Pasted below are the greeting words found at the USFS BUDGET internet portal. It is here where the agency's budget, budget justification and other related document can be found. These words are so extraordinarily Rovian*, I wanted to share them.

I also wanted to inform you that the President's 2007 budget not only called for cuts to both the Recreation (- 4%)  and the Trails (-19%) programs, it contained  a gem -- something  called:  "The Capacity Building Model for Sustainable Recreation". The Capacity Building Model, so I've discovered, was developed in partnership with PriceWaterHouseCoopers -- and that's significant.

PWC is not merely a sustaining member of the American Recreation Coalition and a major collaborator with the USFS on a wide range of recreation-related issues, they are amongst the world's leading facilitators of privatization currently assisting governments around the globe in the privatization of everything from water to national parks.

So with that introduction, here's a quote from the President's Budget.

  "Providing high quality recreation opportunities on the National Forest’s and Grasslands is of key importance to the Forest Service. This resource provides a direct connection to the American people, with 204.8 million visits occurring in 2004. The Forest Service continues working with the public to increase capacity to deliver recreation services. The agency is developing a programmatic plan, “The Capacity Building Model for Sustainable Recreation” that will identify efforts to build capacity to meet increasing demand. Tools will include partnership development, volunteerism, fee revenues, improved business practices and prioritization of recreation facility assets. Specific actions in 2007 will include: completion of recreation facility master planning to prioritize facility assets, completion of a feasibility study on fee retention of existing recreation special use fees, continued implementation of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, working with private sector partners to create a web site on improved business practices including grant resources and volunteerism, and a skills assessment to address improved business and financial skills."

The importance of these words will be clear to those who follow these issues. I would just like to point out that the USFS refuses to furnish the public with current visitation data and claims their data collection methodology is incapable of providing an overall visitation number. Those who watchdog the agency believe visitation is continuing to fall.  It was thus of interest to see the USFS declare as fact that 204.8 Million visits occurred in 2004.  That figure represents a DECLINE in visitation since 2001 when the USFS claimed 209 Million visits.  It represents a dramatic decline from the days when the USFS claimed ONE BILLION visits!  Considering THE FACT that visitation is declining, one really should question the true purpose for this Capacity BUILDING program -- or so I would suggest.

In 2001, I posted a particularly important message in which,  I suppose you might say, I offered a prophecy -- a prophecy that can finally be tested. The message was titled:  "Three-quarters of a billion hikers vanish." Read it here.

Scott

 *"Rovian" --- as in Karl Rovian

The seamless blending of the distribution of public and private outdoor recreation became more seamless this week when two of the American Recreation Coalition's sustaining members stuck up the deal announced in the appended news release.

Soon enough, every conceivable outdoor recreational opportunity will have been commodified, priced and transformed into a reservable product, good or service.

Soon enough, Ticketmaster/ ReserveAmerica / InterActiveCorp (they are all the same company) will be the exclusive gate-keeper controlling virtually all access to the Great Outdoors.

Soon enough, you will cease to be a citizen-owner of public lands and will be reduced to being merely another paying customer valued only for your willingness to consume.

I suppose this fate is not inevitable, but it will be unavoidable if the public does not respond to these threats pretty damned soon.

To learn more about the Ticketmaster Threat,   click here.

Scott

Quoted from the appended article about the ever-unpopular Recreation Site Facility Master Planning process. 

 ["We can't take on new operations and maintenance, that's for sure," [deputy forest supervisor of Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest] Schiff said. "That's the first question -- if you're going to build something new, who is going to take care of it? "Here's the catch phrase we have: No partner, no potty."]

The purpose for RSFMP is, as we have long said, to pare Forest Service recreation facilities back to the point where everything pays for itself or where everything that can be privatized is privatized.

