Written By: Scott Silver, Executive Director, Wild Wilderness
Congress has been putting the squeeze on both the BLM and USFS as it cuts operating budgets in the name of "deficit reduction". Meanwhile, with timber extraction becoming less profitable and with fewer high-value forests left to cut, these agencies have been actively scrambling to find new businesses to branch into and new ways to fill their coffers.
So fearing their own extinction, and with a good bit of encouragement coming from the recreation industry, these agencies have come up with a real doosey of an idea. Instead of selling trees by the board foot, they will rent them by the hour.
The "recreation fee demonstration program," introduced in some 80 test forests in 1997, will soon spread nationwide. And, while many outdoorsmen are already crying; "You can't see the Forest for the Fees", this "user-pay" program is really only the thin edge of a very thick wedge.
Let there be no mistake, the federal government is looking to recreation as "big big" business. From now on, you and I will be referred to as "customers" and they will sell us access to what they are calling "brands" of recreation (hunting, fishing, trail riding are "brand" examples).
If you thought we already owned these public lands, forget it. Their future will be controlled by corporate backed "private/public" partnerships (such as the "fee demo program"), designed to create a profitable new forest-based "product". And that product will be "rural development", "tourism" and "industrial strength recreation." My question to you is: Do you want it?
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
Wild Wilderness
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org