Getting Better at Counting What Counts

My last blog was about a number I found pretty exciting: 7,853,992 recreation visits to Alaska's federal public lands and waters in 2024. It's the clearest combined picture we've had of recreation use across Alaska's federal lands, although it still leaves out State Parks, Tribal lands, municipal recreation areas and plenty of other places Alaskans get outside.

Alaska State Parks has been pretty relentless about trying to fill in another part of that picture. Counting park users here is ridiculously difficult, so they've been experimenting with mobility heat maps and anonymous cell-phone GPS data to better understand where people actually go. Better information helps make better decisions about maintenance, staffing, infrastructure and where limited dollars should go.

We can also put a much better number on the economic value of outdoor recreation than we could even a decade ago. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis now measures it as its own economic sector. In 2024, outdoor recreation contributed nearly $697 billion to the U.S. economy and nearly $3.8 billion in Alaska — 5.3 percent of our state GDP. Being able to put a number on it has helped outdoor recreation earn a place in economic development and public investment conversations where it used to be surprisingly easy to overlook.

A recent essay by Len Necefer about Bears Ears got me thinking about the limits of those kinds of numbers. Len was writing about money, power and accountability in the conservation movement, but I kept coming back to a somewhat different question: What do institutions choose to measure when deciding whether their work succeeded? We measure what matters, as the saying goes, but I suspect the reverse is also true. What we choose to measure starts to define what matters.

We wrestled with that question in the final session of our Regenerative Outdoor Visioning Project. We asked people to imagine Alaska in 2075 and tell us what would convince them that we'd actually built a thriving regenerative outdoor economy. Instead of a dashboard, they described healthy salmon and wildlife, strong local and Indigenous economies, maintained parks and trails, cultural knowledge being carried forward, young people connected to land and water, and communities able to shape what kind of growth works for them. The conversation landed somewhere useful: measure the economy, but also measure what the economy leaves behind.

There are examples to borrow from right next door, so to speak. The Yukon measures economic benefits and employment alongside resident sentiment, cultural sustainability, climate action and the natural environment. Parks Canada counts visitation but also measures ecological integrity and whether conditions are improving, stable or declining. I like the simple question embedded in that approach: How is the place itself doing?

So along with miles of trail built, perhaps we ask what was preserved, restored or left intact. Along with total economic impact, how much value stayed and circulated in the community? Are local people building livelihoods? Are lands and waters healthier? Are cultural practices and traditional access being carried forward? Are we leaving future generations more possibilities or fewer?

Not all of those answers need to become numbers, and I'm definitely not suggesting the invention of some kind of giant reporting system that takes more time to administer than the work itself. Some things can be counted. Others may require us to ask better questions and actually pay attention to the answers.

Outdoor recreation industry advocates fought hard to get the outdoor economy counted. Is it time to get better at counting what the outdoor economy actually produces? If our goal is better, not simply bigger, shouldn't our measures of success need to tell us whether people's lives, communities and the places themselves are better too?