A Wild Wilderness supporter from the Land Between the Lakes (LBL) area of Kentucky wrote to report a new threat:

>But rest assured its purpose is to be a tourist
>attraction, and fees will be a part of the plan.
>I'm as serious as a heart attack about this.

Scott Replied:

This heritage program is primarily about economic development and turning genuine heritage into discrete marketable consumer products. It is about supporting the travel-tourism industry. It is about TARGETING that which is authentic in our culture and then selling access to it.

For those who value authentic heritage and traditional culture, my advice would be to HIDE from the President's new Preserve America Initiative and from the Forest Service's Heritage Program.  Stay off their radar if you possibly can. Protect your heritage FROM those who are vacuuming up the remnants of authentic America.

What's at stake is the Disneyfication of culture. Nothing less.

I'd suggest that he MOST VALUABLE product is that which is most authentic. In today's McDonaldized world, people crave that which is not plastic. People will pay handsomely to observe, touch, feel and be close to anything that is the GENUINE article.

The market would love to get its hands upon LBL's culture and heritage and package it up so that it can be sold in precisely the way that Disneyland sells the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, doing so would destroy everything that still is authentic about LBL's culture and heritage. Doing so would quickly devalue that culture and that heritage, yet for a while people would willingly pay to get close that which was real and was rapidly being depleted. After a while the tourist would pay to visit LBL not for those original, authentic, values, but to partake of similar values as those found at Disneyland. When the tourism promoters were done raping and pillaging the authentic LBL, they'd find another piece of Americana to plunder. LBL would be kept in service as a tourism attraction, but that which had been authentic would have already been consumed and depleted.

What I find so offensive about these tourism promoters is that they SPECIFICALLY TARGET that which is the best! They seek out that which is MOST DIFFERENT from Disneyland or McDonalds and then they quickly convert that unique treasure into another piece of plastic junk.

Thanks for fighting to protect LBL and to protect it FROM the heritage tourism promoters.

Scott 

Comments (1) >>

David Nickell said:

Scott, What is most offensive about the effort to commercialize the Between the Rivers (not Land Between the Lakes) cultural heritage is that to accomplish this they must break the authentic connection we have been fighting to preserve. The LBL administration has even denied to give those of us who are from Between the Rivers "consulting party" status with regard to our own heritage!! We officially have no more legal standing towards our own heritage than a tourist that had never heard of the place before--in spite of our having lived within that peninsula since the 18th century. We can, as individuals, provide the agency with information about our heritage, but we will have no say over how it is used, how we are portrayed, etc. There officially is no "Between the Rivers" heritage. There is only factoids of information to be marketed for tourism promotion. Of course, this dramatically impacts our ability to pass our own cultural heritage and sense of place to future generations.

December 08, 2006

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