The process begun by Chief Bosworth in early 2002, and now known as "Recreation Site Facility Master Planning" (RS-FMP) , has already resulted in the US Forest Service generating dozens of  "Proposed 5-year Program(s) of Work" which collectively call for the closing, decommissioning and privatizing hundreds upon hundreds of recreation sites and facilities. The process had been on track to shutter, demolish and/or reduce the season of operation for thousands of recreation facilities from coast to coast. The process is geared to concentrating access into relatively few, crowded and expensive to visit, facilities. The process calls for doing away with those special places in the forest were one could enjoy uncrowded, minimally developed, camping.  The process is one of transforming the great outdoors into a place where recreation is sold to paying customers and where the quest for making a buck off recreation dominates.

As a direct consequence of the work of Western Slope NoFee Coalition (WSNFC), Wild Wilderness and a few other organizations and individuals, that process has been temporarily derailed. Pasted below is a NEWS RELEASE issued this morning by the US Forest Service Washington Office. I will give the outgoing Chief of the Forest Service the courtesy of spinning his new plans in his own words (see below). I just add that he is not telling the complete truth .  I encourage you to visit the websites of WSNFC and Wild Wilderness to learn the rest of the story.

One other point. We have won only a temporary reprieve. It's up to those who enjoys camping and recreating upon our National Forests to turn this reprieve into a true victory.

Scott 

Here's an extremely important tid-bit from today's WashingtonPost:

[ On Jan. 12, the Forest Service announced that chief Dale Bosworth is retiring, to be replaced as head of the agency by Abigail Kimbell, regional forester for the northern region, based in Missoula, Mont. On Monday, Bosworth, as a parting gift, announced that there is a plan to "reduce operating costs of the Washington office and regional offices by approximately 25 percent" in the next couple of years. We all know what that means. "The new organization will . . . be smaller," he said in announcing the "realignment." Well, Bosworth's showing the way, leaving his office on Feb. 2. True leadership. ]

The new US Forest Service will indeed be smaller. Many of the services provided by the USFS will be outsourced. The range of recreation facilities operated by the USFS will shrink dramatically. Resources that can be privatized will be privatized.

Call this a radical TRANSFORMATION of the USFS.  "Transformation" is the name that has been given to this program internally and expect we'll be hearing a great deal more about it in the weeks and months to come.

  Outgoing Chief Bosworth supported the privatization agenda, but never had his heart in it.  I predict incoming Chief Kimbell will take her place along side such privatization greats as Gale Norton and Lynn Scarlett. To get some jobs done it takes the right woman and from initial indications, Abigail Kimbell is someone who can bring about the long sought- after privatization / transformation of the USFS.

For too many years the US Department of Agriculture lagged behind the Department of Interior in it's zeal to advance the privatization agenda. I expect that the gap will soon be narrowing.

Scott 

CLICK HERE to read the January 22, 2007 internal US Forest letter from Chief Bosworth titled "Forest Service Realignment" 

Quoted from appended article from today's Oregon press:

 During the 19th century, there were many private libraries throughout Oregon that were open only to people who could pay the annual subscription fee.

 In 1901, the state passed a law that created the public library system, which does not discriminate based on a person's ability to pay.

 State Librarian Jim Scheppke said Oregon law forbids the collection of a fee for a library card. "Any public library that did so would cease to be a public library under Oregon law"

I find the analogies between Library User-Fees and Recreation User-Fees striking. Unfortunately, on both State and Federally managed public lands here in Oregon, discrimination based upon a person's ability to pay has become the norm while public lands that once were accessible to all are now open only to those who pay the annual subscription fee.

There are laws on the federal books analogous to the Oregon Law which makes Library User-Fees Illegal.  It is time those laws be followed. Learn More.

Scott

The news in Yellowstone this week suggests that the growth in private property values outside Yellowstone National Park and an increasing reliance on private funds within the National Park Service are working ominously toward privatization in Yellowstone itself. Several in Yellowstone projects have ground to a halt due to rising construction prices; the cause of the ills and the proposed cure both directly relate to capitalism.

<continues>

A number of National Park issues are converging all at once and the harm that may befall the parks if these issues are approached incorrectly, could have devastating consequences.

We all know, and are reminded almost daily,  that insufficient park funding is resulting in poorly maintained toilets. Many of us intuitively appreciate that toilets provide the most personal point of contact between the NPS and it's customers. If using a National Park toilet is turned into an ordeal, park customers (formerly known as visitors or citizens) are apt to conclude that the parks are being poorly run and might be better managed by some private company --- one that is able to keep its toilets spotless, its main street quaint and its Magic Kingdom, entertaining.

