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| Chainsaw Not Our Only Enemy Industrial-strength recreation, "wise-use" and public-private partnerships threaten the very notion of "nature." |
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In 1913, Katherine Bates penned “America the Beautiful” from the top of Pikes Peak, a mountain in Colorado’s Pike National Forest that stands more than 14,000 feet tall. If Bates were still alive today, though, she’d barely recognize this national treasure turned commercial tourist attraction. At the foot of the peak, you can visit Santa’s elves at the “North Pole” amusement park. You can ride the Ferris wheel or have some cotton candy while feeding domesticated deer. Or you can stay at a bed and breakfast and watch a melodrama at the supper club. The Pikes Peak highway is operated under special permit by the city of Colorado Springs. The city controls access to much of the Peak, including the north slope watershed, where it charges tourists to rent boats and fish. For a fee, you can drive up the peak, where you can buy doughnuts or rubber tomahawks. If driving is too much effort, you can take the Pikes Peak Cog Railway—for a small fee of course. The site is primarily used by tourists; many of the residents of Colorado Springs have never even visited the summit of Pikes Peak. Is this a harbinger of what’s to come for America’s public lands? Once, industries and their lackeys in Congress wanted to merely strip our lands of whatever public riches they held. Today they want more than the land itself. They seek to reshape the very way we perceive and relate to our natural environment. To accomplish this task, they have developed a brilliant and cunning strategy: themed, motor-sport-oriented, industrial-strength recreation. It’s a new brand of recreation that has been carefully defined, thoughtfully packaged. It comes with a strong take-home message—and a hefty price tag. Those who visit the forests, deserts, mountains and rivers of the future will no longer be encouraged to discover nature for themselves. Future visitors to America’s public lands will find clean, safe “ecotainment” theme parks: an assortment of tame, fabricated and pre-arranged recreation experiences constructed solely for their consumption. The “wilderness” experience of the future won’t just enrich private concessionaires, but will instill an underlying corporate message: “Trust us, we know how to manage nature (and you).” For many of us, wilderness provides the last great (albeit temporary) refuge from the traffic jams, ubiquitous advertising and hectic pace of “civilized” life. Once or twice a year we throw the old backpack into the car and head into the backcountry for a revitalizing romp in the wild. Others might prefer to spend a long weekend peacefully camped by the lake while fishing or just plain relaxing. Whether you’ve been sleeping on the ground or in your heated RV, that brief return to nature is enough to refresh you, to lift your spirits and to provide fortitude sufficient to last until your next nature fix. After three or four days and nights of “roughing it” we find our spiritual batteries recharged. We’re ready to once again immerse ourselves in our normal lives. Unfortunately, that link to sanity is under attack by the same powers that dominate our daily lives. Perhaps they’re just making a profit by giving people what they want. Or maybe they want more. As the cattle barons of the American West discovered, to control the bottomlands did not assure success. To gain domination and total power, you needed to control the watershed. America’s wild and scenic places are the watershed from which our strength and resiliency springs. We will tolerate, even accept, being treated as cattle so long as we have plenty to eat and are permitted free access to the stream. If made to drink instead from galvanized stock tanks, we become dependent upon the owner of those tanks for our very survival. Free access to raw nature is too important a human resource to institutionalize and turn into just another commodity. A New Enemy Unfortunately for all of us who care about wild and natural places, they are now in greater danger than at any time in recent history. The newly stated goal of federal land managers is to turn leisure into a “product,” to create, market and sell “brands” of institutionalized recreation and to operate like profitable businesses instead of as public resource managers. Through the growing use of corporate-sponsored “educational interpretation” and similar “visitor services,” our public lands themselves will become the final vehicle through which our concepts of nature will be defined and redefined to advance the agenda of Corporate America. We will have no option except to drink from their contaminated stock tanks. This new environmental enemy is not so different than the old one, though. In many cases, the congressmen behind the recreation agenda are the same people we have fought for years. The corporate powers however, are quite different, and may be unfamiliar to many. They are, with few exceptions, singularly united within an easily identified, high-profile target. And it is this target, this coalition, that we must defeat in 2003. The name of the enemy is the American Recreation Coalition. Its leader is Derrick Crandall, and its membership consists of more than 150 high-powered recreation industry corporations and associations. Members include jetski, snowmobile and RV manufacturers, ski associations, campgrounds and Disney, to name a few. Last July, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) introduced the most recent threat in the form of the Federal Lands Recreation Fee Authority Act (S.2607). The bill seeks to make the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, which charges an access fee for public lands, permanent. Please help me to defeat Bingaman’s bill. And more important, please take the time to become more familiar with the threats to our wild lands now being codified through the current shift to industrial strength recreation. Green Colored Glasses In contrast to my doom and gloom, the