"Kids in the Woods" is a phrase upon the tongue of every huckster intent upon boosting the sagging profitability of that segment of the tourism / recreation industry dependent upon people traveling to, and consuming recreation within, "The Great Outdoors"™. It's an important concept, hijacked by those pushing a particular agenda and now gone bad as a consequence of how it is being abused.

Kids, I might add,  are not the only demographic no longer visiting and enjoying their public lands.

Much has recently been made of the large decrease in the number of hunters and, as a result,  a great deal of energy and resources is being used to lure hunters back to the forest (and to the sporting goods shops, motels, and gas stations they are no longer patronizing).

Pasted below is an article from the Detroit press titled "Hunting fees in the crosshairs. " Here is a quote I thought most revealing:
           

"If you discourage people of my age and we don't go out, who's going to introduce it to the younger generation?" said Seefelt, who will be hunting in the Lewiston area this week. "And if no one introduces it to them, who's going to introduce it to their children?"

Unlike those who are using  "Kids in the Woods" to  promote the "Corporate Takeover of Nature and the Disneyfication of the Wild",  Mr. Seefelt is stating a simple fact.

Land managers and those in the commercial sector who have long promoted "pay-to-play" paradigm create fictions to explain declining participation in public lands recreation. Those fictions are designed to a paradigm shift in how, and at what cost, outdoor recreation will be provided in the future.

"Kids in the Woods" is one such fiction. The article which follows offers a more simple, and straight forward, truth.

Scott 

Last week a reporter contacted me for an article he was writing. Forest Service Chief Gail Kimball had just announced she planned to cut recreation and other programs by $300 million and to transfer that money into fire suppression. The reporter asked for a comment and in addition to what is quoted in the appended article, I explained how this budget transfer was a "twofer."  That line of reasoning didn't get into the article and so I share it here.

Not only is Kimball moving money into a bottomless pit from which private contractors will eventually receive the lion's share: in further staving the recreation programs, Kimball could ensure that local land managers would have no option other that to rely even more heavily upon increased and more wide-spread recreation user-fees, volunteerism, partnership and, of course, more commercialization.

With respect to the Forest Service, Congress is not primarily, or uniquely, responsible for using the Reaganesque "Stave the Beast" mechanism to destroy that agency's recreation program. It is the Forest Service itself, thought a variety of mechanisms, that is gutting its own recreation program.

Top brass within the Forest Service are minimizing the amount of allocated dollars that get to the ground. The more conspicuously the Forest Service does this, the more "inefficient" they are seen to be and the more impetus there becomes for cutting the agency's budget.

Sadly, the current administration values those employees who exhibit special competence in destroying their own agencies and showing to all the world, that government does not work and should, therefor, be privatized.

Scott

Pasted below is an article from Idaho with a twist.

A popular walking area has repeatedly been vandalized in the night.

As a result, the Forest Service is thinking about charging walkers who use the area in the day.

Would that be a "user-fee"?

Would charging such a fee solve the problem?

Scott

The Travel Industry Association will hold it 2007 Marketing Outlook Forum beginning on October 22nd

The event is a very big deal – a big deal that has significant impacts upon policies directly affecting outdoor recreation upon, and visitation to, our nation's public lands. If past conferences serve as a guide, this conference will likely be attended by senior level land managers representing the National Park Service and other federal and state agencies.

Derrick Crandall, President of the American Recreation Coalition has prepared a special report for this conference. It makes very interesting reading.  Here are the introductory paragraphs:

   Outdoor recreation is a large and varied force in the leisure choices of the American public. Generating at least $300 billion in estimated annual spending, outdoor recreation is shaped by America’s public lands and waters – covering one-third of the surface of the nation. The outdoor recreation industry is dominated by small, responsive businesses providing a large variety of recreation products and services, ranging from campsites to marinas, from fishing guide services to whitewater rafting.

  In general, recreation spending has climbed more rapidly than the CPI and most other core economic measures for a generation, although participation in specific outdoor recreation activities has been more mixed. Traditionally, participation has been influenced short term by weather and the economy, but longer trends – including an aging population and growth in the proportion of minority populations – have also shaped participation.

  The following information provides an overview of key recent trends and expectations...

Those interested in the fate of outdoor recreation as predicted by the wise use group that calls the tunes to which land managers dance might find the entire document of value. It can be found here.

Scott

You and I and our fellow taxpaying citizens are looked upon as being merely "customers" by the leadership of the National Park Service. By way of contrast, industry groups such as the National Tour Association (NTA), are recognized to be "partners". The difference is starkly depicted in what I'm about to share.