Yes, those citizens who are confronted a disgusting toilet are apt to tell Congress that the parks need more funding. But suppose government does not provide additional funding. If public solutions are not forthcoming,  then private solutions become more and more attractive. Under such circumstances, some degree of privatization can be presented as being the only viable alternative. If government believes, as ours does, that it is in the business of promoting privatization solutions, then privatized solutions are likely to happen.

If one wants to destroy a government agency such as the National Park Service, the surest way to do so is to make that agency fail in the eyes of the American People. If drowning government in the bath tub is the mission of Grover Norquist and the Bush Administration, then they are doing a masterful job. If Norquist's ideology is indeed the ideology of the Bush Administration, then it's easy to understand why NPS budgets (and indeed the budgets of all socially beneficial programs and agencies)  are in the toilet. It is easy to imagine that the more that the public can be made to object to the sorry state of those budgets, the more likely it becomes that the public will accept privatized alternatives when they are presented as the only possible workable solutions.

So getting back to dirty toilet talk, please appreciate that if the administration can keep the National Park toilets in a disgraceful condition and can get the public complaining about those toilets while making certain that no improvements happen , then it becomes increasingly possible for the administration to facilitate the privatization of those toilets and the National Parks that surround them.

Complaining about smelly toilets and inadequate NPS budgets may seem like the right thing for park lovers to do.  Then again, pinching an exposed pawn may seem like the right thing to do.

If we want to save our parks, we first need to understand the nature of the threat and adequately counter the radical ideology now destroying our parks, our democracy and our nation.

Scott


 

National Park visitation is in record-setting steep decline and everyone with horse in this race is weaving a self-serving spin to explain why fewer people are visiting the parks. Those who want to privatize the National Parks, find justification in the data. Those who want to commercialize the parks, find justification in the data. Those who want to motorize the park find justification while those who are determined to Disneyfy the parks for fun and profit, are elated. I offer this warning --- declining visitation is going to be used as an excuse for doing all kinds of harm to the National Park System. The fate of America's Crown Jewels hangs in the balance.

National Park visitation is in steep decline and almost NO ONE is doing anything to put things right.

National Park visitation is in steep decline and almost NO ONE is speaking the truth. That's because the National Park Service is engaged in a myriad of conflicts of interest with the recreation and travel tourism industries. That's because the privatization of America's National Parks is a high priority for the current administration and because those in and out of government promoting this privatization agenda will use any tool available to them to advance their nefarious efforts.

National Park visitation is in steep decline and there is a correct explanation for what is happening. There is a way to reverse this trend and it can be done any day the President and Congress cares to do so. So far they have chosen not to do so.

In the final paragraph of the appended article Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) gets very close to the truth. It's not the complete truth, but it is an infinitely better approximation of the truth than is the drivel to which we are exposed daily coming from the mouths of those with horses in this race or from those in the press who chose not to look for the story behind the facade.

National Park visitation is in steep decline and a great many people are lying about the cause. A great many interest groups are exploiting this situation -- a situation created as a direct consequence of anti-social decisions made by Congress, the President, the recreation industry and federal land managers.

Fortunately, the damage these people have done can be reversed. If, however, the damage is left undone or is permitted to increase, then the privatizers will success and this will be the last generation to know what once was the greatest National Park System in the history of the world.

Scott

Quoted from appended article from today's Washington Post:

[The National Park Service's new director says the agency will increasingly look to outside sources for money to help maintain parks.  "We're much more business-savvy than we used to be," said Mary Bomar, a career employee who became director in October, in one of her first interviews as head of the agency.]  

The optimism some members of my community have expressed about Mary Bomar is unfounded. Privatization remains the name of the game and NPS Director Bomar will be, or so I predict,  MORE effective at this game than was her predecessor, the incompetent Fran Mainella.

The conservation community will, more likely than not, continue to sit on the sidelines and watch the privatization and commercialization of our parks proceed.  Alternative, they may add to the privatization problem by lending their support to the obvious privatization schemes being advanced within the Department of Interior today. Let there be no doubt that creative park funding schemes are, in fact,  privatization schemes.

President Bush's National Park "Centennial Challenge" is primarily intended to advance a privatization agenda. It is secondarily meant to boost sagging park visitation, increase tourism industry profits and create a perception that National Parks are as much fun as commercial themeparks. It is nothing less than an effort to destroy the parks. Unless National Park watchdog organizations sound the alarm,  America's Crown Jewels will, soon enough, become Corporate America's Rhinestones.

