For those who accept Thoreau’s observation, “In wildness is the Preservation of the World,” these are critical times. America’s wild and natural places are in greater danger than at any time in recent history. While President Bush’s consumptive abuse of public lands by resource extraction industries gets plenty of attention, exploitation of the commercial value of intensive, high-impact, outdoor recreation and tourism is a growing problem. 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 theme parks and scripted adventures.
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. With tight budgets, Congress is disinclined to provide adequate funding for maintenance of our National Parks and other outdoor “amenities.” 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,” or “Fee-Demo”, is a private/public venture developed for the purpose of proving that “Pay-for-Play” is a workable model for recreation resource management.
Fee-Demo 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 being implemented as a Cost-Share Partnership with the American Recreation Coalition (ARC), an influential recreation industry lobby. ARC members include dozens of recreational equipment manufacturers and associations, public-lands concessionaires and the Walt Disney Company, but not one hiking, backpacking or environmental organization. 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. 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