"Don't like them," I tell him, "but if the money goes to the park like they say, I'm for it."
"Read this," he tells me, shoving a brochure my way. The cover reads, "For the second year, visitors are being charged $15 to climb/ski St. Helens--SHOULD YOU PAY IT?"
I expect the Krishnas to harass me at the airport, but this is a first on a mountaintop. I sit down on my skis to read. Before long I'm wondering whether it's because I'm hypoxic or because the sandy-haired man has valid arguments that my blood boils.
Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument is one of several hundred federal land agencies partaking in a four-year experiment approved by Congress called the Fee Demonstration Program. To make up for shortfalls in funds allocated to federal lands (a problem that began some fifteen years ago), Congress has allowed the Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish and Wildlife Service to issue all manners of user fees. Unlike old-style fees (like entrance fees to national parks) which padded the General Treasury, 80% of the funds gathered from the Fee Demonstration Program can be used by the agency issuing them. The remaining 20% goes to the overseeing regional offices and can be used for land-management issues elsewhere in the district.
Agencies say these fees provide lost funds to maintain decaying trails, repair over-loved areas, provide adequate waste disposal, and, in general, keep pace with the needs of wild lands that are being loved to death. So what's the beef?
Lots of things according to Rebel Rick here. For starters, fees promote pyramid building that is of dubious value. At St. Helens, for example, seasonal rangers are hired with the monies collected. A major responsibility of the rangers? Patrol the mountain to make sure skiers and climbers fork over the fees financing their paychecks.
Then there's a matter of fairness. At Mount St. Helens National Monument, $176 million was spent on a new highway leading to three new visitor centers, grand structures that siphoned an additional $50 million of taxpayer's funds. Monument visitors pay nothing to drive the new highway and $8 for a three-day pass into the heavily staffed visitor centers. To ski up the mountain (which uses a gravel road, a trail, and a pit toilet), costs visitors $15 per day. The brochure calls this "a money grab targeted at a group lacking the voice to protest."
Perhaps what's most irksome is the precedent being established. Public recreational lands (lands we already pay taxes to use) are being managed like privatized commodities. If we don't show park administrators and politicians how much we detest double taxation, we can expect more (and higher-priced) fees to follow.
"Any private business that operates like government would have bellied up decades ago," this rebel tells me, "but bureaucrats keep finding new ways to tax us." He pounds the air with his fist, "If we don't stop this pay-for-play movement, it's going to roll over historic precedents of land use."
"You're getting dramatic," I tell him.
"Am I? Look at Mount Rainier and Olympic national parks. This year, for the first time ever, you pay to camp in the backcountry."
Two weeks later, when I visit Mt. Rainier National Park to ski the glaciers flowing off the 11,000-foot summit of Little Tahoma, I encounter the newly placed sign declaring, "Permits Required." The sign says that as of June 1, we are required to pay a $10 fee for a permit and a $5/person camping fee. That's $20 on top of the $10 fee paid to enter the park. It reminds me of the e-mail I just received from a friend bemoaning how much it cost him to ski Mt. Shasta (climbing fee of $15/person and parking fee of $5/day). "We spent more to sleep in a tent than in a motel room the night before."
My partner flips the finger at the sign and we walk defiantly up the trail, joining the ranks of disobedients who are boycotting fees.
"What line will we use on a ranger, if we see one?" my partner asks."Should we say we're just out for the day?"
"Nope," I say. "I'll pull out my reporter's pad, get the spelling of his name, ask him to lay his $50 fine on me, and tell him the park will love the favorable ink they're about to receive."
We spend this weekend in late June carving steep slopes of corn without the backcountry cops slapping us with fines or cuffs. Surprisingly, I find myself joined to the jihad now. When we encounter climbers atop Little Tahoma, I pop the question, "What do you think about the new backcountry fees?"
Deja vu.
"Don't like them," one tells me, "but if the money goes to the park, I'm for them."