NTA is, or so their lobbyist Jim Santini stated when testifying before the House of Representatives in support of increasing National Park entrance fees and in  support of the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, "a Lexington, Kentucky-based international package travel association of 627 companies." NTA is also a member of the American Recreation Coalition. You can read his testimony here.

And if you scroll up that page, you can read the testimony of the ARC's President, Derrick Crandall.

Today in an industry publication we learned that while National Park entrance fees for the public have risen dramatically and will continue to increase,  entrance fees charged to NTA members have not gone up. In fact, those low fees are now guaranteed not to increase for several more years. NTA described their special arrangement in these words:

"The National Tour Association and the National Park Service have been able to ensure that visitors have equal access to the national parks due to a longstanding partnership between the two groups. As a result of recent meetings with  NTA and the park service, there will be no increases in National Park group entry fees until 2010."

That doesn't sound like "equal access" to me.

You can read the entire article below. You can also find below that a posting made by an NTA representative to an NTA electronic bulletin board. The posting is titled "NPS Entrance Fees Impact Consumers, Not Operators" and goes on to tell NTA members that:

"NTA has a longstanding partnership with the Park Service, and has continued to work on behalf of its members on issues related to visitation and fees at these treasured landmarks."

Does this sound like "equal access" to you?

Scott

When I created the Wild Wilderness website in 1997, at the top of the home page I placed the following statement

On this website you will discover how conservative Congressmen, cash-strapped land managers, and recreation industry leaders are working cooperatively to create an entirely new land management paradigm. Their efforts are being directed toward maximal "commercialization, privatization and motorization" of our natural heritage. The name best used to describe their vision for the 21st century and beyond is: "Industrial Strength Recreation"

During the next 10 years I wrote and distributed to the Wild Wilderness network some 4000 updates detailing the progress of this Industrial Strength Recreation agenda.

It was never my intention to be a chronicler of the loss of what had once made the National Forests and other public lands so special -- though it often times feels as if that is what I am doing. I was my belief and expectation that through a combination of outreach, activism and education, the Industrial Strength Recreation agenda could be derailed.


Pasted below is an article from today's Oregonian titled "Rethinking Camping."  Its subheading reads "A Forest Service plan could dramatically change Mount Hood's offerings."  It is about the final stages of the implementation of the Industrial Strength Recreation agenda I first described a decade ago and it involves much more than merely rethinking CAMPING -- it involves Rethinking Recreation.

Similar plans have already, or will soon be, being drawn up for each and every one of the 155 national forests in this country. What you will read below affects you no matter where in the USA you live.

I may not be too late -- not if people are willing to stand in the way of this agenda and to turn it back.

Scott

Have a look at these snippets from the appended article about a US Forest Service employee fired for failing stick to the script presented to her by her superiors:

When she described the reduced funding as "a problem," she said, her supervisor told her the talking points should say that "everything is fine out there in the forest, and there is no need for additional funds." She refused and was quickly removed from her public-relations job, Wenstrom claims.

"Local Forest Service officials are really under the gun to talk the party line," [San Bernardino National Forest's former supervisor] Zimmerman said then.

Wherever I look, I see Forest Service people reading from the same few scripts — scripts that are usually disingenuous, if not downright dishonest. On occasion a FS employee will deviate from the script because their integrity requires them to do so. Those who do so risk being punished.

The USFS is rotten to the core. It is being squeezed from above by President Bush, by his Office of Management and Budget, by Undersecretary Mark Rey and by it's top-level executives and managers.  

Scott

1) Park managers, since 1996, have gotten to keep park entrance fees and they have be forced to rely upon that revenue stream. Prior to 1996, entrance fees were not retained by the NPS.

2) In recent years park managers stopped speaking of visitors and began referring to visitors as "customers."

3) Park managers have been brainwashed, or coerced, into believing that they are in the business of luring paying customers to the entrance gate. During the past decade,  business has been bad, park visitation is in decline, and so a park marketing campaign has been being kicked into high gear.

4) The President's Centennial Initiative is as disingenuous as it is potentially destructive. It is less about reaching out to minority populations than it is about using minority populations as an excuse to further privatize and commercialize the parks while transforming them along the Disneyland model. Learn more.

Recreation Site Facility Master Planning is a 6 year old Forest Service program. Its purpose is to reduce the number of maintained recreation sites and to ensure that those sites which remain open will be the least costly to maintain and/or the most profitable to operate.

RS-FMP, as this program has been called since its inception, became EXTREMELY controversial when brought to the media's attention by Wild Wilderness and the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition. It became SO CONTROVERSIAL that outgoing Chief of the Forest Service Dale Bosworth, as one of his last items of business, temporarily halted the program. Bosworth assured the public that  RS-FMP  would undergo intensive internal review and that changes would be made as required.

