(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. 

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