|
By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
"There are those who can live without wild things and sunsets and those who
cannot."
-- Aldo Leopold
"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and
wildness."
-- Henry David Thoreau
It is difficult enough to get the government to demand that automakers increase the fuel efficiency of their vehicles. But that task is even more difficult because of a little known, powerful organization that claims to speak on behalf of millions of Americans.
The American Recreation Coalition (ARC) lobbies Congress and other local, state, and federal agencies regularly. The members don't want protection for our precious public lands or fuel economy for vehicles. The ARC wants everyone to be charged to use nature and believes that the wilderness is best experienced on the back of a Jet Ski, snowmobile or in a high speed boat.
All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) (Photo courtesy
Idaho Parks)
The ARC is trying to convince Congress and the American people that the only way automakers will respond to the demands to increase gas mileage on new vehicles will be to lighten cars, making them unsafe. Many other ways exist to increase fuel economy that will not sacrifice vehicle safety.
The ARC joined with the anti-environmental organization Coalition for Vehicle Choice to support these assertions as well as to condemn the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to address global warming.
The American Recreation Coalition (ARC) is a recreation industry supported group that includes over 100 recreation associations and equipment manufacturing corporations. It has been instrumental in influencing Congress to implement many pro-business programs, including the public lands fee program currently in place in many of our national forests. The fee program has been extended through September 2002 and efforts are underway to make it permanent.
Derrick Crandall, president of the ARC and current president of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, an industry trade group that represents nearly 95 percent of all RV sales and service in North America, testified before Congress in February 1999. He told an oversight hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the fee program is "an important learning opportunity."
Crandall said, "Across the nation, we are experimenting with new fees and fees collected in new ways, with fees that vary by day of the week and which are regional in nature."
National Park Service user fee program (Photo courtesy
National Park Service)
The fee program is seen by critics as an effort to get visitors to public lands used to paying for what should be free access. The members of the ARC are hoping that the cash poor state and federal agencies will increasingly turn to business and industry to manage our public lands - for a price.
A look at some of the members of the ARC is quite revealing - and chilling:
•American Council of Snowmobile Associations
•American Hotel and Motel Association
•American Motorcyclist Association
•American Petroleum Institute
· American Power Boat Association
•Chevron Corporation
•Exxon Company
•International Association for Amusement Parks
•Amusement Industry Manufacturers & Suppliers
•International Jet Sports Boating Association
•National Rifle Association
•The Walt Disney Company
Critics of the ARC's recommendations and tactics call them "pay-to-play wreckreation," since many of the recreational activities advocated such as off-road vehicle use, snowmobiling, and hunting wreak havoc with wildlife and ecosystems.
Michael Zierhut of the California based organization Free Our Forests says, "They are into management of recreation, and one of the objectives is to concession out public land management. In the long run Disney could have parks on public lands," Zierhut warns.
ATV (Photo courtesy The Wilderness
Society)
"This shift actually began in the early days of the Reagan administration," says the Wild Wilderness website, when, "Interior Secretary James Watt undertook a whirlwind effort to 'privatize' public resources." At the same time Congress began to withhold maintenance funding to all federal land management agencies "in what we believe was a deliberate attempt to further promote the 'privatization' agenda. Without adequate maintenance funding, the 'maintenance crisis' we are now facing was inevitable. And so was the eventual 'rescue' of a decayed public lands recreation system, by private/public joint ventures and partnerships."
Wild Wilderness believes that the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and other federal and state agencies are intent on working with recreational industry leaders to craft plans to commercialize, privatize, and motorize recreational opportunities on federal public lands.
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, has said that the USFS fee program "has the ominous potential to transform recreational management of our public lands from a public service orientation to a commercial enterprise. Recreation uses that generate the most income like mechanized-lift skiing, off-road vehicle use, resort development and power boating would undoubtedly take precedence over lower impact activities like hiking, camping, backcountry skiing, nature study, and educational outings."
Off-road vehicle tracks (Photo courtesy
Oregon Sierra
Club)
A memo from the ARC states the coalition's intentions clearly. Obtained by the "Denver Post" and discussed in the newspaper's June 19, 2001 column by Penelope Purdy, the memo says, "Have we fully explored our gold mine of recreational opportunities in this country and managed it as if it were consumer-brand products? As we transition from providing outdoor recreation at no cost to the consumer to charging for access and services, we can expect to see many changes in the way we operate. Selling a product, even to an eager consumer, is very different from giving it away."
http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2001/2001L-08-03g.html |