This month, the Recreation Site Facility Master Planning program was terminated. RE-FMP was replaced with something called "Recreation Site Analysis" (RSA).

The first RSA has just been released.  This new report appears to be virtually IDENTICAL to older RS-FMP reports. About all that has changed is the program name and logo -- and, to be frank,  the logo has not changed much.

Here are the BEFORE and AFTER comparison. Note that the dollar sign has been removed from the word "Sustainability". Note also that what appears to be writing has been added to the information board.

The implied message is that the Forest Service will no longer keep the public in dark and will no longer focus narrowly upon making recreation into a financially $ustainable business.  I'd suggest that nothing of substance has changed.

Scott 

Here are two articles about Wilderness that I thought created an interesting contrast.

This article about the Isle Royale Wilderness from the "Marquette Mining Journal" touts the inaccessibility of the Wilderness as a real plus.

This article from the "Columbian" titled "Wilderness that too few can enjoy" complains that the decision to not rebuild a section of the Stehekin Road makes the Stephan Mather Wilderness too inaccessible.

Some get it, some don't!

An added note (correction) about each article.  The Isle Royale Wilderness is about 130,000 acres, not 500,000 as the article states.   The Stehekin Road is a "cherrystem" in the Stephen Mather Wilderness, it is not in the Wilderness as stated in the article.

 George

Federal land management agencies deny even the possibility that increased recreation fees have been discouraging visitation and use. When confronted with the fact of declining visitation and decreasing recreational use of America's public lands, land mangers and their private-sector partners have created a long list of self-serving explanations. Fees are not among them.

That being the case, I wonder how our Park Service and Forest Service managers would explain this short article from today's Kansas City Star.

Scott

"It is difficult to awaken the person who is only pretending to be asleep." - an old saying

--- begin quoted ---

Beaches waive fees to combat heat

Too hot? Try the beach.

In an effort to provide relief from the high temperatures and even higher heat indexes, the entrance fees to the beaches at Blue Springs and Longview lakes will be waived through Friday.

Also a reduced weekend price of $2 per adult and $1 per child will take effect for the remainder of the season. Normal admission prices are $5 for adults and $3 for children. 

The first paragraph from the appended article from today's Oregonian tells an important story.

Here it is, in a nutshell.

Northwest national forests are hurriedly boosting federal logging to the highest levels in years with a new infusion of cash, even as they close campgrounds and other recreation sites because money for them is drying up.

Forest visitors wonder why there is so little money available for maintaining recreation facilities.

People wonder why they are having to pay ever-rising forest recreation fees while recreational opportunities on the forests diminish and disappear.

The Forest Service says the reason is because of Congressional budget cuts.

Read the appended article and, if you've not already done so,  you might question whether the Forest Service is telling the truth.

Scott 

Appended is an newspaper article from New Jersey titled "Beach tags to give way to wireless wristbands." The article is not merely fascinating, it is extraordinarily predictive of issues that are about to impact YOU!  This obscure, local, article is damned important!!!

Ostensibly, the article is about using high-tech to ensure that everyone who sets foot upon the Jersey shore has paid his or her beach access fees and that no one is on the beach who shouldn't be there. It is technology gone haywire in the pursuit of private profits and the privatization of public access.

Most importantly, it is about the future of access to our parks, forests, lakes, rivers, beaches and other places where we, as citizens and taxpayers, formerly enjoyed free access to what once were OUR public lands. Whether high tech will be involved, remains an unknown. That access will be controlled and priced, is all but certain.

That's all I'm going to offer by way of introduction, but I'd like to also share with you the comments NJ readers have already posted in response to the appended article. 

Listen to the PEOPLE. Lord knows, the politicians and the land mangers aren't doing so.

Scott

Here are those reader comments:

A strange thing is happening.  A growing number of individuals and organizations linked to the travel-tourism industry are openly making the connection between declining participation in outdoor recreation and increased recreation fees charged for the use of the Great Outdoors. This may, or may not, be a good thing.

Have a look at this quote from the appended news release:

[ For months now we've been hearing about the decline in visitors and higher fees to USA public lands. Why isn't the great outdoors so great anymore?

    The Centers for Disease Control reports a 30 percent drop in youth participation in outdoor activities over the past 10 years. Since 1999 recreational visits to our national parks have been declining, with overnight stays down 16 percent, and tent backcountry camping down nearly 20 percent. Federal studies in many states show the first decline in 20 years to our national forests. ]   

The recreation industry is in a panic. Fewer visitors mean declining profits. It also means that THEIR efforts over the past many years have backfired.