Or more succintly:

Scott

Considering the many many privatization threats to National Parks, I find it curious (thought not surprising) that the bioprospecting threat has generated so much public ire relative to other less-sexy  threats. While I agree that bioprospecting is part of the "Everything's for Sale" issue, I offer that bioprospecting in the parks represents minimal threat to parks. It represents a significant threat to park management, but in that regard, it is little different than corporate sponsorships, advertising in parks, public-private partnerships, pay-to-play and the myriad of other schemes which make park managers increasingly dependent upon interest groups seeking private gain from public resources.

Pasted below is a recent article on this topic. While it raises many excellent points, it makes too much of the biopiracy / "privatization of life" theme. Bioprospecting in the parks in not primarily a biopiracy issue -- or so I have stated in numerous posts on this topic.

If you'd like to read another take on the bioprospecting issue, please check out this posting I made in 2002 when this issue was first attracting public attention . To  learn still more, search the Wild Wilderness website for the term "bioprospecting"... or contact me directly for the rest of the story.

Scott

When in 2001, the American People  purchased the 90,000 acre Baca Ranch in New Mexico for a little more than 100 million dollars, Congress mandated that this newly acquired public property would be operated so as to be financially self-sufficient. At that time, I vociferously lambasted this management model,  suggesting that it would become the harbinger of a very dangerous new trend. I suggested that the Valles Caldera would become America's de facto first "Charter Forest" operated under President Bush's new Charter Forest Initiative. In 2003, Wild Wilderness' blowing the whistle on this fraud and deception was recognized as one of Project Censored's Top 25 Stories of the Year.

Pasted below is a newly published article in which the former head of the Valles Caldera Trust says the areas needs subsidies. This article makes it  clear that the Charter Forest concept is FAILING.

I am not overjoyed.

On the contrary, the failure of the Valles Caldera was entirely predictable. The mandate that the Valles Calder MUST be financially self-sufficient remains,  and this all but ensures that the area will have to be further commercialized in an effort to meet its required revenue generation goals.

This all but guarantees that these publicly owned lands, purchased five years ago with public tax-dollars, will be managed in ways that enhance the privatization of access and use, while maintaining public deed-title ownership.

This all but guarantees the imposition of higher user fees and the development of increasingly "value added" recreation and tourism products -- products that will be marketed and sold exclusively to paying customers. This all but guarantees that the Valles Caldera Trust will increasingly look to the Disneyland model when trying to figure out how to manage this area. And this all but guarantees that the area will remain largely off-limits to the non-paying public.

The fact that the Valles Caldera privatization experiment has failed comes as no surprise. The problem was that in choosing to manage the property as a quasi public resource, the privatization process did not go far enough. In order to make this scheme succeed, the Valles Caldera Trust must push the privatization envelope more fully. It must more faithfully execute Libertarian / Free-market privatization ideology and do so more completely. Either that, or this public resource should be operated as a public resource for the good of the American People and not, as is now the case, as an experiment in privatization.

To learn more, click here.

Scott

After several court challenges extended over a period of years, a monopoly public lands reservation contract has finally been awarded to Ticketmaster and their parent corporation InterActiveCorp freeing the way for increased commodification of outdoor recreation and further commercialization leisure pastimes. This is a black day for those who value free access to wild nature.

The profound implications of this action will probably not be immediately clear, except to those who have been actively following this issue.

I strongly encourage you to explore the ReserveAmerica website for yourself and then read what Wild Wilderness has reported upon this threat to public lands.

Scott

No one has been chronicling the major issues embroiling the National Park System as well or as thoroughly as blogger Kurt Repanshek, author of the National Parks Traveler website .
 
And in my opinion, few National Park-related articles are more important than the one which follows.
 
This past weekend,  Kurt asked several National Park champions their thoughts on a topic to which he's given the name "Leasing the Parks". Kurt discovered, as you will soon read, that amongst these park champions, there exists an extremely large "Philosophical Rift."
 
