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. Even the most casual observer will appreciate that President Bush has declared war upon the environment and intends to log, mine and drill our national forests for whatever value can be extracted from them.
Unfortunately, consumptive abuse of public lands are not limited to these resource extraction industries. In recent years the commercial value of intensive, high-impact, outdoor recreation and tourism has been added to this list. It is fair to say that the Great Outdoors has itself become a hot commodity now that federal land-managers race to convert leisure into saleable products that can be marketed the way Proctor and Gamble markets toilet tissue or mouthwash. Worse yet, these land managers are being forced to become recreation and tourism entrepreneurs by a Congress determined to withhold necessary funding specifically for the purpose of creating opportunities for private investment and to facilitate the eventual privatization of the management control of those public lands.
Unless we halt this trend, the recreational opportunities upon America's public lands will soon be transformed into little more than a series of highly structured themed-parks and scripted adventures. Today 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 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 rely upon traditional sources of funding, land managers are being told to develop new funding sources, such as user-fees and private investment. The four year old 'Demonstration Recreation Fee Program' is unique in this respect. It is a private/public venture developed for the sole purpose of proving that 'Pay-for-Play' is a workable model for recreation resource management.
'Fee-Demo', as it is commonly called, allows federal land managers to charge for the privilege of visiting your public lands. It is a highly regressive form of double-taxation that is discriminatory and exclusionary. Worse yet, the very fact that people must pay for things that once were free has been proved to change their expectations and alters their recreational experience. It is, some have said, much like the difference between romantic love and paid sex.
Fee-Demo is the creation of the private recreation sector and is being implemented as a Cost-Share Partnership with the American Recreation Coalition (ARC), an influential recreation industry lobby. Included on ARC's member list are dozens of motorboat, jet-ski, RV, motorcycle, ORV and snowmobile manufacturers and associations. The remainder of the coalition includes ski area associations, sporting equipment manufacturers, tour associations, public-lands concessionaires and the Walt Disney Company. Not one hiking, backpacking or environmental organization is included. For ARC's member corporations and for the special interests they represent, pay-to-play guarantees access to those most willing to play and provides enhanced access for those willing to pay the most.
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'. The result will be the Corporate Takeover of Nature and the Disneyfication of the wild.
I wonder what Thoreau would say.
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 much more about this subject by visiting the Wild Wilderness website at -- http://www.wildwilderness.org or phone 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