We Don't Need Forest Service to `Sell' Us Our Public Land
12/16/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: We don't need Forest Service to `sell' us our public land
Source: The Idaho Statesman, commentary
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 16, 1999
Shocking and very revealing are these quotes from the new U.S. Forest
Service Internal Recreation Marketing Proposal: "build it and they
will come," "strengthen what nature has created to enhance value so
that we can charge fees, and in turn produce increasingly satisfied
customers."
A long delayed Freedom of Information Act request exposed this new
"marketing driven" Forest Service that paid $350 per hour totaling
$253,971.52 to a former Universal Studios marketing consultant to
develop the agency's now halfway-implemented marketing plan.
Hold on there, Smoky, the American public who owns the national
forests and has recreated there free for decades will now be
considered your "customer" and our taxes will be spent to repackage
nature so you can "market" it to us?
Forest Service employees across the country are now working with the
marketing consultant on the stated goal: "transform the Forest
Service to be `marketing driven' by fulfilling customer needs in such
a manner that financial resources are produced." Another goal is,
"solidify the Forest Service's future as a recreation outlet as a
result of fee for service."
These words, "transform" and "solidify the Forest Service's future"
expose the intentional metamorphosis that is in process. And here
lies the real outrage: a giant bloated federal bureaucracy having
lost its primary purpose (timber harvest) is reinventing itself to
avoid the major agency down-sizing that all economic logic would
dictate. And their new self preserving strategy is to start selling
to the public the privilege of access to lands which we already own.
As President Clinton stated recently, only 5 percent of our nation's
wood supply comes from public national forests. Fading into history
is the Forest Service's main function as taxpayer subsidized
facilitators of timber harvest by private logging companies in our
national forests. (This change is due partly to Idaho's most
effective forest conservation group, The Idaho Sporting Congress,
which just this fall won a federal court injunction to stop all
logging in the Boise and Payette national forests because the Forest
Service ignored old-growth protection.)
Looking to "commodity recreation" as its new "cash cow," and with
help from their old friends, the politicians, and new friends, the
recreation corporations, the Forest Service reincarnation would be
complete.
It's a new version of that incestuous triangle where corporations pay
politicians to legislate a Forest Service agenda, which then feeds
the corporate and Forest Service appetites on natural resources
belonging to the American people. And the public still winds up the
big loser.
The "Recreation User Fee Demonstration Program" is blatantly the
leading edge of a broader plan to transform the Forest Service and
create a working partnership with the corporate recreation industry.
This model for "demonstrating" that the public will accept the "pay
for play" concept was conceived and legislated by the recreation
industry's agents in Congress, and the Forest Service chiefs are
embracing it as the golden egg that will hatch them a new life.
The best scenario for the American people whose national forests are
their invaluable treasure would be a complete dismantling of the
unreformable Forest Service, while creating a new Department of Parks
and Recreation.
Our public lands should be managed exclusively for their ecological
and recreational values without any "marketing driven" or commodity
oriented schemes to sustain obsolete federal agencies or fatten
industries on the public trust.
Will Caldwell is a Ketchum artist and co-founder of The Idaho
Sporting Congress.