Scott

 Click Here to View a Great Short Video

Within the National Park Service, the push to privatize began very slowly and festered for decades. The process first got rolling in earnest in 1995 not with the privatization of an existing park, but with the conversion of an unneeded military base into a brand-new, quasi-privatized, first-of-its-kind unit of the National Park System  -- that being the establishment of Presidio NP within the city of San Francisco.

The next privatization leap came in 2002 when plans were put forth of "save / protect" the decaying historic buildings at another former military base. The venue was Fort Hancock located within the Sandy Hook Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area in New Jersey. The solution to the park service's inability to maintain these structures was to give a commercial developer a 60 year lease and carte blanche to develop them in ways that could provide him with a satisfactory return upon his investment. There were no public purposes in this deal, at least none consistent with the purposes of National Parks.

In the first days of 2007, the National Park Service has leapt once more and once again their privatization adventure privatization involves a former military base. It is, for all intents and purposes, a repeat of the Sandy Hook fiasco. Apparently, now that the model is established, it will be repeated with growing frequency.

Here's a encapsulated look at what's happening. Details can be found in the full article which appears below.

[ The National Park Service has quietly signed a 60-year lease with developers for a $95 million conversion of Fort Baker into a bayside lodge and retreat center...It will include 142 rooms, ranging from two bedrooms to one bedroom with an average size of 600 square feet, a restaurant, bar, wine and olive oil institutes, cooking school, wellness center, bicycle rentals, hiking tours, evening lectures and morning yoga classes. ]

Which park will be next? When, if ever, will the cavalry arrive? Or is this privatization trend now so thoroughly established that it can no longer be stopped?

Scott

"Using Volunteerism to Privatize Society" is the title of the appended article written by Bill Willers and recently published on the Dissident Voice website.

GOOGLE for the word "volunteerism" in combination with my name and you'll get 630 hits. GOOGLE for the word "volunteerism" in combination with the word "privatization" and you'll get nearly a MILLION hits.  The volunteerism / privatization connection is well established,  even if it is not broadly acknowledged.

Privatization supporters have never hidden the fact that volunteerism is one of their most effective privatization tools. All you need do is peruse the GOOGLE hits to which I've drawn your attention and you will quickly come to appreciate why this is the case.

Let me also be clear --- volunteerism is a wonderful concept which is often, but not always, good in practice. It is precisely because we uncritically look upon volunteerism as inherently and obviously good, that those who are mischievous have been successful in selectively perverting this concept and bending it to serve their anti-social purposes.

Willers notes that the connection between privatization and volunteerism is largely flying below the radar. With your help, perhaps we can alter that situation.

Scott

Our National Parks are, as many know, under extreme threat. Representatives of government and the NPS deny this reality and have instead created PR messages which present an alternate reality. In my estimation, these individuals are not ignorant; some are malicious, some are liars.  If you want objective truth and are prepared to put in a small amount of your time to get to it, please read on. I've put unusual effort into the creation of this particular message and hope you find it of value.

In recent weeks I've dug deeply into the roots of the current transformation of the National Park System. Drawing upon what I have learned, I've assembled a small collection of exceptionally important documents originating from the 1980s. I optically scanned these materials and have made them available online for the first time.

Individually, and in combination, these documents detail the plans set forth during the Reagan Administration to defund the National Parks System, to replace Congressionally allocated funding with user fees and to commercialize, privatize and motorize in an effort to Disneyfy what had been America Crown Jewels.

  Virtually every management action occurring today with respect to the above-mentioned transformation of the NPS can be traced directly to decisions made 25 years ago and implemented in the ensuing years.

Here is some of the key evidence I offer in support of that claim.

In 1982, the New York Times reported upon President Reagan's proposal to cut NPS funding by $50,000,000 and to simultaneously give the agency authority to collect and retain higher entrance and user fees. The plan was to not merely to shift how  parks were funded, a stated objective was to make public lands recreation more expensive so that it would not unfairly compete with private entertainment alternatives.

In 1985, Reagan's Office of Management and Budget, explained these plans   to the US Senate.

In 1985, the American Recreation Coalition, testifying before the US Senate, presented a comprehensive proposal for reinventing the NPS. They offered a lengthy discussion paper' titled,  "The Recreation Challenge".  I suggest that this paper, and Derrick Crandall's accompanying testimony, has become official policy for not merely the NPS, but for all federal public land management agencies. This is a document of extreme importance.