A diatribe bursts from my mouth. My spew lasts long past my mountaintop testimony. I e-mail my congressman, my two senators, Rainier's superintendent to give them a piece of it too. I say that rather than the government's solution to waste (increased taxes), it's time to emulate businesses that have streamlined, pared deadwood, and reeled-in employee benefits. I ask them to spare us the indignity of double taxation for a walk in the woods. "Do you remember anything about King George?"
I conclude by telling my public servants that if income taxes were reduced, user fees would be acceptable. But until I receive back what was previously allocated for public lands but is now financing the gilded mirrors aboard Air Force One, the Kenneth Starr Investigation, and the 114,000 IRS employees who have produced 7 million pages of tax code, I'm boycotting the Fee Demonstration Program. "Send on the rangers; fines are the only funds you'll rob from me."
The momentum is rolling and I pull out the St. Helens brochure, reread it, and decide to visit a recommended website. That's when my eyes go from half to wide open.
The address is http://www.wildwilderness.org and the man behind the site, Scott Silver, is an avid backcountry skier, a biochemist by training, and an idealist who has made the fight against the Fee Demonstration Program his personal crusade. The fight started quite innocently as a protest against the hiking fees on the national forest trails around his hometown of Bend, Oregon. But the more Silver, 47, researched the situation, the more sinister the picture grew. And the more time he devoted to the cause. Soon, he was working, without pay, seven days a week, 16 hours a day to inform the public of his findings.
In his writings on the Wild Wilderness website, he states, "In recent years federal recreational land managers have had to endure severe funding cuts. These cuts were not made in order to eliminate government waste or to reduce the federal deficit, as the public has been led to believe. These cuts are part of a carefully orchestrated strategy by sympathetic Congressmen working hand-in-glove with the wise-use movement; a strategy calculated to co-opt public lands for corporate profit and guarantee "motorized recreational access" without future restrictions."
Conspiracy theories abound among the paranoid and the fanatical. Skeptically I start following the leads given at this site to their sources--documents published by the Forest Service, Congress, American Recreational Council--and my skepticism mutates to dismay. After hours on the computer following the trail, Silver's odious claims smell more and more like truth.
Because their budgets have been slashed, the Forest Service, Parks Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish and Wildlife Service have not only been encouraged to charge user fees but to align themselves with private organizations that can develop and maintain recreational opportunities.
Unfortunately, while Winnebago-driving Americans may appreciate where this so-called "wise-use" alliance between the public and private sectors is leading (more concessions; fewer restrictions on motor boats, jet skis, snowmobiles, motorcycles and RVs; campgrounds with showers, laundromats, and grocery stores; swankier hotels and lodges; interpretive displays teaching us about the outdoors indoors), we who value undeveloped recreation and the spiritual connection to raw nature (whether that connection comes through skiing, hiking, climbing, or canoeing) will find the wilderness under siege.
The winds of war began during the Reagan administration when wilderness friend, James Watt, toiled as the Secretary of the Interior to privatize public resources. At the same time, Congress slashed appropriations to land management agencies in what Wild Wilderness believes was "a deliberate attempt to promote the privatization agenda." As Silver notes, "Without adequate funding, the maintenance crisis we are now facing was inevitable. And so was the eventual 'rescue'... by private/public joint ventures and partnerships."
Behind the machinations of Congress is the bad medicine of Frank Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska known to be one of the most anti-environmental senators on the Hill by such conservation organizations as The Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife, The Sierra Club, and The League of Conservation Voters. Murkowski, also Chairman of the Senate's Natural Resources Committee, is working with the American Recreation Coalition, a consortium of over 100 corporations, that has put time and money into helping federal agencies implement the Fee Demonstration Program. In return for its outlays, members of the American Recreation Coalition (ARC) are receiving the right to develop the recreational opportunities on lands where they have lent a helping buck.
To Murkowski and the ARC, the future of our public lands has little to do with wilderness, ecosystems, bio diversity, habitat and everything to with revenue, profits, and bottom lines. Says Murkowski, "To understand what is possible we need only look to the Forest Service. In the first half the 1980's budget cutbacks forced the closure of many forest campgrounds and reduced seasons of operation at virtually all others. Beginning in 1987, the agency initiated a program to replace its direct campground management with concessioned operations. In 1996, 70% of all camping in the forests occurred at concessioned campgrounds."