A decade ago,  the recreation and travel tourism industries all but took control of America's public lands recreation policy with the passage of their Recreation Fee Demonstration Program. Fee-demo launched a pay-to-play management paradigm and with it, a radical transformation of the very nature of outdoor recreation. Fees were not implemented for revenue generation. The purpose of fee-demo was to bring the profit motive to outdoor recreation management so that experiences could be packaged, marketed and sold to paying customers. The expectation of the recreation industry was that their profits would rise as undeveloped recreation yielded to Disneyfied Wreckreation. They erred and we, the people,  have been paying the price ever since.

In the span of just one decade, these new policies have transformed millions upon millions of former forest visitors and public lands enthusiasts into people who actively AVOID traveling to, and dealing with, their public lands. In just 10 years, a "crisis" has been created --- a crisis that the RECREATION INDUSTRY is now dealing with.

In the months and years ahead the recreation industry will acknowledge to a growing degree the crisis that has manifest itself in the form of declining visitation to America's once-great outdoors. The recreation industry's solution will NOT, however, be a pleasing one. The recreation industry's solution will be to call upon their public-land management "partners" to bite even more deeply into the "Corporate Takeover of Nature" apple.

Unless those who have long appreciated their public lands rise up and actively oppose the recreation industry's efforts to dominate public policy, the transformation which has been in process for the past decade will almost certainly go from bad to worse.

Fees are NOT the issue.
Fees are, however, central to everything.

Lyle Laverty, an early and fierce supporter of the "pay-to-play" concept, is in the news again. He's in the news for demonstrating the value of the "fee-demo" management paradigm he helped implement within the Forest Service when he headed that agency's recreation program. He's in the news for being part of a scandal.

Lyle Laverty may soon be confirmed as the next Department of Interior Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. If so, he would become the third most powerful person within Interior. If confirmed, Laverty would be directly responsible for formulating outdoor recreation policy for the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Because of concerns about massive, multiple and ongoing ethics violations within the DOI, Mr. Laverty's confirmation has been being blocked by Senator Wyden. For the sake of our public lands, I sincerely hope the block remains and a new, and better, appointee is selected.

Pasted below is an example of pay-to-play working PRECISELY as its Libertarian, Free-Market and recreation industry supporters intended the program to operate.

Is this merely proof that wealth has its privileges in the pay-to-play world, or is this another ethics violation? Whichever it is, it most certainly is a valuable example of how the ideology of pay-to-play will further unfurl if Lyle Laverty is put into a position of governmental power.

Scott

PS... Laverty's congressional testimony on pay-to-play can be read here.

The appended news article is 350 words in length and is worthy of being committed to memory by anyone who has even a passing interest in outdoor recreation. If you want the executive summary, here it is:

1) The Forest Service is spending recreation dollars fighting forest fires and as a consequence, inadequate money is available to maintain recreation facilities.

2) Facilities that can not be kept open through creative means, such as privatization, commercialization, etc., will be decommissioned and removed.

I have detailed the 10-step process by which this would unfold and encourage you to read my decade-old essay titled,  "Our Public Lands: Their Working Capital." Assess for yourself the true nature of the ONGOING threat which resulted from permitting our lands to be treated as their capital.

If you are displeased with what you discover, do something to create a different future. And if you don't know what to do, please contact me for suggestions.

Scott

"We're going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing." - Cid Morgan, USFS District Ranger, 2005

On October 28, 2006 I wrote: "I have written many times, and with increasing frequency, about how federal land management agencies are closing and shuttering public recreation facilities."

On June 24, 2007 I followed with a piece titled "The shuttering has begun in earnest".

Today, I share with you a column from a newspaper in Upper Michigan. The headline reads, "What’s the benefit of shuttering campgrounds?"

What indeed is the benefit of shuttering campgrounds? Why is this happening on public lands all across America. Why specifically is the shuttering being focused the smaller, rustic, minimally developed, free or inexpensive to stay at, out of the way campgrounds that have long been the most popular amongst those closest to the Great Outdoors?

Why, as this column asks is "There is a push to bigger and better — such as large motor homes for camping and deep-sea charter boats for fishing — that not all residents of and visitors to our state embrace"?

Those reading the Wild Wilderness blog know the answers to these questions. You know who is to blame, because you've been paying attention.   Have you interest in helping to stop this trend, or will you be satisfied knowing what's happening, why it's happening and what the eventual outcome will be?

