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Show THE ZEPHYR/OCTOBER-NOVEMBER ESCAPING the ENCLOSURE 2005 of ENVIRONMENTALISM Some Views on the "Greening of Wilderne$$" By Lance Christie Jim Stiles’ “The Greening of Wilderness in Utah” exposed two themes which I agree are challenging and often degrading the current “environmental movement.” The first theme is agenda distortion among environmental advocacy organizations by the demands of their funding sources. Dave Foreman has written a chapter about this problem ‘in his new book, “Myths of the Environmental Movement.” The fundamental problem is similar to what we see today in political campaign financing: because of the high cost of getting elected/supporting the environmental organization staff, the candidate/environmental organization becomes timid about doing anything which might offend donor constituencies, and often shapes message and position aiming to incite special interest constituencies into contributing funds. The second theme is the commodification of nature which occurs when natural resources, processes, or information (e.g., genetic) are evaluated in terms of their economic value in the system of human capital. “Enclosure” occurs when something that was free to the public - access to land, for example - becomes privatized so that you have to pay a fee to access it. An environmental amenity becomes commodified and enclosed when you can buy access to it, and you can be charged with stealing it if you possess it without paying for it. Back in the days when the Leaming Report alleged that wilderness preservation devastates local economies, I and others countered with economic research showing that wilderness amenities and their protection through wilderness designation appeared to attract economic development, not repel it. Our purpose was to debunk an economic myth national forest outside this area without paying a fee. Then the demonstration fee program morphed into a form which the public has been rejecting. When we drove to California to visit my wife’s father, all through a national forest around the freeway were signs that you would be cited for parking, walking, or otherwise touching any square inch of the entire national forest without purchasing a “Forest Adventure Pass.” The signs said you could purchase one of these passes at a couple of forest service offices in towns I never heard of and have never been in during my lifetime. I viewed this as un-American tyranny. I have read I am hardly alone; “compliance” in the form of buying adventure passes or paying citations issued to vehicles not displaying one has been very poor, various local and state governments have gone on record as opposing : this program, and apparently some judges won't enforce collecting fines for people cited for trespassing on undeveloped parts of the forest. Pursuing the idea of commodifying and deriving economic revenue from public lands recreation has distorted the public lands wilderness and conservation debate. The opponents of the Utah Wilderness Coalition have turned the debate into a conflict between competing human recreational user groups. I will flippantly refer to them as the “exhaust suckers” and the “waffle stompers.” This has led to such wonders.as SUWA asking waffle stompers for instances in which they have been “displaced” from favored hiking routes by the adverse effluvia of motorized trail users; countered by the exhaust suckers arguing that which was being used to deny protection of wilderness values ort lands which still had the waffle stompers are being “voluntarily” displaced because they could choose to walk by the side of the trail and not compete with the machines, whereas the motorized users would be “involuntarily” displaced by trail closures to motorized use. It’s hard to find any them. moral high ground in this morass. In essence, we were arguing that wilderness is of most value to local economies and humankind in general if it isn’t commodified and enclosed. We were arguing that wilderness has its best effect on local economies if it is formally, legally protected from commodification and enclosure - “development” - because its continued presence as an Pursuing the idea of commodifying and deriving amenity attractor is insured through a public declaration: wilderness protection by Congress. Alas, we didn’t have the conceptual vocabulary to say that back then. The idea of promoting economic development in local communities by deliberately setting wilderness off-limits to commodification and enclosure got swallowed up by economic interests which our arguments alerted to the fact that you could privatize and sell “natural capital” inanew economic revenue from way. By the 1980's, public lands resource extraction was an economy in permanent decline relative to the rest of the U.S. economy. The smarter capitalists were looking for new ways to convert natural capital that belonged to everybody into human capital that belonged to them. public lands recreation has Thanks in part to environmentalists making economic arguments, the capitalists discovered promising new ways to enclose and sell natural capital. The capitalists were tipped off by people like Randall O’Toole’s Reforming the Forest Service. distorted the O'Toole noted that forest service office budgets were largely composed of a share public lands " of timber sale receipts, which supported the vast majority of staff. Managers’ salaries were larger or smaller in proportion to the budget and staff they managed. In order to maximize staff and budget, federal managers were rewarded by maximizing timber sales, even when wilderness and conservation debate... sales hurt wildlife, recreation, watershed, and the other natural values the managers were charged with protecting. O’Toole and others argued for commodifying public lands recreation and other multiple uses so that federal lands managers would be economically motivated to take good care of the goose laying these new golden eggs. The flaw in these commodification plans is obvious if you look at how well federal land managers were taking care of forests and rangelands from which they were already collecting timber harvest and grazing allotment fees. Why these reformers thought federal land managers would care for natural values producing new revenue any better than they were caring for existing revenue-producing values is anybody’s guess. These economic arguments by O'Toole and others were intended to motivate protection of recreational, wildlife, watershed, and other natural values on public lands by public lands managers. To accomplish this, federal agencies had to see those amenities “paying off” in revenue the agency could use for the maintenance of its empire. This led directly to the “demonstration fee program” concept. The demonstration fee program started off making sense. In its original form, the demonstration fee program permitted a federal land management agency to invest in the development of recreational facilities and the like, charge fees for their use, and then keep the fees for use in the land management agency office instead of sending the fee money to the treasury. The Mirror Lakes demonstration fee area in Utah is a good example. The USFS invested in trailhead, improvements in a heavily-used scenic recreational area on fee money keeping these amenities clean and repaired. 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