The People's Treasure is a wonderful poem by the Australian poet Michael Leunig which beautifully describes how the privatizers are stealing what we collectively own. It begins:
They're privatising things we own together.
And though we're still connected by the weather
They say that sharing things is now unsound.
They're lonelifying all the public spaces.
They're rationalising swags and billabongs.
They're awfulising nature's lovely places,
Dismantling the dreaming and the songs."
Wherever you look you can see the privatizers. Free-trade agreements, the prison industrial complex, terminator seed technology and corporate run school systems are just a few of the forms privatization is taking. It is the impending Corporate Takeover of Nature with its associated Privatization of Wildness where I have established my personal battle lines in this larger fight.
The Chief of the Forest Service, Mike Dombeck, routinely responds to my oft repeated accusation that he is "commercializing, privatizing and motorizing American's public lands." Dombeck assures us that the US Forest Service has no intention of privatizing the ownership of America's National Forests. Except for the scores of land swaps the USFS enters into each year in which public forests are exchanged for private stumps, Dombeck is, I suppose, technically correct. But it is not the privatization of OWNERSHIP to which I have been referring. I accuse Dombeck of negotiating in secret with the recreation industry to privatize the "management control" of our National Forests and I challenge Chief Dombeck to respond to THIS ACCUSATION!
From January 11-14, 2000 Chief Dombeck, his boss, the Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons, 20 high level USFS employees, 56 other federal employees and 42 representatives of the recreation industry met in secret at Walt Disney's Contemporary Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. The meeting, called "Partners Outdoors IX" was the ninth such high-level closed-doors meeting in as many years.
To get an idea of what was discussed in this luxury resort where both the public and media were barred from entry, consider the following short quote from meeting notes obtained by the author - "Leaders from federal agencies and recreation companies have participated in candid and intense sessions -- which have proved successful in increasing the flow of ideas for cooperation between the public and private sectors and resulted in more than two dozen concrete recommendations for joint actions…. The conference will further discuss opportunities for for-profit corporations and federal agencies to cooperate more regularly in meeting the outdoor recreation needs of the American public and visitors from overseas."
More explicit still, are notes the author obtained from last year's Partners Outdoors VIII by way of a FOIA request. The following statement is quoted from a document titled "Recreation Partnership Initiative" and appears on Army Corps of Engineer letterhead. The quote begins: "The intent of the program is to encourage private development of public recreation facilities such as; marinas, hotel/motel/restaurant complexes, conference centers, RV camping areas, golf courses, theme parks, and entertainment areas with shops, etc."
We are talking about public lands upon which these private facilities will be built. And while the land itself will remain in public ownership, the use of that land will be entirely privatized. Once privately developed, these lands will no longer be available for other public purposes or uses. The true owners (you and I) will no longer even have access to our lands unless we are prepared to pay private corporations for that privilege.
The federal agencies are, of course, wetting themselves with excitement at what the see as a free lunch. In exchange for assigning development rights to your lands, federal managers will receive a cut of the profits generated from these entirely inappropriate private wreckreation developments. The Army Corp describes this arrangement in the following words: "The Corps is indeed excited about the possibility of providing these additional opportunities for private sector development of public recreation facilities. These opportunities provide a win, win, win situation. The private developers win because of the excellent opportunities they will have to make a profit. The public wins because of the additional recreation opportunities made available to them and the Corps and the Federal Government win because much needed public recreational facilities are provided at no cost to the Government. "
Mr. Dombeck may be technically correct when he says that "HE" has no intention of privatizing America's National Forests. But accompanying Mr. Dombeck at Partners Outdoors IX was the person who is putting together the privatization plan for him. The following is quoted from a resume made available in the official meeting notes. It reads: "Stepanie Hague - serves as Confidential Assistant to the Chief of the USDA Forest Service. At present, she is directing a national Forest Service effort, the Marketing Resource Group, which is completing an extensive study of marketing principles and techniques in preparation for the service-wide implementation of the Recreation Fee-Demonstration Program and to help transform the Forest Service into a better market-driven, customer-oriented agency."
To better understand what is meant by what you have just read, please note that the Marketing Resource Group is a critically important, extremely low profile program being run for the USFS by a private consultant - Robert S. Shulman. Once again, through the use of FOIA, I have obtained Mr. Shulman's consulting agreement and can tell you that he is currently billing the taxpayers of America at the rate of $350/hr, and will continue to do so until he has collected $253,971.52 of your money. Mr. Shulman reports directly to Dombeck's Confidential Assistant, Ms. Hague.
Mr. Shulman's job is to make the Recreation Fee-Demonstration Program look successful, because the key to turning America's public lands into one big outdoor playground depends entirely upon the success of the fee-demo program. Before fee-demo, federal agencies were prohibited from charging for recreational use of public lands except for developed campgrounds, national park access and for the use of mechanical boat launches. Fee-demo supercedes this restrictive law, and opens public land up to new revenue generating recreational uses and fees. Fee-demo is about creating business opportunities and is itself the love-child of a past Partners Outdoors gathering.
Quoting from another recently obtained document titled "Partners Outdoors : A Tradition of Action" one reads, "Among the major outgrowths of past Partners Outdoors sessions are: … the federal recreation-fee demonstration program authorized by Congress for FY96-99 and recently extended through FY 2001." The reason why the recreation industry created fee-demo is because without the ability to charge for recreation upon public lands, there could be no public/private wreckreation business.
Mr. Shulman is using every marketing trick in his vast repertoire to turn fee-demo into an apparent success and to obfuscate the enormous opposition to this program. To accomplish this short-term goal, Shulman's team has identified two nationally important test-markets. Shulman and his USFS partners will concentrate their effort upon these two specific locales in order to prove that the public likes being treated as customers and will happily pay-to-play. These test markets are the Pacific Northwest and Sedona, Arizona.
If the public buys what Shulman is selling, then there will be a never ending stream of new outdoor wreckreation products created for them to purchase in the years to come. If the public rebels so loudly and clearly that their voice is heard above the misinformation being spread by Shulman and his associates, then PERHAPS, the planned Disneyfication of the Wild can be avoided.
To close, I'd like to leave you with three short quotes. First, from an editorial that appeared in Sedona's Red Rock News: " 'We are designing a business. When this is all done, we will create a product line that has a price tag,' said Ken Anderson, Sedona-Beaver Creek District Manager."
Second, from a speech made by the Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons to the recreation industry on June 8, 1998. "We developed a marketing strategy and an icon that we hope will become to outdoor recreation what the Nike swoosh is to sporting goods and the famous Mercedes Benz hood ornament is to automobiles … Can you think of any entity - private or public - that has the breadth and diversity of outdoor recreation experience that you can find on the national forests? I doubt it! We've got a great product to sell. And, with your help, we can make it even better!"
And, finally, here is the concluding verse of Michael Leunig poem, "So if they steal away the people's treasure. And bring the jolly swagman to his knees. They can't remove the simple common pleasure Of loathing public bastards such as these."
The author, Scott Silver, is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Wild Wilderness. Located in Bend, Oregon, Wild Wilderness has fought in support of 'undeveloped recreation' since 1991. Readers can learn more about Partners Outdoors by visiting the following web page on the Wild Wilderness website -- http://www.wildwilderness.org/docs/po.htm or by contacting us at (541) 385-5261
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org