Stephanie Pearson, contributing editor to Outside Magazine, author of the recent National Geographic book 100 Great American Parks, and ATCF member.

For Stephanie Pearson, the outdoors has always been a primary force, the reason she pursued a job as a wilderness canoe guide during her college years and at Outside magazine out of graduate school in 1995. During her junior year of college, she studied in Ecuador and Colombia, which cemented her love for and intrigue with Latin America. She started working at Outside and it further opened the world. The first ATTA event I attended was in Chiapas, Mexico, in 2011. “It was the first time I’d ever met so many like-minded travelers and it was an absolute blast.” She joined the ATCF when it launched in 2016.

Tell us about a story you’ve written that has meant a lot to you.

Stephanie in Colombia in 2012. Photo by Joao Canziani.

I was an exchange student in the early ‘90s in Colombia when the semester was cut short because of drug violence. Many years after, around 2011, the FARC announced a moratorium on kidnapping foreigners in order to start the peace process with the government. Through my ATTA friend Gregg Bleakney, who had recently moved to Bogota, I met tour operator and pilot Hernan Acevedo. He arranged to take the photographer Joao Canziani and me to formerly FARC-controlled regions. It was a logistically challenging, risky trip and we flew all over the place in a borrowed Cessna plane. But to see those stunning places—Pacific coastlines, llanos, mountain regions—in their near-natural states left an enormous impression on me and I am forever grateful to Gregg and Hernan. The resulting story, “Love in the Time of Coca," ran in Outside magazine.

Given everything, how does travel need to change and what are you doing personally and professionally?

I try to live by the general philosophy that I need to take personal responsibility for my choices. Translating that to travel, I am constantly weighing the risk versus reward ratio for my travel. Is it necessary that I go? Are there more sustainable options for getting there? When I do get there, what will I be doing and where will I be staying, and how does that affect the community? If it’s a work trip, will the resulting story have the opportunity to inform or change opinion? I’ve always been a writer who likes to stay put for a few weeks in a place to try to better understand it, so the no-brainer solution for me is to travel less (which I have generally been doing for the past five years), stay in places longer, and appreciate the experience more when I do go.

You’ve been a supporter of the ATCF since almost the beginning. Why?

The ATCF is a fundamental pillar of the ATTA. It’s at the core of the mission of the organization. We have to understand and support the people who live in the regions we’re traveling to, first to find out if they even want us there, and second to empower them to make their own decisions about how they can better live and intersect with visitors. I really appreciate the soul searching and awareness both the ATTA and ATCF are doing around travel and conservation. We are all hard-wired to wander, but we have to do it more thoughtfully.

Tell us about a trip or place that changed you or your thinking.

I recently wrote about this in Outside, but my last trip to Sedona, Arizona, was a wake-up call. My parents have traveled there to hike every winter since the 1990s. It’s a deeply spiritual place for me, but it’s also becoming increasingly overrun and overcrowded and I have begun to ask myself if I should be there or anywhere that cannot sustain the overwhelming amount of visitors it receives.

Check out Stephanie Pearson’s work at Outside and on her site.

Conservation Conversation With Journalist Stephanie Pearson

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