message from big “environmental” groups (as expressed in the promotional materials that seem to appear in my mailbox with greater and greater frequency) is jubilant. These beautiful (and high cost) congratulatory statements explain how such-and-such a forest was saved from clearcutting. These are optimistic messages, suggesting that through ever more diligent work, additional lands may be saved in 2003. But I am sorry to say that while my friends may save more trees in 2003, we will almost certainly begin to lose the very land and ecosystems upon which these trees now grow. We now face threats even greater than Ronald Reagan and James Watt, Reagan’s infamous Secretary of the Interior who oversaw the massive clearcuts of the 1980s. America’s wild places are not only threatened by mining, logging, grazing and drilling. An equal, if not greater threat is the effort to “commercialize, privatize and motorize” them. This effort is largely orchestrated by recreation and entertainment corporations, with the rubber stamp of anti-environmental western state congressmen. And it is being implemented by land management bureaucrats who, quite frankly, are sick and tired of fighting with environmentalists about extraction issues and are glad to be moving on to something new! These are very tough times for the environmental community. It’s not that we’re incapable of coping under conditions of adversity. On the contrary, we are at our finest when the forces of darkness are most apparent. James Watt did more to expand our ranks, and fill our coffers, than did any of our actual successes. In fact, the mere suggestion that we are gaining the upper hand would probably send the movement into recession. But that is not the problem we face today. It’s far worse than that. Those of us working at the grassroots level know what we want to accomplish and why we dedicate our lives to activism. We are close enough to our issues, and operate on sufficiently low budgets, that we can pursue our visions faithfully, without distraction and without feeling compelled to settle for less than we know is right. Grassroots vs. Astroturf This unflagging commitment and sharp focus are not so apparent in the large national environmental organizations that have developed a much greater sense of political savvy and requirement for significant funding. And certainly not so for the ever-growing number of fallacious, corporate-sponsored groups that profess to represent “the new environmentalism.” Also not so for the hundreds of “Astroturf” organizations sprouting up everywhere—groups with names suggesting green, but which are anything but. The reason 2003 is going to be such a tough year for the environmental movement is that the general public has become lost in an increasingly discordant cacophony of environmental issues. They haven’t a clue which threats are real, which can probably be ignored, which could shrink their wallets, or which will cause their early demise. Even in the environmental community, we are finding it increasingly difficult to tell friend from foe, especially when we see bona fide environmental groups joining highly questionable coalitions having obviously anti-environmental members or leaders. I can usually quickly identify a fake environmental group. But when I see coalitions forming between groups that I actively support and those that I actively oppose, I become totally baffled. It also disturbs me to find that although my beliefs and values systems have, over the last ten years, remained rock solid, I find my position drifting, relative to the mainstream. In reality, the middle is moving so quickly to the right that “absolute” positions become disconnected from previous landmarks. And with the introduction of so much ardently anti-environmental, yet green-sounding chaff, the battleground has become chaotic indeed. Amid all of this confusion, the issues facing the environmental movement have shifted radically. A New Agenda An important shift in public lands management has already occurred. There is a major new issue before us and it will deserve much more attention and scrutiny than it is now receiving. That’s not to say that the battles with the extractive industries have ended or that federal land management agencies now suddenly share our views. But starting in 2003, we will find that the industries most threatening the environment will no longer be those we’ve grown accustomed to fighting. Furthermore, the federal land managers whom we’ve so diligently watch-dogged will become seemingly less interested in defending their newest timber sales or mining projects. However, to mistake their apparent retreat for evidence that our righteous efforts have finally paid off would be the biggest of all possible mistakes. While this management shift has been occurring for several years, in 2003 it will become painfully clear that the new business of the Forest Service, the BLM and other federal agencies is “industrial-strength recreation.” From now on, trees will be rented by the hour instead of sold by the board foot. And while that might sound like a step in the right direction, it is absolutely not. The sad truth is that this recreation agenda is being driven by corporate and wise-use forces whose mission is turning nature into a commodity. For those of us who still find refuge in the wild, it means the end of our respite from daily life. For everyone, it means the continued destruction of our natural sources of water, clean air, biodiversity and everything else our public lands provide for us. I wrote this story five years ago, but Forest Voice is the first to publish it, with edits for accuracy and timeliness. Looking back at the last five years, I’m sad to say my observations were quite prescient; Much of what I predicted has come to pass. If this edited version lacks anything, it’s a sense of urgency and explanation of how this “management shift” has already happened. -Scott Silver For more information, please visit Scott Silver’s website Some other good information sources More about the commercialization of nature
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