Scott

The Seattle Times recently published a lengthy cover story framed around  two questions,  quoted here as they appear in the article:

• Is a national park supposed to be a crown jewel of American wilderness, a place protected from the bulldozers and strip malls that define much of our lives?
  
  
• Or is it a "park," an outdoor playground for the masses, shaped for everyone's enjoyment and run to help businesses profit along the way?

Those familiar with my work will know my answers to those questions. I need not repeat them here. Unfortunately, and as this article confirms, today's National Park Superintendents rarely agree with my positions. And that being the case, I'd like to pose for you two questions of my own:

• Why do high ranking National Park officials almost invariable fail to understand and accept the fact that they are employed by you and me to serve as custodians of our nation's crown jewels in accordance with long held traditions and in compliance with existing laws and precedents?
  
  
• What more must the American People do to ensure that high ranking public servants of all stripes show more respect for them and less subservience to business interests and the pursuit of profits?

The Seattle Times article is long. I have provided a much condensed version below as well as a link to the original piece.

 Scott

(From: The Source Weekly)

Bend Oregon - If you head out to your favorite campground in one of Oregon’s National Forests this summer, you may well discover it’s no longer there.

For the past two years the U.S. Forest Service has been engaged in a process called Recreation Site Facility Master Planning (RSFMP). The bureaucratic rationale is complicated, but it all boils down to this: Each of the more than 16,000 National Forest recreation sites in the country – more than 2,600 of them in Oregon and Washington – has to demonstrate that it can pay for itself or it will be closed.

Oregon National Forests were among the first in the country to begin the RSFMP process, and the tangible results are now starting to appear. For example, the Curry Coastal Pilot reported on Saturday that the Rogue-Siskyou National Forest has closed 24 campgrounds and three picnic sites. Can the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests be far behind?

Not only are facilities being closed, but drastic budget cuts, including a 46% cut in funding for maintenance over the past two years, are forcing National Forests to reduce or eliminate services – such as providing toilets – at those that aren’t.

The National Forest shutdown is being justified by the need to pour money into President Bush’s “Healthy Forests Initiative,” which aims to make forests healthy by cutting down the trees. Philosophically, it dovetails perfectly with the administration’s broad aim of starving all government services – or at least those that benefit average Americans rather than big corporations and their major stockholders.

Critics, such as Scott Silver of Bend-based Wild Wilderness, see an even deeper and darker motive: They believe the funding cuts and the RSFMP process are steps toward the “Disneyfication” of recreation facilities on federal lands – turning them into money-making enterprises, or maybe even handing them over to private corporations to operate as concessions.

Even if you don’t buy that sinister theory, it’s not hard to see why the present policy is short-sighted and destructive. Closing facilities, making them prohibitively expensive or making them difficult or impossible to enjoy because of a lack of basic amenities shuts off access to the only recreation many working people can afford. It also has a negative impact on communities near National Forests whose economies depend largely or partly on the dollars that visitors to those forests spend.

It’s ironic that an administration that likes to attack “environmental elitists” for wanting to “lock up” public lands has turned out to be the biggest locker-upper of such lands in American history.

When the U.S. Forest Service was founded more than a hundred years ago during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, summed up its job as "to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people in the long run." The administration’s approach seems designed to provide the greatest number of dollars to a handful of people in the short run.

It’s a lousy way to run our National Forests – but it’s an excellent way to earn THE BOOT. 

If National Parks were museums, there would be no debate whether entrance fees discouraged visitation.

Everyone the world over knows that entrance fees discourage museum visitation. Those nations which place a high value upon their children, education, heritage and culture have already discovered the value of providing FREE access to public museums and galleries.  Nations that have abandoned museum entrance fees have already seen visitation soar 100% or more.

But America's National Parks are not museums and in this country, many of our legislators and virtually all public lands managers strenuously deny even the possibility that declining park visitation could be correlated to soaring entrance fees. 

Are parks and museums so very different the whereas fees take an enormous toll upon visitation to museums, they have no similar impact upon park visitation?

Or is it possible that the people of the United States are so very different than the people of England and France that what is true elsewhere in the world is just not true in our country?

Or is it possible that those who are responsible for the rapidly increasing entrance fees in our National Parks (and we do know who those people are -- do we not?), simply do not place as high a value upon children, education, heritage and culture as do the people and legislators of other nations???

Pasted below are excerpts from two recent articles on museum entrance fees and here are two links to other of my recent blogs on the issue of museum entrance fees and how these fees and visitation are directly correlated (click and click).

As for the farcical pizza connection, does the fundamental economic market concept of 'price elasticity' illustrated in this pizza graph apply to everything except parks?

Scott