REI and the California-based organization Outdoor Afro Inc. have collaborated on a new line of technical apparel designed to address gaps in the outdoor market and make gear more inclusive for all customers, both groups announced this week. The co-branded line has been in the works for two years.

“Nature has been, and will continue to be, a place where Black people seek connection and respite,” said , founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro Inc., a for-profit group that collaborates with companies on design, marketing, and sales efforts. The organization is distinct from the nonprofit Outdoor Afro, also founded by Mapp, which oversees a national network of volunteers in 60 cities to promote outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.

“Black people have always spent time outside across a variety of activities, but the community has always felt a gap in finding gear that fits, functions well, feels good, and represents their personal style,” Mapp said. “REI was the right partner to listen deeply and help us create a collection that would start to meet those needs.”

In an posted to its website yesterday, REI wrote that building the line meant “considering the range of Black body shapes that the clothes will fit and respecting the culture’s interpretations of nature. It [meant] exploring a broader range of fit modeling, bold, celebratory colors, and materials that work with textured hairstyles.” The initial 22-piece collection includes leggings, fleeces, shells, and boots designed with input from Mapp and others at Outdoor Afro Inc. about color, style, and function.

“This collaboration with Outdoor Afro Inc. was not optional for us,” said Maureen Estep, REI deputy vice president of strategic brand partnerships. “This was not a question of ‘Should we?’ It was ‘How soon can we?’ It was a commitment to lean into a partnership through an inclusive approach, and it changed us. We turned on a truly inclusive design process. It defined how we worked and who we brought into the work.”

The collection uses technical lightweight and stretch materials that promote breathability and are easy to care for. REI wrote on its website that “the line is a mashup of iconic ’80s and ’90s silhouettes coupled with modern details inspired by the Black community: a play on throwback jackets, a riff on parachute pants, and items printed with a Black folks would gather for rest and fellowship.”

Mapp emphasized that, though the collection was designed with the Black community in mind, “it also solves universal needs. We’re creating a better outdoor product for everyone.”

To support the collection launch, Outdoor Afro Inc. and REI are debuting a new marketing campaign, .

“What I realized is that everyone wanted access to the Black market from a diversity, equity, and inclusion point of view,” Mapp said in summing up the effort, “but no one was truly creating accessible and stylish options that actually accommodated our body shapes. This fashion line is us,” she added. “We are also nature.”

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When I hear about outdoor diversity campaigns, my knee-jerk, gut reaction is fear.

The issue isn’t the newcomers. As someone who makes her living writing about the outdoors and sharing it with new audiences, I want to see our numbers grow.

The issue is that I have an environmental science degree. I’ve spent seasons doing biological field research. I’ve edited a Leave No Trace column for Backpacker, a magazine that sells solitude on every other cover. I’ve been trained to value staying on trail, keeping group sizes small and respectful (as per Leave No Trace’s recommendation), and limiting impact.

When I read about diversity in the outdoors, I seem to hear that new groups are getting outside, but often in different ways—big group hikes, Quinceañera celebrations, or family reunions, for example.

On their own, I love those things. But over 300 million people visit national parks each year—double the number from 60 years ago, when most infrastructure was last updated.

Environmentalism Gone Wrong

Many environmentalists share my fears of rising impact. But a growing number of reports indicate that, if left unchecked, that personal nervousness can manifest as something far nastier: xenophobia and racism, masked by a self-proclaimed dedication to Leave No Trace ethics.

In reporting this story, I heard plenty of examples of so-called “LNT policing”: A Latino family told to stop talking at a campground. A family of Luiseño Indians shamed by passersby for their annual, traditional harvest of poppies during the California superbloom. A group of black hikers chewed out by a white woman, who claimed the dried bamboo and palm fronds the group had brought for their children to play with might be invasive species. And, of course, plenty of white hikers shaming other white folks for stepping off-trail.

“People feel unjustly entitled,” said Nadia Mercado, an Osprey hiking athlete and outdoor diversity advocate of Dominican descent, of many longtime outdoorists. “They forget the land is public.” That mix of entitlement and fear for the environment can leave veteran hikers extra-sensitive to new groups of people on trails, especially those using the outdoors in ways white hikers might be unaccustomed to.

The more I learned about these instances and ingrained biases, the more I started to ask myself an uncomfortable question: Am I afraid to share the places that I love?

But What About the Environment?

“There’s a perception, particularly in the white hiker community, that there’s a specific way to behave on-trail,” said Jackie Ostfield, director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors For All program. That perception traces back to the fanatical reverence for self-reliance and solitude espoused by 19th-century conservation icons like John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. “Going into wilderness for solitude is fine,” said Ostfield. “But it’s also fine to have a community experience.”

Those transcendentalist values appear in the scientific community as well. A common tenant of Western ecological theory is that, in order to be protected, conservation lands must be restored to their pre-settled state. (That’s one reason indigenous communities were forcibly removed from early national parks, like Yosemite.) But in many cases, turning the land into a museum isn’t practical, or even necessary.

“Native people have been managing land sustainably for a long time,” said Lydia Jennings, a PhD candidate in soil microbiology with a concentration in American Indian policy. She argues that, for centuries, scattered bands of human beings have been part of a place’s native fauna.

Leave No Trace executive director Dana Watts agrees. She says LNT derives its guidelines from scientific research and input from land management agencies. She acknowledges that the organization could do more to loop in indigenous land stewards as well as people of color, and emphasizes that LNT guidelines are just guidelines. “There’s nuance to everything,” she said. That includes geotagging, plant harvesting, group size, and off-trail hiking.

The takeaway: you can love the outdoors and want to enjoy it with groups of people.

The Real Meaning of LNT

It’s easy to point fingers at the hikers around us, but there’s another, bigger culprit for the degradation of public land: lack of government funding.

The only way to change that is to vote for it, and people only vote for the things they love, says Outdoor Afro Founder Rue Mapp. “We have to put our hands on the land,” she explained. “That’s what instills an environmental or conservation ethic.”

Outdoor Afro is a good example. What started as a recreational hiking group has since become a nationwide network of outdoor leaders who have begun leveraging their numbers to enact political change. In 2019, Outdoor Afro dispatched 20 of its leaders to lobby with local congressional representatives, which helped bring about the reauthorizing of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Outdoor Afro demonstrates that new groups of hikers aren’t the problem: They’re a force for change. American public lands are under threat, but I’m starting to realize that the solution, ironically, isn’t to shut the gates. It’s to open them a little wider.

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