The Meaning of Stewardship
The term stewardship has an interesting etymological history. In early usage the term references those who upheld a home, or place, through a life of service. Its linguistic roots tie it to the modern concept of economy and, more specifically, to systems of community resource management. It is a practice committed to ethical value that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources—a definition that falls squarely within SUWA’s mission and that of land management agencies across the West.
As we see it, stewardship is our land ethic in action, a way of honoring the relationship between people and the places that sustain them.
The mission of SUWA’s Stewardship Program is to foster this shared ethic and provide opportunities for volunteers to directly preserve and enhance the wild character of public lands in Utah. This is accomplished through hands-on stewardship projects that support and guide federal land managers in their efforts to protect wild landscapes from human impacts and promote long-term resilience.
Incursion & Restoration
Throughout the winter, our Stewardship Program staff (Jeremy, Talitha, and Ellie) are actively planning the 2025 Stewardship season—our program’s 10th. We will conduct fieldwork, review and create new maps, and sit down with our partners at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to propose priority work projects. As soon as all the pieces are in place, we’ll let you know where we are headed, literally, in 2025 (our calendar goes live on February 1st).
Simultaneously, great changes will no doubt take place as the new presidential administration implements a vision that will in many ways prove incompatible with the land ethic our program promotes. Across the country there will be opportunities for resistance. Here in Utah, our program will continue to care for our wildest public lands in partnership with land managers and alongside you, our current and future volunteers.
Taking Account
Since the inception of SUWA’s Stewardship Program, we’ve conducted 1,200+ days of in-field projects and direct meetings with the agencies, submitted 150+ formal project proposals and reports, and led 1,404 volunteers as they dedicated 20,374 volunteer hours over 179 projects. Our program also:
- Remediated ~286 non permitted routes and ~236 miles of incursion into protected lands/proposed wilderness
- Remediated (by hand) 806,669 square feet of wild landscapes
- Naturalized 51,640 square feet of social trails
- Installed 41,850’ of barriers and fencing and 659 wilderness, wilderness study area, or other protective signs
- Reclaimed 681 unauthorized user-created campsites
- Cleaned 10,700 square feet of graffiti
- Removed 10,330 lbs of trash from public lands
- Monitored and Cleaned 102 miles of river corridor
- Removed 72,814 square feet of invasive vegetation
- Planted 4,300 square feet of native vegetation
SUWA Members: Join Us for a “Winter Stew” Gathering to Celebrate our 10-Year Milestone!
We invite our members to join us for Winter Stew, a gathering to celebrate a decade of hands-on stewardship! We look forward to celebrating this milestone with actual winter stew—because would it really be a Stewardship gathering without a group of good people savoring a home cooked meal?
Winter Stew will be held on Thursday, January 30th, 2025 from 6–8 PM in Publik Space at the downtown Publik Coffee in Salt Lake City as we kick off our 10th season of stewardship. For now, save the date and RSVP. Details will follow soon!
Volunteer with Us in 2025!
Here at SUWA, we each rely on one another to accomplish all that we do. The Stewardship Program was born from the need to protect our exceptional policy and legal gains, won over decades of persistence. We are supported daily by our GIS specialists, our administrators, our organizers, and other SUWA colleagues.
We reach out to you with an invitation to join us in this work—first in January to celebrate our season launch, and then in the field throughout the coming year as we continue to put our ethics into practice by protecting the places we love.
Our 2025 volunteer project calendar goes live on February 1st, with early access open to SUWA members at our Winter Stew event on January 30th. If you have any questions between now and then, please do not hesitate to reach out to Stewardship Program Director Jeremy Lynch at jeremy@suwa.org or by calling (435) 259-9151.
Thank you for the work you do,
Jeremy, Talitha, and Ellie
SUWA’s Stewardship Program