At face value, private/public partnerships sharing costs sounds logical. Likewise, a coalition of interests represented by a body named the American Recreational Coalition sounds favorable. After all, doesn't harvesting recreational opportunities beat the devastation of harvesting timber or minerals?
Yes. And no. Unfortunately, the recreation peddled by the ARC is not what it seems; it is not consistent with the heritage of our public lands. The ARC represents the interests of RV manufacturers, motorcycle associations, downhill ski areas, power boaters, jet skiers, snowmobilers, tour associations, lodging companies, and oil corporations. There's a notable absence of advocates protecting the wilderness or representing wilderness sports. All of which makes the ARC a favorable force for the future only if KOA, Yamaha, Chevron, and Disney (all of whom are members of this coalition) represent the recreational opportunities you think our national parks and forests need. Silver vehemently disagrees with this direction, stating that the agenda of the ARC is to "motorize, privatize, and commercialize America's public lands for the benefits of its corporate members."
Speeches given by high officials within the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture indicate that Silver is not misreading the writing on the wall. Michael Dombeck, Chief of the US Forest Service, told ski area managers at Ski Industry Week, "The Forest Service is the Proctor and Gamble of outdoor recreation...We are looking to promote--and seek your help to promote--the full array of recreation products and services that we offer the American people."
James Lyon, Dombeck's boss and the Under Secretary of Natural Resources and the Environment, says of the Forest Service, "We've made recreation a priority, we're promoting it, we're marketing it, and we're seeking partners to help."
Later, in the same speech given at Outdoor Recreation Week, an event bringing together officials who manage public lands and recreation executives from the private sector, Lyon says of the Forest Service, "We developed a marketing strategy and an icon that we hope will become to outdoor recreation what the Nike swoosh is to sporting goods...we know that high quality outdoor recreation experiences are the product of public/private partnerships."
Foreshadowing how the funds will be received to develop these recreational experiences, Lyons said, "What about a profit-sharing arrangement with concessionaires where the taxpayer and the business benefit from the venue--in cold, hard cash--and the customer benefits from improved recreation...We've got a great product to sell."
Lyons brazenly assumes the "improved" recreational services he would like to sell are the will of the people. From surveys taken of national forest visitors, he says 38% wanted improved services and facilities, 18% wanted more and better recreation facilities, and 18% wanted more and better interpretive information. But without knowing more about the surveys he quotes, it is reasonable to ask whether 62% might not want improved services and facilities, and whether 82% might not want better improved services or better interpretive information.
While the commercialization of public lands may reflect the will of those who stand to profit (e.g., corporations behind the ARC), and the will of those whose jobs are at stake (e.g., Park Service and Forest Service employees), it may flow against the will of the people.
In a National Public Opinion Survey of what Americans expect of their National Parks, the majority rated all of the following as inappropriate: post offices, outdoor equipment rentals, boat marinas, bank machines, gas stations, laundromats, swimming pools, hotels, motels, auto repair shops, taverns, golf courses, airstrips for sightseeing aircraft, video arcades, movie theatres, hair salons. The list of appropriate amenities included: hiking trails, visitor centers, bike trails, tent campgrounds, horse stables, cabins and cottages, souvenir shops, RV campgrounds, and restaurants.
While the public may feel differently about what is and isn't appropriate on lands managed by the Forest Service, BLM, or Fish and Wildlife, we all need to recognize that development is the price of giving private enterprises access to our public lands.
The Forest Service is entirely aware of the price. In its 100-page Public-Private Ventures Desk Guide, it notes that changes are required to accommodate private partners. "There are traditional views of what types of facilities are appropriate in the national forests; these views may need to be reevaluated. For instance, to provide a viable business opportunity (for a concessioned campground) it may be necessary to consider amenities such as showers and telephones, or additional sources of revenue such as laundries, electrical hookups, or camp stores that are not traditionally associated with Forest Service campgrounds."
