Last month's eco-arson at Vail could have been a monkey wrench aimed at the machinery of a blossoming marriage between recreation corporations and the keepers of federal lands, Boulder activists say.
Certainly, the fires cast light on a powerful consortium of recreation, industry leaders, government offi-cials and influential politicians that appears dedicated to turning Western public lands into glittering, destination playgrounds, they say.
"Industrial recreation," the off-spring of this new marriage, could be more damaging to wild land than all the logging, mining grazing of the past century, activists add.
"We don't know what (the arsonists') motives were," said Jasper Carlton, director of the Boulder-based Biodiversity Legal Foundation. Carlton's law-suit to protect the lynx gave rise to much of the controversy about Vail's proposed expansion.
"But what did it accomplish? It elevated the industrial-recreation issue from a local issue to a national issue. People are talking about it all over the country. Now it's going to be perused."
Generally the term industrial recreation refers to intensive, mechanized use of the landscape by high numbers of people, often involving extensive development.
Roz McClellan, a Boulder forest activist who has worked extensively on trail proliferation and its impact on wildlife habitat, said wide-spread recreational development will change the nature of the wilderness experience.
"Nature will become, instead of the object of a contemplative experience, a blurry backdrop for high-speed thrill technologies," she pre-dicted.
A little-known group calling itself the Earth Liberation Front has taken credit for the Oct. 21 Vail arson, which did an estimated $12 mil-lion in damage to four ski lifts and five build-ings. The group said it struck to protect the lynx because the 880-acre back-bowl expan-sion would damage what biologists have said is some of the best lynx habitat in Colorado.
But that explanation alone doesn't hold much water with one former Earth First! activist.
"(Dave) Foreman (co-founder of Earth First!) would never have advocated something like this, because he always said monkey-wrenching (environmental sabotage) was inef-fective against the big projects with a lot of money behind them" said the man, who claims no knowledge of the people behind the Vail arson but asked not to be named.
The industrial-recreation issue came up in Denver two weeks ago, when U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck - confronted by protesters - admitted recreation already has superseded logging as a target for environ-mental lawsuits.
But Vail is only the tip of the recreation iceberg. According to the Los Angeles Times, thousands of trees are being cut down around the Mammoth Lakes National Recreation Area in California to clear the way for a new golf course. $750,000 townhouses and a condominium complex.
And eight ski resorts in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park are planning 2 mil-lion square feet of commercial construction, 14,000 hotel beds and 500 dwelling units over the next decade, according to the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a grass-roots environ-mental group that advocates protection of the natural values of the Yellowstone ecosystem.
Near Aspen, the Forest Service has traded hundreds of acres of meadows famous for its wildflowers to a developer who will build upscale homes. The list goes on.
Derrick Crandall, whose group, the American Recreation Coalition, lobbies for recreational development of public lands, said commercial development will benefit both tourists and the environment by generating funds for upkeep of public places.
Such development will give public lands the "sizzle" it needs to draw people outdoors, he said.
"Recreation is going to be our business in the future," Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons said at a public-lands conference last December. He predicted recreation in national forests will pump an estimated $97 billion into the national economy in the year 200G. By contrast, he said, logging in national forests that year is expected to generate only $3.5 bil-lion, and grazing about $1 billion.
In an era of shrinking budgets for federal land-management agencies, officials are look-ing to "partnerships" with big business to pro-vide the infrastructure for industrial recre-ation. And the little-known American Recreation Coalition - led by 100 recreation-industry corporate executives - and subsidiary groups have been working on fulfilling this role for 20 years. The coalition represents the interests of the motorboat, jet-ski, RV, motorcycle and ski industries, as well as sport-ing-goods manufacturers. tour associations, public-lands concessionaires, petroleum cor-porations and even the Walt Disney Company.
Disney signed a memorandum of under-standing in 1995 with seven federal govern-ment agencies including the Forest Service, Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, "to work together in partner-ship on issues of common interest" and "activ-ities consistent with each organization's mis-sion and objectives."
The ties of media and entertainment con-glomerate Disney - ranked 48th in the Forbes 500 wealthiest- corporations - to the recre-ation coalition, as well as related organiza-tions called the Recreation Roundtable and the National Forest Foundation, has raised flags in the environmental community. Kym Murphy Disney vice president of environmen-tal affairs, is the executive vice president of the Recreation Roundtable, a subgroup of ARC, and Richard Nunis, chairman of Walt Disney Attractions, is a top member of ARC.
"You have to wonder what Disney wants from its partnerships with these federal agen-cies and these organizations," Carlton said.
Recreation doesn't have to destroy public lands, according to Scott Silver of Wild Wilderness, an Oregon group that tracks the recreation groups' lobbying for access to public lands.
However, "if managed poorly or managed primarily as a cash-generation tool, then the shift to 'industrial-strength recreation' is hard-ly an improvement (over logging, grazing and mining)," Silver said. "Unfortunately the Forest Service seems hell-bent on commer-cializing, privatizing and motorizing recre-ational opportunities on federal public lands."
Lyle Laverty Rocky Mountain regional forester, doesn't deny the new thrust. "You're not seeing two-week trips to go camping and fishing anymore," Laverty told the Times. "Instead, you're seeing busy two-Income families trying to pack in as much, activity as possible in a long weekend. Hiking or mountain biking, followed by a nice meal and maybe something fun or romantic at night."
Vail is a very real example of industrial recreation in our back yard, McClellan said.
"It's already the largest (ski) area in the country and it's growing aggressively," she said. "But now it's being marketed as a four- season resort. The impacts to the landscape that were only occurring in the winter are now extended throughout the year."
McClellan said an estimated 100,000 mountain bikes are using the ski lifts in the summer, extending unofficial "user-generated trails" throughout the backcountry, causing habitat fragmentation and opening the areas to recreation.
These trails often are used to disqualify an area from inclusion in wilderness bills, she said.
Carlton said the major ecological problem with industrial recreation is the Forest Service rarely requires extensive analysis of its effects on the environment and has never looked at the cumulative impacts of such development.
Lynn Young, a spokesman for the Rocky Mountain Regional Forest Service office, said he hasn't seen a recreation explosion in the region's national forests.
It's been building for 20 years," Young said. I don't see a sudden surge." But forest planning will have to accommodate the recreation needs of a growing Front Range population, he added.
Young said the worst-case scenario is over-stated. "Walt Disney World is not appropriate for the national forests. But if you want ski areas, big business is the only one who can do a ski area. And people want ski areas."
Such projects will receive full scrutiny under environmental law, Young said.
If that happens, it will be only because envi-ronmental groups have sued the agency, according to Carlton. "There has never been one ski area required to complete an Environmental Impact Statement unless the Forest Service was sued," he said.
Another behind-the-scenes trend has been setting the stage for the shift to recreation, according to Silver. "The shift actually began in the early days of the Reagan administration, Congress began to withhold maintenance fund-ing to all federal land-management agencies in what we believe was a deliberate attempt to fur-ther promote the privatization effort."
The lack of funding, which continues today created a vacuum in which the "decayed" pub-lic-lands recreation system would be "rescued" by the public/private joint ventures and part-nerships now being espoused, he said.
Regardless of the motivation behind the arson at Vail facing this potential assault on public lands might drive forest and wilderness activists to future acts of sabotage, according to the former Earth First! activist.
"I think (the arson) reflects the level of frustration people feel when faced with forces this powerful. And you got to admit it made a hell of a statement," he said. "Will it continue? I hope not, because anything less professional could hurt people and cause a serious backlash. But I wouldn't be surprised, unless the FBI makes some quick arrests. I suspect (the Vail arson) is quite admired in some quarters.