Could This Be the Summer of the Ecotourist?

Summer will be but a blur of funny home videos and mustard-stained T-shirts. Camping gear will be collecting dust in the garage. The kids will be back in school.

And, on Sept. 21, thousands of volunteers will descend on public parks and beaches to pick up summer’s litter in the “California Gold’n Cleanup.”

But, there may be less debris than in seasons past, say keepers of the parks, who point to a new environmental awareness or “ecotourism.”

“People are much more environmentally conscious, there’s no question about it,” says George Berklacy, chief of public affairs for the National Park Service, which oversees the 50 national parks.

Recently, six of those parks--including Yosemite--have put recycling programs in place, with major corporate funding and, Berklacy says, they are “working very well.”

Because more people are visiting the national parks--257 million last year, double the 1970 count--more trash is being generated. Cleaning up litter in recent years has been a $15-million annual headache for the National Park Service, which has a $1-billion annual budget.

But the service hopes that an intensive educational program will pay off this year.

A new public opinion poll conducted for the nonprofit National Park Foundation to mark the 75th anniversary of the National Park Service includes a happy surprise:

Overwhelmingly, respondents placed preservation of America’s natural beauty and wildlife above recreation and pleasure in assessing the importance of national parks.

Citing this “new awareness,” Berklacy, a 32-year veteran of the service and self-described “tree hugger,” says, “I don’t think that would have been said 20 years ago.”

In California, “there is a push to get people to recycle,” says John Arnold of the state Department of Parks and Recreation. So far, there are recycling centers in only 10 of the 285 state parks but, Arnold says, the concept “is growing.”

The Sept. 21 California cleanup will be a cooperative effort spearheaded by the Coastal Commission, the Department of Parks and Recreation, Keep California Beautiful and the nonprofit California State Parks Foundation.

Volunteers will collect the trash of summer’s pleasure-seekers, including about 80 million visitors to the state parks.

They will find the usual: single sneakers, beer bottles (full and empty), windshield wipers, pacifiers and bed springs.

And if this year’s cleanup--the second annual effort--is like last year’s, they may find a cat’s scratching post, a set of fake fingernails, a Volkswagen engine block, an orthodontic retainer or two, and a hand from an E.T. doll.

They will pick up plenty of the plastic six-pack rings (which ensnare birds and mammals) and follow a trail of paper, plastics and flip-top cans.

Keep California Beautiful, which focuses on litter prevention recycling and waste management, is targeting conscious and unconscious litterers, director Theresa Creech says. “There’s a lot of unconscious littering. People put their windows down and things blow out of the car.”

Creech and others aren’t interested in joining the “paper versus plastic” debate:

“If it’s out there on a hiking trail and doesn’t belong there, then it isn’t good, no matter what it’s made out of,” she says.

Christyne Imhoff of The Wilderness Institute, based in Agoura, says she hikes often in the Santa Monica Mountains and sees less littering as a hopeful sign. At the beaches, however, Imhoff says she has been “completely appalled” at the amount of debris. “People seem to be a lot more lax on the beach.”

The Sierra Club has been organizing nature trips since 1901 and, says Charles Hardy, a staffer at San Francisco headquarters, was among the first to recognize the impact of human presence in wilderness areas. He says, “Nobody here would go camping taking disposables.”

The club’s “wilderness manners” include this credo: “Take Only Pictures and Leave Only Footprints.” Central to Sierra Club philosophy, Hardy adds, is the goal of reducing levels of solid waste, rather than only recycling.

The club’s golden rules for campers include: Do as little rearranging of the natural landscape as possible, never cut boughs or drive nails into trees, drown campfires until ashes are cold to the touch (for cooking, use a stove), field-strip cigarettes and carry out the filters, camp well back from lake shores and streams. When breaking camp, erase all evidence that you were there.

Sometimes, the problem is that park visitors take out more than they brought in. “Some of our finest people sort of get sticky fingers,” observes the National Park Service’s Berklacy. Souvenir hunters may, for example, chip off just a bit of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

Overcrowding is also taxing park facilities. It isn’t that there aren’t enough wide open spaces, Berklacy explains, it’s just that everyone seems to want to visit the same parks during the same peak summer months--75% come between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

“Yosemite comes to mind,” he says. Although the park has 800,000 acres, its 4 million annual visitors come mostly in summer and “90% of them congregate in Yosemite Valley, which is 7,500 acres.”

Yellowstone is also heavily visited but, Berklacy points out, 75 miles away is Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, “a wonderful place.” Other relatively undiscovered attractions include the Channel Islands.

The Washington-based National Parks and Conservation Assn. is crusading to get federal funding for what it calls a $2-billion backlog of crucial repairs to the national parks, which expect record attendance this year.

Spokesman Nick Clark says, “There is no money for preservation. . . . As glorious and as lovely as these places look right now, they are literally falling apart. We’re trying to raise everybody’s consciousness.”

Though he does not yet perceive “this great rush to ecological consciousness on the part of tourists,” he does see some increased awareness. “As our overall consciousness greens, so will that happen in the parks. We think that ecotourism, in that sense, is something that is growing,” he says.

Environmentally aware park concessionaires can play a key role, Clark believes, by doing such things as avoiding pesticides for natural pest control, insisting on water recycling and installing motion sensors that automatically shut off lights--”things that give people an idea of living with the environment, as opposed to against it.”

As for that big Sept. 21 cleanup, those wishing to volunteer may call (800) 253-2622. That’s (800) CLEAN CA.