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Outdoor educators are adapting practices to respond to the priorities of education for sustainability. New practices are emerging or adopted from elsewhere. In Europe, the American recreational movement of Leave No Trace (LNT) has influenced environmental education programs. LNT has been criticized for encouraging a reduction in environmental impact in wilderness areas while ignoring the more significant impacts of equipment purchase, travel, and modern lifestyles. This paper extends the critiques of LNT, suggesting that it encourages attitudes of a separation from nature. It suggests that the LNT concept is unrealistic and unhelpful in Europe, where most landscapes have experienced the impact of humans for millennia. Inspired by European approaches of human-nature relations, and at a time of need for significant environmental changes, I suggest that educational programs seeking to connect people with nature encourage people to "leave more trace" or, perhaps, to "consider their trace" instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An improved steel sheet pile (SSP) inspection procedure is proposed in this paper, which couples the field inspection condition-index methodology previously developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with reliability assessments to quantify the life-cycle costs and environmental impacts associated with various maintenance and repair (M&R) scenarios. Maintenance and repair strategies over the analysis period (from present to the end of the structure's lifetime) are determined through reliability assessment for structures with relatively low condition indices. The level of maintenance activity is then to be determined by the life-cycle cost analysis and environmental life-cycle assessment of M&R alternatives. The optimal M&R alternative is the one with the lowest cost combined with minimal environmental impact. Using these methodologies, the SSP structure owners will gain improved capabilities to monitor present-day conditions of SSP infrastructure and prioritize structures that will require sustainable M&R. Further research is proposed to collect real field-inspection data and create M&R records that can be used to estimate the reliability more accurately. In addition, the methodology developed for this relatively simple type of structure can be extended to more complex and critical structural systems such as gates, valves, and other components making up locks, dams, and other related navigational facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • An integrated approach is developed for environmental sustainability. • Climate variability has significant impacts on local environmental sustainability. • Rio Grande Basin is sustainable under current climate conditions. • Rio Grande Basin will become less sustainable in the late 21st century. Abstract Extreme weather events have been affecting local environmental sustainability. Previous literature in this field evaluates environmental sustainability based mainly on past and current resource consumption and availability, however, knowledge about the status and potential changes of environmental sustainability under future climate extremes is missing. This paper proposes an integrated approach (combining the Ecological Footprint Analysis with econometric regressions) to predict future environmental sustainability under different climate scenarios. Based on the case study of the U.S. Rio Grande Basin, the results show that this region has been sustainable in 1982–2012, although sustainability levels have been declining over time. In addition, projections for the future show that the entire region will most likely move away from sustainability by the end of this century under the high emission scenario (e.g., RCP8.5). These findings are relevant for sustainable resource management and allocation of local environmental resources as well as for decision-making support regarding climate risk adaptation and mitigation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]