I thank Kurt for sharing these thoughts and am indebted to him for allowing me to have the final word. It is with this paragraph that Kurt's article ends:

Forgive my hyperbole, but these are perilous times for the national park system. Taken individually, perhaps a lease here and snowmobile access over there isn't that big of a deal. But when you consider the collective and peer into the future, it's not so difficult to understand Scott Silver's arguments.    "Any short-term wins that compromising/collaborative (yet politically weak and effete) organizations may achieve for the parks will be wiped out by harm that will befall the NPS as a direct consequence," he says. "Short-term wins will come at the cost of long-term compromises and concessions that will all but ensure our children's lives -- and the fate of this planet -- will be darker."

Scott

The appended article titled "Rescuing Our Parks" is not truly a new piece --  it is more like reheated ideological left-overs that have been served many times before. It is certainly not a news piece. It is at its core, pure, unadulterated, propaganda.

The person being interviewed, Holly Fretwell, is a Senior Fellow at Property and Environment Research Center-- a hard-core free-market think tank at which former Interior Secretary Gale Norton was also a Senior Fellow.

The reporter, although not identified as such, is a Senior Fellow and the even MORE RIGHT WING and more strident Libertarian think-tank -- the Independence Institute .

http://www.i2i.org/main/author.php?author_id=98
  Jay Ambrose, a senior fellow at Independence Institute and former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, returned to Colorado to write nationally distributed columns and take up other pursuits last December after nine years in Washington, where he served as director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers.

It drives me to speak of Fascism when articles such as this appear in the media masquerading as news and without being identified as collusion. The source represents one ideologically driven, corporate funded, think thank. The so-called "reporter"  represents a second think tank which espouses similar ideology.

Neither of these think tanks seek to "Rescue Our Parks".
They seek to privatize them.

Scott

The alarm about the health of the condo market is widespread. "Vulture investor" Palisades Financial has launched a $100 million fund to acquire distressed condo properties nationwide. South Florida's market is scary enough to be the sole target of one vulture investor (see main story) ... 

Here's a recreation fee trend to watch.

You've paid your $50 and bought a National Park Pass. Now you try to use it. You drive up to Mt. Rushmore National Park, slip the pass out of your wallet and are ready to flash it as you enter the park.

Only problem is --- Your National Park Pass doesn't work here (see appended). At Mt. Rushmore, you will have to pay Presidential Parking Inc.  before you can pay your respects to Presidents Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Washington

If in frustration and disgust you pull out of the parking lot and try to park along the adjacent public highway --- think again. Roadside parking has been banned anywhere in the  area and South Dakota's State Police will do whatever it takes to ensure that Presidential Parking Inc. gets paid.

Unbelievable? Not at all. Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Washington forewarned us long ago.

Scott

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? - Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. -Abraham Lincoln

"The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations." -Thomas Jefferson

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."  -Theodore Roosevelt

If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst. -George Washington

Rarely is the word privatization used when it comes to federally managed parks and other recreation areas. The current administration much prefers to use less evocative words -- speaking instead in privatization codewords such as "collaboration", "partnerships" and "management efficiencies."

In New Hampshire, however, where their park system was the first in the nation to become entirely self-funded and where recreation user fees were broadly implemented to replace tax-based funding, privatization is the word on everyone's lips.

New Hampshire is about to pay the ultimate price that comes with having switched to fee-based recreation. Will America's National Parks and forests soon follow New Hampshire's lead? Does anyone care?

Scott

Scott

Quoted from appended article published today and titled "Park volunteers aren't just greeters and gatekeepers anymore."

"Volunteers free up rangers to do other things, said Peter Krulder, manager of Honeymoon Island State Park at Dunedin."

MUCH more importantly, the increasing use of volunteers frees up politicians to reduce taxes which, in turn, results in more severe under-funding of park managers. Park managers, in turn, have no option other than to rely more heavily upon volunteers. It is a spiral to the doom of public parks.  It is a spiral planned by those advancing a privatization agenda.

The issue goes much deeper than volunteers providing cheap labor. Those who seek to shrink government to the size that it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the tub are manipulating the altruism of volunteers and turning it into a tool for destroying our civil society and creating a privatized "ownership society" that is more to their liking. 

