Nathaniel Scrimshaw
Founder, White Mountains Field School (New Hampshire, USA)
Chair, Board of Directors, Pan American Trails/World Trails Network – Hub for the Americas
New Hampshire, United States
András J. Molnár
Co-Founder, Pilgrimage Academy, Viatorum Trail Experts
Research Fellow, HUN-REN SZTAKI
Budapest, Hungary
This essay gives a brief insight into the journey of the Trails & Sustainability Task Team of the World Trails Network, which started in 2018 with the aim of conceptualizing trails and sustainability, and eventually lead to the team envisioning and developing a digital library of trail knowledge.
While walking the Camino de Santiago, we identified a question that would shape our discussions at the 2018 World Trails Conference: Is our focus on sustainable trails limited to designing and maintaining a resilient trail tread—capable of withstanding increased use and a changing climate—or does it extend to broader issues of environmental, social, and economic sustainability? After some deliberation, we chose the latter, which expanded our scope into a more intricate conceptual space.
As a framework for exploring trails and sustainability, we adopted the three pillars of sustainability outlined in the 1987 UN World Commission on Environment and Development report, The Brundtland Report: environment, economy, and society. This aligns with the widely accepted definition of sustainability: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” We then layered the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) onto these pillars to explore how trails fit into the broader sustainability agenda.
A web-based survey among members and contacts of the World Trails Network (WTN) provided key insights. Participants, ranging from trail professionals to enthusiasts worldwide, offered varied interpretations of what makes a trail sustainable. Responses spanned environmental concerns, such as drainage and erosion control, to more human-centered aspects, like whether a trail is cherished by local communities. These diverse perspectives further enriched our approach to sustainability and trails.
The core tasks we have focused on in the intervening years all trace back to our organizing sessions at the 2018 WTN conference in Santiago de Compostela. One project emerged as the unifying thread: the creation of a “sustainable trails toolbox.” Initially, we envisioned this as an online resource hosted on a dedicated website. Users would answer a series of project-specific questions, and then receive tailored resources and links relevant to their needs.
To develop this toolbox, we drew from the three pillars of sustainability, our brainstorming sessions, and the survey results. This process led us to outline an algorithm that took shape as a word-net diagram, mapping possible pathways and relationships across categories. However, as more concepts and terms were added, the diagram became increasingly complex.
While this expanding conceptual network helped refine our thinking, it quickly became overwhelming. We realized that without well-organized content, an interactive website would hold little practical value. As a result, the toolbox working group shifted its focus toward organizing and curating content.
While other members of the Trails & Sustainability Task Team gathered relevant literature, the toolbox working group’s challenge was to find a practical, accessible way to organize the materials—one that could categorize and display the complex relationships identified in our word-net diagram. A breakthrough came when we discovered that multidimensional arrays could help structure the toolbox.
To illustrate, imagine building a conceptual matrix with multiple dimensions. Each of the three sustainability pillars can be viewed at varying scales. At the most granular level, we might assess an individual trail’s environmental impact—soil compaction, erosion, vegetation loss, and wildlife disruption. At this same scale, we could also consider the trail’s economic effect on nearby towns and villages and its cultural significance within small hiking communities. Scaling up to a landscape level, individual trails become part of broader networks. Our environmental lens now focuses on the larger landscape, with its mosaic of habitats and ecological corridors. Economically, we begin to see impacts distributed across multiple communities along a trail route or regional network, while organizational coalitions and conferences emerge. As we zoom out to national, multinational, and global scales, the focus shifts further across all three pillars. Adding another axis—urban to wild—creates a three-dimensional array where projects can be situated within human-influenced geographies.
We can continue to add more dimensions. For example, the environmental dimension could be organized using the Holdridge Life Zone system, which is itself a three-dimensional array. Though it is difficult to visualize beyond three dimensions, the structure is relatively straightforward in mathematical terms and can be handled easily in coding.
We have successfully organized keywords into a category tree based on this sustainability matrix. These keywords, along with their hierarchical and cross-hierarchical relationships, can be coded into MediaWiki, providing a structured foundation for the toolbox.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, the toolbox subgroup made substantial progress in building this Trails and Sustainability Toolbox in MediaWiki. Our current focus is refining the structure and adding content. A crucial next step is identifying an editorial group to curate the toolbox and invite broader community contributions. This resource will serve as a global repository of trail-related materials across various topics, guided by a structured framework to categorize existing literature.
In conclusion, we offer a word of caution. Any endeavor attempting to categorize such vast and varied material risks overemphasizing one perspective at the expense of others. As Alfred Korzybski wisely noted, “The map is not the territory.”