Last week, the U.S. Forest Service trumpeted the news that it would be offering four fee-free days in 2013. This is dandy, but not as dandy as it sounds, for two reasons.
First, “fees are not charged on 98 percent of national forests and grasslands, and approximately two-thirds of developed recreation sites in national forests and grasslands can be used for free.” So to recap: most of this is free all the time anyway.
Why open up the additional 2 percent of national forests (and approximately 33 percent of developed recreation sites) on those four days? Because the Forest Service is a team player. The agency’s “participation in fee-free days supports the efforts of President Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors Initiative that aims to establish a 21st Century conservation and recreation agenda.”
Which sounds great until you learn that in 2012 the service had eight fee-free days.
So some “support.” Cutting your fee-free days in half to show your support is like giving half your usual contribution to the Red Cross after a hurricane. It’s like observing that your wife has had a hard day and offering to rub one of her feet.
It seems like an insult, but maybe the Forest Service is just baffled by this Great Outdoors Initiative, which is where we’re camped. In Bafflement Canyon.
Several years ago, the AGO Initiative undertook what it modestly calls an “unprecedented listening tour to learn from communities outside of the Nation’s Capital.” The result was what it modestly calls “the most robust public conversation about conservation in American history: 51 public listening sessions with more than 10,000 participants and more than 105,000 comments submitted.”
This of course resulted in a report that came out almost two years ago, in which “10 major goals and 75 action items” were identified. After this, the Secretary of the Interior “continued the conversation with Americans outside Washington, this time seeking recommendations in each state about opportunities that support the three place-based goals of the America’s Great
Outdoors Initiative.” So more listening and talking and, we assume, goal-setting.
But the point of all this vague. Because, as we noted back in 2011, the folks at Interior have admitted that there was no money for any of this, that the people who want to act on most of the 75 action items “will have to find funding somewhere besides the U.S. government.”
So what is the purpose here? You can’t claim to be an initiative unless you actually initiate something. Once again, we refer you to Billy Pueblo in Hearts of the West: “If a person saying he was something was all there was to it, this country’d be full of rich men and good-looking women.”*
* Billy Pueblo was the pen name of Howard Pike, a fictional writer played by Andy Griffith in the 1975 movie Hearts of the West, which was enjoyable when seen 38 years ago.
Photo of the Seney National Wildlife Refuge in Michigan, via the America’s Great Outdoors web site.
