On Earth Day, New Hampshire conservation partners and local officials gathered for a celebratory hike with one of our own true champions of the outdoors: Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. We gathered at Pulpit Rock Conservation Area in Bedford, where recent funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund enabled critical trail improvements and new bridges that improve public access, including for those with mobility challenges, to lovely and historic woods.

We were there to deliver a double dose of thanks to the senator for her long-term leadership in support of LWCF, a program critical to ensuring New Hampshire’s natural character and outdoor recreation economy.

Outdoor lovers in New Hampshire are celebrating a huge victory with permanent reauthorization of this program earlier this year. LWCF funds have helped to protect so many of New Hampshire’s natural and cultural treasures, and we know that Sen. Shaheen’s passionate, vocal support over many years was instrumental to this recent success.

But both we and the senator know that this victory is only the first step toward completing our shared goal.

While there is now a guarantee that America’s most important conservation and recreation program will be around for the long haul, there is still no guarantee it will receive its allocated share of $900 million in oil and gas leasing revenues every year.

LWCF has been around for more than half a century, but in that time more than half its intended funding has been raided and redirected to other, non-conservation purposes. That means $22 billion that should have gone to increasing recreation opportunity and access, protecting our national parks and forests, connecting and completing our national, regional, and local trail networks, providing close-to-home playgrounds and ball fields to support healthy kids and families, expanding sportsmen’s access and wildlife habitat, conserving our most important natural areas, safeguarding our drinking water supplies, and keeping working forests as forests instead of subdivided and developed – all that money went somewhere else.

Fortunately, Sen. Shaheen is again at the forefront of a bipartisan effort to fix this problem.

Building on the recent LWCF reauthorization victory, Shaheen and colleagues on both sides of the aisle are launching a concerted drive for full, permanent and dedicated funding via the recently introduced bill, S. 1081. Passage of this legislation would mean the $900 million that comes in every year to the LWCF account will automatically go out to LWCF projects and grants for conservation and recreation at the national, state and local level.

Until then, the permanent promise of LWCF and all its benefits are still at risk.

With more than $165 million invested in the Granite State, and so much need still unmet, that is a risk we are not willing to take – and neither is Sen. Shaheen.

For her deep understanding of the recreational, economic, environmental, cultural and public health benefits brought to our state by LWCF, and her steadfast, active and vocal support for this program, she has our sincere thanks.

(John Judge is president and CEO of the Appalachian Mountain Club. Jane Difley is president/forester for the Society for the Protection of N.H. Forests. Doug Bechtel is president of N.H. Audubon.)