Earlier this month, I told staffers of a
U.S. Senate committee about my annual ritual where a woman in a
Park Service uniform passes me a map of Yellowstone, brochures on
bison safety and my National Parks Pass. I turn over $50 to her,
and for the next year I have access to everything from the Gates of
the Arctic to the Everglades.
It’s all part of
the six-year-old Fee Demonstration program that uses the funds to
improve trails, repair outdated sewage systems and provide general
maintenance where the fees are collected.
Not a
bad deal, I think.
Last year, Fee Demonstration
provided the Park Service with $126 million in gross revenues. The
Bush administration seeks to make the program permanent. Two pieces
of legislation are now in congressional committee and the
administration hopes to push one to a vote before major House
supporters retire in the fall. If the administration succeeds, it
will be an environmental shouting point for 2004.
In decades past, environmentalists were hesitant
to criticize recreation on public lands. After all, no resources
were consumed and damage was minimal. The bad boys were mining,
timber harvesting and grazing. But as those activities were
curtailed, the realities of recreation became clear.
It did damage the environment.
Recreation threatened half the sites on the 1999 National Parks
Conservation Association’s list of endangered parks. The
organization’s Rocky Mountain director, Mark Peterson, announced,
“We need to recognize that tourism can be as environmentally
destructive as mining and logging.”
It consumed
resources, too. Recreational users visit public lands to get away
from people. But each additional visitor detracts from the
experience of others. The difference between four people in a field
and 40 is a consumed resource.
Fee Demonstration
worked to address these problems. The $600 million collected
between 1997 and 2001 mitigated environmental damages and repaired
infrastructure. In Grand Teton National Park, fees paid for
wildlife surveys and water-quality monitoring. The General
Accounting Office assessed Fee Demo and found the program a
success.
Why then does the Bush Administration
worry about chances for making the program permanent? Who could
object?
Some do, including those recreationists
who simply don’t want to pay the costs. They like free. They hate
fee. Who wouldn’t want someone else to pay for their play time?
But, in this case, our public lands and their natural environments
pay the price.
There are legitimate concerns
about fee-based recreation. The first is fear about commercializing
the parks. A second concern is that fees drive the poor from lands
where they ought to “- through taxes “- hold equal title to the
rich.
Commercialization, however, is the
heritage of our national parks. The first park created by Congress,
Yellowstone, coalesced from the Northern Pacific Railroad’s
aspirations for hauling visitors across the country for a profit.
Moosehead hats, ice cream cones and plastic tomahawks have long
been standard fare in our national parks.
As for
the second concern, most low-income families lack the luxury of
free time or the financial means to get to the front gate of a
national park. But if we are worried about their access, one
alternative is to send them a free pass based on the previous
year’s tax return or coupons for a percentage reduction in their
fee.
>Let’s investigate some real effects of
fees, since after all, that’s what “demonstration” programs are all
about. Fees make public lands safer: At the Glen Canyon National
Recreation Area, assault, rape, and drunken driving dropped sharply
after fees were imposed. Gang activity went down. Family visits
went up.
Fees also help to protect natural
resources. Funds from Fee Demo repaired trails in Utah so that
visitors were prevented from straying off trails to harm the
fragile, black crusts of bacteria, which provide groundcover in the
region.
Fees also place decision-making power on
the ground. No park manager will order a $1 million outhouse like
Congress voted for Glacier National Park in 1998. On-the-ground
managers know parks have more pressing needs. If this is
commercialization, I’m all for it.
Scott Silver,
who heads a group called Wild Wilderness in Oregon, is a leading
opponent of fees. Mr. Silver’s concern is that free and fee
recreation differ like “romantic love and paid sex. It changes the
experience totally. It can’t be wild if it’s not free.”
He fails to mention that unlike free love, where
both parties benefit, a plan of free recreation benefits the
recreationist, while the environment just gets screwed.
I hope I can pay my fair share again next year.
J. Bishop Grewell is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a student at
the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a
Research Associate with PERC – the Center for Free Market
Environmentalism.
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