In 1985 the recreation organization "United Four Wheel Drive Association", acting as a surrogate of the ARC, not only made the case that motorized recreation supports the pay-to-play model, UFWDA called upon Congress "to lease certain public recreational sites to commercial developments" so that they could be better meet  UFWDA's needs.  This document is short and to the point.

On June 27, 1985, in the opening remarks to the Senate Hearing referenced above, the Honorable James A. McClure (R-ID) set off an extraordinary display of fireworks. He warned the Senate and the portion of the public that was paying attention about the unprecedented threats to our public lands which would be presented in testimony later that same day. I've have appended Senator McClure's prescient words and encourage you to take them to heart.

   If you are interested in truth -- please read on.
   If you want to change the course of history --
    -- we'd appreciate your help in this, the New Year.

Scott 

There is a very disturbing trend occurring in the way land managers the world over are allocating access to lands entrusted to their care. An attitudinal shift has taken place which now causes land managers to imagine that they are service vendors in direct competition with Disneyland and other private-sector amusement providers. The idea of PUBLIC lands is quickly dying. The concept of CITIZENSHIP is fading fast. Everything is part of the MARKET and every person is just another potential consumer.

These concepts have been drummed into the psyche of North American public land managers for the past two and a half decades. In the next posting I  make to the Wild Wilderness blog, I will address these very points and will go back to 1982 when this transformation began in earnest.

Meanwhile, pasted below is an outstanding Art-Ed (or perhaps Op-Article) from Australia. It is titled "Priced out of our family traditions" and except for the elitists who shamelessly gloat over their success in bringing about this transformation, almost everyone who reads this will find themselves nodding in agreement with this story from the land down under.

BUT FIRST ... here's my favorite poem by the Australian poet, artist, cartoonist and long-standing privatization critic, Michael Leunig.
 

"The People's Treasure"

They're privatising things we own together.
And though we're still connected by the weather
They say that sharing things is now unsound.

Scott

Washington State Parks have, in recent years, come under extraordinary pressure from those determined to bring about their privatization. Efforts to defund that park system and force it to operate from self-generated revenues have been intense. Fringe Think-Tanks have created detailed plans for how to privatize the entire state park system.

Fortunately, these extreme measures have, so far, been resisted and rejected.

Pasted below is the latest attack on Washington's State Park system. It too comes from a fringe thank tank. This proposal attempts to encourage State legislators to take a more modest bite of the poisonous privatization apple.

Scott

I noticed a very short item in the newly published National Park Foundation newsletter. It said "National Park Monopoly on Your Christmas List."

Pasted below is info about the game itself. It's not new but for those who've not already seen this, it might be of interest.  What is new, is the extent to which this whole National Parks Monopoly thing is no longer a game.
 
Scott 
 
National Park Monopoly on Your Christmas List
Outdoor enthusiasts can now own a piece of America with America’s National Parks Edition of the MONOPOLY® Game! From Yosemite in California to Acadia on the coast of Maine, players will experience the wonder of National Parks while enjoying America’s favorite board game.    
 
MONOPOLY®: America's National Parks Edition

Outdoor enthusiasts can now own a piece of America! America’s National Parks Edition of the MONOPOLY® Game lets you buy, sell and trade the 22 most visited National Parks. From Yosemite in California to Acadia on the coast of Maine, players will experience the wonder of National Parks while enjoying America’s favorite board game.

This completely customized game comes with 6 collectible pewter tokens: Fishing Reel, Mountain Bike, Camera, Tent, Hiking Boot and Canoe.

A portion of purchase price is donated to the National Park Foundation.
 

Beginning in 2007, those who provide 500 hours of volunteer service to the Bureau of Land Management or other federal land management agencies  will qualify to receive an "America the Beautiful Pass" currently valued at $80. With that pass, the bearer will be able access America's National Parks for a full year and have basic access to most, but not all,  federally managed public lands. Your rate of compensation will have been 16 cents per hour but heck,  you weren't volunteering for the money, you were doing it for love.

In 2005, the BLM put a value of $18.04 upon each man-hour of donated labor or $32,472 per man year.

Poor Americans all across the country are being invited to volunteer upon federal lands so that they can earn a free public lands pass. Those who volunteer under these terms will, in effect, be compensated an a rate of $288 per year.  The difference between the value the BLM assigns to labor and the rate at which they compensate for labor, is $32,184. Some might call that difference the "net profit" per volunteer year.