Here is a google search for the combination of the terms "volunteerism, privatization, parks"  

That link takes you to 405,000 hits, the first two of which just happen to have been written by me.  You can skip over those because you've heard what I've had to say on this topic before.  Ignoring my warnings, you will still have 449,998 other articles from which to draw.
 
Scott 

We hear every day that federal land managers have no money and therefor must unload the operation of public facilities in order to cut costs.

Here's a twist on that standard model.

Congress has just authorized payment of up to $10 million dollars to a non-profit organization as part of a deal designed to PRIVATIZE a 96-mile National Heritage waterway -- privatize being the word used in the appended article.

Pay-to-privatize!?
Is this the wave of the future?

Scott

In 1993, John Baden, President of the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE), laid out the case for charging the American public for the right to access their federally managed public lands. Amongst his many arguments he wrote:

When our national forests give away recreation, private managers cannot compete. But when national forests charge fees, private land may open up to recreation, also for a fee.

In 1996, Baden and other recreation fee champions got their way. With the  passage of fee-demo, a walk in public woods was no longer free and an important threshold was crossed.

In today's press appears an article under the headline "Potlatch Corp. to charge fees for access to N. Idaho forests." The article reads in part:

Potlatch, based in Spokane, Wash., owns almost 670,000 acres that the company says draws 200,000 visitor-use days each year from hikers, birdwatchers, hunters, anglers and trail riders. "They've all used Potlatch land without a fee and minimal restrictions," Matt Van Vleet, public affairs manager for Potlatch's western region, told The Spokesman-Review of Spokane. But "the future is not going to be like the past."

The future is not going to be like the past. We're riding upon a hidden track and things are likely to get worse. Much worse.

Why do I say this? Because the future that is unfolding today was planned two of more decades ago. I've poured over the blueprints and have done my best to share what I've learned. Today's news is not news. It is merely an unfolding.

Scott 

New Hampshire's State Parks system serves as America's first modern Libertarian-inspired experiment in creating entirely self-funded parks. The experiment has failed and that park system is now crashing and burning. The New Hampshire model was adopted by the former Governor of Texas and today, the Texas park system is also crashing and burning. That former Governor, George W. Bush, applied the Texas model to America's National Park System which is in the process of crashing and burning.

All of this was entirely predictable and avoidable.
All of this is the direct consequence of ideology.
I explained all of this is a previous blog which can be read here.

The appended article provides an update of the plight of New Hampshire's parks, and the efforts to save the parks by wandering still further down the same, wrong, ideological path.

Scott 

Here is an extraordinarily revealing passage quoted from page 79 of the White River NF Travel Management Plan.

The Forest Service will continue to rely more heavily on resources besides congressional appropriations for the operation, maintenance, and management of roads, trails, and other facilities needed to serve forest users. User groups will need to increase their involvement in assisting the forest with maintenance of many of these routes either through volunteer labor, grant acquisition, or user fees of some type to continue their availability unless congressional appropriations increase dramatically and keep up with increased use. It is unlikely that new opportunities will be considered unless they can be constructed and maintained from resources originating outside Forest Service budgets.

Simply stated, the USFS will no longer be providing for the general public. Special interest groups that are willing to donate time and/or money will be given the opportunity to develop the public forest resource as per their own liking.

Pasted below is a specific example of how this new way of funding, managing and maintaining our national forests is actually playing out on the ground.

Scott 

Derrick Crandall, President of the wise-use American Recreation Coalition, is one of the slickest lobbyists in Washington DC. If you've ever heard  him speak, you'll know he comes across like warm lard. Some people lap it up. Others is sickens. Pasted below is a presentation Crandall gave 10 days ago. 

If you can get past its warm lardy texture, buried within the fat are several choice morsels.
 
Here's one: 

Starting tonight leaders of key public and private organizations will gather not far from here to ponder the message in a recent book entitled Last Child in the Woods, a disturbing story of societal change that is erasing the watermark that our Great Outdoors has had on generations of Americans up to today.  To some, these challenges are unfortunate but inevitable.  To others, the threats generate passion so strong that radical solutions become goals.

 
I'll leave it to you to find others.

Scott