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With some student/faculty exceptions, the Institute for Outdoor Recreation and Tourism  at the Utah State University Extension is one of the bastions of inside the box, industrial-wreckreation, thinking. The work of many on staff contributes to the academic leg of the four-legged platform currently conspiring to transform random acts of outdoor re-creation into planned tourism consumption for fun an profit. Other legs are the land management agencies, political ideologues and the travel-tourism / recreation industry.
Not too long ago, things were different. Before the incentives of pay-to-play warped the thinking of recreation managers and before the days of outsourcing, politically-motivated insourcing, unethical collaboration and rigged public-private partnerships sucked the democracy out of the public comment process, the US Forest Service (at least in theory) made an effort to listen to the American People and to rationally act upon what they heard.
No more. Today the FS and other agencies as often as not contract-out or use politically motivated internal entrepreneurial groups to obtain whatever justification they feel is required to execute an agenda created for them by external forces. Meaningful public input has largely been replaced with an illusion of public participation.
Pasted below is an article about an forest recreation listening session that will be held tomorrow evening at Utah State in Logan. I have a bad feeling about this process...
Scott
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May 4, 2007
View?? of the future
By Laura Mecham
USU, Forest Service seek public opinion on use of Cache N.F.
Do you use the forest? How do you use it? What changes would you like
to see made in the management of your local forest? These are just a
few potential questions a recreation survey being created at Utah State
University is looking to have you answer.
Graduate student Elliot Hinckley is working on a project to create the
survey in an effort to help officials with the Logan Ranger District to
better understand how the general public would like to make use of the
forest. The project is called participatory action research and is a
technique new to natural resource planning. It attempts to better
incorporate local community voices in the research process.
Hinckley is working to gather concerns from groups who frequently use
the forest to generate a survey which will then go to the general
public for their input.
"The whole point of the research is to get local knowledge into the survey development process," Hinckley said.
Logan District Recreation Resource Manager Ron Vance said although the
Forest Service frequently receives input from these "stakeholder"
groups, it will be helpful to understand what the general public wants
to see more or less of.
"Everyone pays taxes so essentially everyone's a stakeholder in the forest," Vance said.
Hinckley said he will be holding two meetings to gather concerns and
discuss forest utilization issues with about 40 stakeholder groups.
These groups represent a wide range of recreation in the forests and
include such groups as Top of Utah Snowmobile Association, Bridgerland
Back Country Horsemen and the Outdoor Recreation Center at USU. He said
the groups included in the survey-making process were either identified
by the Forest Service, USU or referred by groups already included in
the project, but any forest-using group is invited to participate.
"We have no idea what will be on the survey. It's completely dependent on the groups concerns," Hinckley said.
After the meetings, Hinckley said he will have two weeks to develop the
survey, which will then be brought back to the groups for review and
more discussion. Upon completing the final draft, the survey will be
distributed door to door to the general public. It will be distributed
in Cache, Rich and Box Elder counties and Franklin County in Idaho
sometime in June or July. Hinckley said he had hoped to be able to
include the Wasatch Front in the project but was unable to due to
limited funding.
Vance also works in the regional office as a liaison for the College of
Natural Resources at USU, and said the project came about through his
discussions with Steven Burr, associate professor in the College of
Natural Resources. He said Burr was interested in utilizing local
community voices in research and saw the needs of the Forest Service as
a way to use the method in the recreation field.
Surveys on forest visitor use are not new to the Forest Service.
Yearly, the USDA Forest Service conducts an effort called the National
Visitor Use Monitoring Program. This program collects information on
National Forests and Grasslands about visitor satisfaction and use.
Vance said the results of the program have not been useful at a
district level because so little of it applies to Wasatch and Cache
forests. He said he hopes the results of this project will give the
local Forest Service leaders insight into the opinion of the general
public in the surrounding area.
"We're excited if there is a process that can engage the public," Vance said.
Vance said the Forest Service is not conducting the survey, but rather
sitting as technical advisors to the project. He said because Hinckley
is issuing the survey and has no bias because he does not work for the
Forest Service, he hopes the individuals answering it will be more open
with their opinions.
"The forest service likes diverse opinions," Vance said.
Vance said he hopes the survey provides a broad sample so the Forest
Service can understand what's most important to those who may or may
not use the forest. He said the survey results will not necessarily
initiate great changes in forest use or management, but will provide
information for the Forest Service to draw from when making decisions
in the future. He said although the results will help them understand
what changes the public would like to see, the Forest Service is a
government agency with regulations which may not permit some changes.
"The better the public can understand our rules, the better we can work to serve them," he said.
The Utah State University Extension, a system geared toward extending
the university into the community, is helping to fund the project. The
Extension System is a partnership of federal, state and local
governments which has a network of county offices and state
universities. The Extension responds to critical and emerging issues in
the community through enabling teaching, research and public service
and saw this project worthy of their assistance.
Vance said after reviewing the year-end budget, the Forest Service was
able to contribute some funds as well which paid for the work of
Hinckley and the other professors involved in the project.
Hinckley said anyone who is interested in the project is welcome to
attend the meetings, which are tentatively scheduled for May 8 and 10
from 6:30-9 p.m. in room 314 in the Biology and Natural Resource
building at USU. Once the survey has been created it will be available
at the Logan Ranger District Office as well as on the Institute for
Outdoor Recreation and Tourism website at
http://extension.usu.edu/iort/.
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- Privatization 