Pasted here is a table from the BLM's recently published 2005 Volunteer Annual Report. It summarized Volunteer Activity for Fiscal Yeas 2000-2005. It shows what may be the beginning of a new, important, and perhaps even disturbing trend.

Look closely at the total amount of volunteerism for each year. Notice how the amount of volunteerism trended rapidly upwards until peaking in 2003. Notice how volunteerism has been in decline ever since.

Would anyone like to venture an explanation?

I would. I'd suggest that volunteerism is being used and abused as a privatization tool and as a mechanism for shifting how work gets done in America. I'd suggest that the privatizers who sought to use volunteerism as an ideological hammer have taken something good and devalued it through their excesses.  I'd suggest that if Americas are in fact becoming less inclined to volunteer, it might be because of the relatively news emphasis upon touting the economic value of that volunteerism.

I don't want to hang too much credence upon possible interpretation of limited data. I would, however, suggest that the issues are raise are worth tracking.    

Scott

Quoted from the November / December edition of the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association's newsletter:

  [ Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne recently met with American Recreation Coalition (ARC) President Derrick Crandall to discuss a number of parks and public land issues important to the outdoor recreation community. During the meeting, the group.... talked about the declining visitations to national parks and public lands, funding issues, boosting public lands infrastructure, and reaching out to the nation’s youth to spur interest and involvement in the outdoors. ]

RVIA goes on to explain that Secretary Kempthore is a keen RVer and the recreation industry loaned him and his staff a motorhome for their use.

I wish I could tell you more about what was discussed behind these closed doors but alas, I am privy only to the information which appears below.

Scott

A Denver TV station is doing a poll right now. Pasted below is how they've framed the issue. You are told that the Forest Service's maintenance budget has been cut by 60-percent and asked to choose between two options -- 1) close campgrounds to save money or 2) sell or lease campgrounds that the USFS can not afford to run.

The TV station query is appended. Feel free to go to the website indicated and share your thoughts.

But first you might read the 250 word description I wrote in 1997 explaining Wild Wilderness' major issue. I titled that webpage "The Future of Public Lands Recreation".

Here is a short quote:

 [ Unnecessary and inappropriate budget cuts to recreation programs were orchestrated by Murkowski and Hansen so as to create an apparent maintenance crisis for federally managed recreation lands and facilities. The rescue of a visibly decaying public system by ARC's private investors and corporate sponsors is the intended outcome. Fee-Demo does not exist to raise needed funding for trail and facility maintenance. It exists to circumvent and eventually repeal the long-standing legal prohibitions upon the charging for recreation on federally managed lands.]

Welcome to the future. Know that unless action is taken and another future created, things are going to get much worse. The parting out of our public lands, our rights and our democracy has begun. It will not end until the carcass is stripped bare.

Scott

 As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. 
      - U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas 

The Property and Environment Research Center is destroying the National Parks, killing Earth's life-support systems and eradicating democracy --- (have I missed anything?)

When PERC rolled out their "How and Why To Privatize Federal Lands" proposal in 1999 in which they called for the sale of every last acre of federally managed public lands, every National Park, every Wilderness, every Wildlife Refuge --- Wild Wilderness was first to raise the alarm.

When PERC's Senior Fellow Don Leal appeared on stage at the University of Colorado School of Law in 1998 and told an auditorium filled with land managers that,  "Congress and state legislatures should allow park managers to create innovative services for paying customers and to set fees according to the demand for those services... Requiring popular parks to be self sustaining is the surest way of spurring responsible management and financial stability,"  I was on that stage denouncing his proposal and advocating to keep public lands truly public.

I have fought PERC relentlessly, yet PERC is winning. PERC is winning because they have sunk their tentacles into the flabby flesh of compromising, corporatism-crooning big-green organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense, World Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife and others.  Through collaborations, one more unholy than the next, PERC's free-market ideology is undermining the entire conservation movement and, in the process, destroying the planet.

Pasted below is a new article from PERC titled, "Nothing Oxymoronic About Free Market Environmentalism." Read it to learn how PERC and The Nature Conservancy have teamed up to create a "virtual university"  to be known as "Teaching Enviropreneurs About Markets" (TEAM).

Learn more click  here for PERC's Infomation and click here for Wild Wilderness' Information.

Scott 

Throughout the 90s, the Outfitter/Guide industry generally favored Congressional efforts to implement recreation user fees. Their logic was straight-forward. They were already paying outfitter permit fees and favored the NEW provision within Fee-Demo and in the Recreation Access Tax that allowed fees to be spent locally in ways that directly served the needs of outfitters and their clients. So long as their own clients were not required to pay additional fees,  purveyors of commercial recreation were advantaged by the higher fees charged to non-guided forest users. In theory, outfitters enjoyed all the gain with none of the pain.

