The Obama administration released a progress report earlier this month on the America’s Great Outdoors initiative, a program intended to encourage outdoor recreation and better manage the country’s wilderness areas.
The 2011 Progress Report outlines how federal agencies are working together to manage wilderness and efforts to improve access to outdoor areas and encourage people to recreated outside.
One interesting factoid from the report is that 280 million people visit National Parks each year, generating $12 billion in visitor spending and supporting nearly 250,000 jobs. The outdoor industry supports more than 6 million jobs, and only 3 percent of those jobs where shed from 2007 to 2010 — a pretty good track record for a recession.