This Desk Guide also eludes to the fact that staying at such a campground won't be cheap. To create the bottomline needed, private partners will require an "average income per site, per night of $20."
If a night on public lands is sounding more and more like a night at KOA, you're right. That's where the trail blazed by Murkowski, the ARC, and Fee Demonstration Program leads. And if this vision of recreation for the 21st century doesn't conform to your notion of what public lands are about, your voice needs to be heard. Soon.
It's almost too late. The topic is complex and blinders obscure the real issues and players. In September of 1999, the trial period of the Fee Demonstration Program ends, Congress evaluates the program, and, if the populace has taken the bait, the landscape of our public lands will be forever changed.
Should that happen, the changes we have witnessed so far will be but the point of the stiletto. If the public swallows user fees, Congress will feel justified in slashing public-land appropriations even more, public-land managers trying to save their jobs will prostitute themselves to more and more public/private partnerships, and businesses (along with the developments they bring) will control ever larger chunks of our public holdings.
The battle is lost unless there is an upswelling of discontent, unless politicians have their mailboxes filled with letters of disgust, unless our congressmen and senators know that we want money appropriated to public lands that benefit us all rather than to pork-barrel subsidies, unless the superintendents of land agencies understand they are violating the public will, unless park rangers have their lives made miserable by fee violators who refuse to knuckle under, AND unless we make the plans of Frank Murkowski and ARC known to all who value wilderness and undeveloped recreation. To accomplish this check out the sidebar, What You Can Do.
And do it.
Like many wilderness lovers, I am not a political animal, but the St. Helens rebel inspired me. After descending the mountain, I found his boycott brochure papered to my car's windshield. Farther down the mountain at the climber's registration booth, his brochure was taped to the bulletin boards. The man was not just boycotting, he was changing minds.
Undoubtedly, monument employees quickly trashed his side of the story, which leaves it up to me (and, hopefully, to you) to carry the message to other backcountry users. Now when I encounter the pay-for-play signs, I will not only boycott, I'll plaster them with a brochure of my own offering quite a different slant to the story. The hour is late and I'm feeling the choke collar tighten. It's late enough that I might even take to the mountain top and adopt Krishna tactics.
SIDEBAR:WHAT YOU CAN DO
1) Disobey. Boycott the fees. Make the fees a curse for land agencies to administer and enforce. Henry David Thoreau said it of a government that was a 150 years more benign than the government of today. "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
2) To disobey is not enough. Make your discontent known: Write your representative and senators. These folks will decide the fate of the Fee Demonstration Program and they need to know how many people will want them out of office if they give away our public lands. Obtain mail and e-mail addresses of congressmen from www.house.gov/memberwww.html or www.house.gov/writerep/, those of senators from www.senate.gov/senator/index.html.
3) Write the superintendents of the public lands you visit; tell them you're boycotting fees and why. Tell them to kill the Fee Demonstration Program, to lobby Congress for larger appropriations, and to stop wasting what they are appropriated on timber and grazing subsidies.
4) Visit the Wild Wilderness Website (www.wildwilderness.org), read its findings, sign its petitions ("What We Can Do link). Also, cut-and-paste the circular found at (www.wildwilderness.org/doc/dappen.htm) into an e-mail. Send copies of this message to every wilderness user you know (whether they're skiers, climbers, hikers, or kayakers). Ask your friends to read the circular, e-mail it to all the wilderness users they know, and to get letters written to their senators and representative.
5) Visit the webpages of the Forest Service (www.fs.fed.us) and American Recreation Coalition (www.funoutdoors.com). The best wake-up call is to see what those who are molding the future are saying. Read just a bit between the lines and you'll be worried.
6) Copy this article and snail mail it to wilderness users you can't e-mail. Again, get them to mail the article on.
7) E-mail Senator Murkowski and tell him you're contacting every Alaskan you know to vote him out of office.
8) Act. Good intentions are worthless.