That tide has changed --- as the appended article about Alaskan Outfitters makes plain.

Today, cash-starved land managers are looking upon commercial outfitters as sources of additional revenue --- sources that can be bled as necessary. These outfitters have no option other than to pay up, or to take their case back to Congress --- which they will surely do unless the agencies back down.  But the agencies are not going to back down. The agencies have been turned into vampires and to them,  one source of blood looks as appealing as the next. What's more, the outfitter industry's traditional guardians in Congress are about to become very much less powerful. For the outfitter/guide industry, the tide has changed and it is truly a brand new day.

Let me be clear. I have no love for any special interest groups that supported the imposition of recreation fees when they believed that this anti-democratic and ideologically motivated program could be twisted to serve their own interests. I have no sympathy for such groups today, now that they've been tripped up by the very legislation they helped pass.

My HOPE is that when these outfitters take their case to Congress, they do not demand that exceptions be made in the law to benefit only their interests. My HOPE is that these organizations and their lobbyists, will not again conspire to screw the general public.

Perhaps that's a naive hope and so maybe it would be wise for the general public to get actively involved in this issue and to do what is required to ensure that commercial outfitters do not receive special treatment denied to everyone else. Perhaps now that the tide has changed, the outfitter/guide industry would like to work WITH the general public and not against it.

Scott

Quoted from the appended article about the continuing fiasco of the Valles Caldera:

 [ It's an experiment in the way public lands are managed -- only the Presidio in San Francisco, the military base-turned-park, has a similar governance...

    ...the board has been focused on the cattle program because -- unlike the fee-based hunting, fishing and recreation programs offered on a limited basis by the preserve -- it was costing money and "just wasn't working very well." ]

The Valles Caldera was to have been an experiment in quasi-privatization of public space. Its Libertarian and Free-Market supporters (of which there are many), had hoped to use the success of the Caldera, operating as a self-funded NOT-TAXPAYER supported preserve, to grease the skids for the privatization of many more public lands. The Valles Caldera experiment was (and still is) of major national significance. It was (and still is)  a pilot program for President Bush's "Charter Forest" initiative -- and more.

THE EXPERIMENT HAS FAILED.

And yet there's a lesson to be learned which has NOT yet been learned. As you noted above, the Valles Caldera was to have become self-funded largely through revenues derived from pay-to-play, fee-based, recreation programs -- i.e., through the commodification of nature and the marketing and selling of artificially created, value-added, recreational products, goods and services.

THAT EXPERIMENT HAS ALSO FAILED.

Simply stated, the public wants its public lands to be truly public. So let's move past these ideologically driven, anti-democratic, failed experiments. Let's get back to managing, and funding, public lands for the benefit of the true public. Let the failure of the Valles Caldera experiment serve as an impetus to aggressively protect the remainder of the our Commons from being downgraded into quasi-public properties.

Scott

PS... I have written extensively on this topic and I invite you to read more.

America's modern-day self-funded park movement was born in New Hampshire from the loins of it's former State Park Director, Wilbur LaPage . LaPage is famous, or perhaps infamous, for his success in eliminating tax-based funding and replacing it with user fees, commercialization and privatization.

What makes LaPage significant beyond the confines of New Hampshire is the fact that he served on Ronald Reagan's "President's Commission on American Outdoors"  which, in 1987, set all of America's public lands upon the path pioneered in New Hampshire.

Pasted below is a newly published editorial from the staff of New Hampshire's Concord Monitor. It concludes with the following words:

[User fees eventually fail because they must be increased to keep up with escalating costs. When hunting and fishing license prices rose repeatedly, people stopped buying them. The user fee path, if followed, will turn New Hampshire into a pay-to-play theme park. It's the wrong approach, and it won't work in the long run.]

The editorial is worth reading no matter where you live because it is still possible to save the National Park System or the State Park system in your own state. It is still possible to save outdoor recreation on lands managed by the USFS, USFWS, BLM and other federal agencies. I'm not sure the same can be said about the failed New Hampshire system which, having already passed a critical point in the user-fee process, is about to free fall into the deepest depths of privatization ideology.

Scott

To learn more, see: State Parks' Progress Toward Self-Sufficiency, a report published last month by the PRO-privatization Property and Environment Research Center.