For those who accept Thoreau's famous saying: "In wildness is the Preservation of the World", these are critical times indeed. America's wild and natural places are in greater danger than at any time in recent history. The commercial value of outdoor recreation has been discovered, and the 'Wilderness Experience' has become a hot commodity. Federal land-managers are racing headlong to turn outdoor leisure into saleable products that can be marketed in the same way Proctor and Gamble markets soap. Worse yet, these land managers are being forced to become recreation and tourism entrepreneurs by a Congress intent on withholding funding in order to deliberately create opportunities for private investment and the eventual privatization of public lands.
Unless we halt this trend, the American Outdoors will soon be transformed into little more than a series of highly structured themed-parks and scripted adventures. Through the growing use of interpretive attractions and similarly crafted visitor services, our public lands themselves will become the vehicle through which the concepts of nature will be defined and redefined. Just as Disney instills upon its visitors a 'Man as Consumer' message in its constructed environments, those who visit the recreationally optimized public lands of the 21st Century will be served up a Disneyfied version of nature with a similarly corrupted message. What would Thoreau say?
As we approach the year 2000, we find corporate financed Congressmen, cash-strapped land managers, and recreation industry leaders working cooperatively to create an entirely new management paradigm. Their efforts are being directed toward maximal commercialization, privatization and motorization of our natural heritage. The name that best describes their vision for the 21st century and beyond is 'Industrial Strength Recreation'.
The first task of turning recreation and tourism on public lands into revenue generators will be to find the capital necessary to build the infrastructure to support these enterprises. In these days of tight budgets, Congress is disinclined to provide adequate funding for maintenance of our National Parks and other outdoor "amenities". Unable to draw upon traditional sources of funding, land managers are being told to develop new funding sources, such as: user-fees and private investment. The recently implemented 'Demonstration Recreation Fee Program' is unique in this respect. It is a private/public venture developed for the sole purpose of marketing and selling the very concept of 'Pay-for-Play' as an acceptable model for recreation management.
'Fee-Demo', as it is commonly called, allows federal land managers to charge for the privilege of visiting Wilderness areas and other lands. Fee-Demo is being implemented as a Cost-Share Partnership with the American Recreation Coalition, a highly influential recreation industry lobby whose recently retired Roundtable Chairman is the current Chief Operating Officer of the USFS.
Undeniably, Fee-Demo is about money, but this program has almost nothing to do with accumulating funds for trail maintenance and similar worthwhile purposes. Last year this program added just 18 million dollars to the 3.2 billion-dollar budget of the USFS. Fee-Demo is simply a program designed to provide federal land managers with an opportunity to demonstrate that the public will actually pay to enjoy things that once were considered amenities. Trail fees will never generate significant revenues, but that was never the intended purpose of this program.
As the cost of recreation rises toward its free-market potential, private sector investors will be encouraged to develop, through private/public partnerships with federal agencies, an ever-wider array of commercialized recreation products. We, the customers, will be given the opportunity to purchase or to forgo these products in accordance with our willingness and/or our ability to pay. These newly created commodities will encompass not only those nature-based recreational activities that we have traditionally enjoyed on public lands. They will also include entirely new, and far more profitable, forms of 'eco-tainment', 'edu-tainment' and 'wreckre-tainment'.
No amount of money can purchase the satisfaction of a hard-earned 'Wilderness Experience', and almost nothing is as awe inspiring as a breathtaking vista chanced upon while exploring the wild. But a lucrative market does in fact exist for cheap, easily consumable facsimiles of Nature. Under the tutelage of the recreation industry, federal land managers are starting to realize that by developing and building such things as interpretative viewing areas, it is possible to even sell the sunset.
For an agency accustomed to selling trees by the board foot, the Forest Service finds renting forests by the hour an irresistible alternative. Not only does recreation provide great PR opportunities, but it is potentially far more lucrative than continuing to dispose of our natural resources at bargain basement prices. But, extractive uses of public lands are already on the wane, and it is unnecessary to introduce "wreckreation" as the new business of the USFS. The so called financial crisis responsible for recreation user fees was manufactured by a Congress bent on the privatization of public wealth. The solution to deferred maintenance and infrastructure decay on public lands is extraordinarily simple. We need not continue to waste our tax dollars on corporate welfare. We could instead spend those dollars on resource protection and preservation.
In wildness is truly the preservation of the world. When
evaluating whether it is appropriate to charge a few dollars for
a walk in the woods, we should not be asking laughably banal
questions such as: "are users receiving fair value for their
money?" Instead we should be questioning what the world loses if
we are prepared to destroy the real value of Wilderness for the
price of a Big Mac and fries.
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org