ENERGY and RECREATION

In the future, recreation-oriented vehicles seem likely to be one expression of what I call the marriage of the machine and the environment, a middle class version of this concept. In my view, one of several important lifestyles developing in our culture is emerging from the middle class; it is materialistic, active, and essentially wholesome. Among its other virtues, this lifestyle tends to keep families and friends together. This developing trend, in effect, offsets a quite different set of upper middle class attitudes which are hostile to industrialization, technology, economic growth, and even affluence, although people who feel this way are often accustomed to affluence through their own family background.

The united states will probably be the first country in the world where typical middle class and working class families will own recreation-oriented vehicles. These vehicles may well come to epitomize the healthy lifestyle of the average american. Indeed, they are, in some ways and in some places, already playing much the same role (on a smaller scale) which the automobile did in creating industries, promoting economic development, and spreading the fruits of this process. The snowmobile has already had a tremendous impact in the midwest and the west. There was a time when many people in these regions were just plain depressed every winter because the severe climate limited their activities so sharply. Now many of these same people can't wait for winter to return, and the main reason is the snowmobile (cross-country skiing has had similar effects, on a smaller scale). By the same token, off-road vehicles (including bikes and four wheel drive cars) have played a big role in making areas like Arizona as attractive as they now are.

However, a key point of this study is that energy is changing from being a cheap commodity (for Americans) to one which is inexpensive; it is not becoming expensive. Cheap energy is like oxygen: it is very important, but people don't worry about it very much. But if energy is expensive, this dominates everything! under these circumstances, people would not build big houses because they are hard to heat or would not live in suburbia because of the energy problems associated therewith. They certainly could not own and operate large numbers of recreationoriented vehicles. However, if energy is inexpensive, things are quite different, and i expect that it will be inexpensive, at least in the long run; isolated crises are a different matter, of course. Inexpensive energy means that people behave pretty much as they have always behaved. But they do the same things somewhat differently. They still build ranch houses with large windows, but they are well-insulated and the glass is thermopane. People don't abandon suburbia, but the family-sized car is lighter and more efficient thant it used to be. They still buy and use recreation- oriented vehicles, but those which use a lot of energy will be redesigned to be more economical.

Expansion in the use of recreation-oriented vehicles is exactly the kind of thing which our government is likely to discourage in various ways. The reason is that the kind of people who tend to work for the government tend not to be well-attuned to the contribution which these vehicles make to the well-being of middle class americans. Very few things in our society are actually essential. For example, it is not unusual for affluent people to spend over $50 for a fine meal in a gourmet restaurant. We all know that most of this money is paying for something of value other than simple nutrition. Much of spending today is discretionary in this sense. This is also true of tourism. It certainly is not a vital necessity, but this does not mean that it is of no importance to the middle class. And many of the things which enhance the quality of life of middle class people are likely to be shortchanged by the upper middle class elites who staff many of the regulatory agencies in washington and elsewhere. I am referring here to intellectuals who automatically assume that no reasonable person would prefer a motorboat to a canoe. This kind of outlook, and the problems it entails in our society, are a pretty good reason for doing a serious study of tourism and other forms of recreation.

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