to the John Muir Trail in particular, which you call one of your top 10 walks in the world. I have a long and deep relationship with the John Muir Trail. When I graduated from college, it was 1968, and the Vietnam War was raging, and so I joined the Coast Guard. I enjoyed living in the city, but even more I enjoyed getting out to Yosemite. It really convinced me that I wanted something to do with the National Parks . That’s also how I became aware of John Muir and the Sierra Club. I always get a kick out of hiking above the tree line, of visiting places that I’d been seeing in Sierra Club calendars for years, thinking, "I really want to go there." Hiking over John Muir Pass and then on to Gifford Pinchot Pass -- the legacy of American conservation is just written into the landscape. To me, there’s no mountain range that’s more beautiful and friendly and engaging than the Sierras. That, combined with the Muir legacy, makes the trail my favorite hike. You’re an expert in park management. What’s your take on how the John Muir Trail is managed? It has been around for a long time, so it’s well marked and well managed. One area where it excels is the permit system. What makes a good permit system? The only innovation I’m aware of is the Grand Canyon's rafting permit system, which switched to a weighted lottery. I should also mention that you profile a hike along the Colorado River in your book. The rafting waitlist was 20 years [ laughs ], and that can’t work. The John Muir Trail innovation is the simplicty of a single permit that cuts through two national parks and two U.S. Forest Service areas. It would be daunting if one had to get a permit from those four entities and then had to coordinate the dates. At Yosemite in general, they allocate things in a way that's easy for the user, even when it's not easy for them. So nationally, we’ve got some good parks. What about internationally? In Walking Distance , you list a number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, such as El Camino de Santiago, in northern Spain and parts of France. UNESCO sites are very sucessfully managed. It’s the Parks Service ramped up on a global scale. For a country to get the status, they have to have a plan in place to manage it. And they take that very seriously. El Camino de Santiago is a Catholic pilgrimage, and yet there’s a mix of people that there. The mix, the diversity of people, on the Camino is probably the most on any trail that I’ve walked. We met people from all over the world. Even more impressive, we came across people of all age groups. The religious significance is obviously important, but I’d say that a large portion of the people we encountered were not walking for religious reasons. In your book, you focus on provencial hikes like the Camino and wilderness hikes like the Muir Trail. What about urban hiking? Martha and I have really begun to embrace urban walks. One that we did this summer is what’s called the River Thames Walk in England. It starts at the source in the Gloucestershire and goes right through London -- which takes three days -- and then on to the sea. Martha and I would like to include urban and suburban walks in a future book. We love, for example, that portion of the California Coastal Trail from Muir Beach south to Cliff House. We sort of christened it "the Golden Gate Way." - -interview by Cedar Attanasio / all photos courtesy of Robert Manning You can learn more about Robert and Martha Manning, and 30 of their favorite hikes -- including Vermont's Long Trail , British Columbia's West Coast Trail , and Florida's Ocala Trail -- on their website . READ MORE: 6 Most Dangerous Hiking Trails Pro Hiking Tips: Excercises Breathtaking Canyons Posted at 05:15 PM in Outdoors , Q&A | Permalink | Comments Tags: easy hikes, grand canyon, hiking, john muir, john muir trail, national parks, robert manning, university of vermont, vermont May 28, 2014 Defending The F-Word The oil and gas industry dislikes the noun fracking , shorthand for hydraulic fracturing . It prefers frac , a literal reduction of fracture , but at this point it's probably out of luc. Last week, Merriam-Webster announced that it was including fracking in its 2014 Collegiate Dictionary (along with spoiler alert , hashtag , selfie , and turducken , among others). Frac hasn’t caught on outside the industry –- it seems vaguely French for starters -- and its verb form, fracing , would be totally confusing. (Some industry sources employ the even more tortured frac’ing .) Blame it on those impish enviros, always eager to mock their opponents in as few words as possible on 36-by-48-inch protest signs. “No Fracking Way,” “Frack Off,” “Don’t Frack Our Future,” and “Stop Fracking Mother Earth” are just a few of the ways shale-oil opponents have happily turned the emotionally neutral term “hydraulic fracturing” into a dirty word. It’s clever framing – put “fracking” on the list with “death tax” and “job creator” –- but environmentalists didn’t need to hire a political wordslinger to concoct a winningly charged term. Merriam-Webster traces industry use of the term “fracking” back to 1953. Image by iStock/Joe_Potato. Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra . He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term. For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.” Read More The Clean Dozen Surcharge for Smoggers China Chips Away at its Pollution Problem Posted at 02:59 PM in Books , Current Events | Permalink | Comments Not Your Grandparents’ Road Trip: 5 Green Reasons to Visit National Parks Wailing children, crotchety parents, sand and sunscreen in uncomfortable places… you get the idea. If this sounds familiar, chances are you’ve been on what feels like an eons-long summer trip with your family. But the National Park Service ’s new, sustainab...