WILD BILL
Outdoor Industry Association Should Stand Up For Wilderness
By Bill Schneider, 5-25-06
Two weeks ago while researching an article on outdoor recreation trends, I stumbled across an item on the website of the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) that shocked me.
In a past life, I was an OIA member and exhibited at the organization’s trade shows for many years, so I feel safe in saying that with few exceptions, such as large box stores like Cabelas that may sell both backpacks and ATV accessories, the organization represents businesses that sell gear for wilderness-related outdoor activities such as hiking and backpacking, Nordic skiing, snowshoeing, rock climbing, and paddling. In fact, we probably can credit OIA with coining the words “human powered” or “muscle powered” to refer to non-motorized recreation. OIA membership includes retail giants like REI and Eastern Mountain Sports, but most members are your local hiking, climbing or paddling store, a few of which also sell bicycles.
Given that background, pardon my surprise to discover that this non-motorized industry association has strongly supported continued use of motorized recreation in inventoried roadless areas in our national forests.
“It has recently been suggested that OIA opposes motorized recreation in roadless areas,” wrote recently departed OIA vice president for government affairs Myrna Johnson in a March 2 presentation to the Colorado Roadless Areas Review Task Force. “Let there be no confusion: OIA supports the broad spectrum of recreation opportunities allowed in roadless areas, from hiking, to mountain bicycling to motorized recreation.”
If interested, you can read the entire position statement yourself, but here is the key section: “While roadless areas may have many wilderness-like attributes, unlike wilderness the use of mountain bikes and other means of travel, including motorized recreation, are allowed. OIA supports the expanded means of recreation allowed in roadless areas and believes this increases the value and appeal of roadless areas for citizens.”
Knowing many OIA members who support Wilderness designation for roadless areas, this seemed like quite a conflict to me. Since this position was written, Myrna Johnson has left the organization (for no reason related to this position statement), and Amy Roberts has taken her chair. I caught up with her last week to discuss this conflict, but she does not see it as a conflict.
Roberts also made it quite clear. “We (OIA) are not an anti-motorized group.”
In talking to Roberts it appears as OIA is lumping mountain bikes and motorbikes together, and I’m sure the OIA’s limp-kneed position on roadless lands is influenced by close alliances with the International Mountain Biking Association, American Alpine Club and The Access Fund, all also located in Colorado and all either outright opposed to Wilderness or politically cool to the idea. Another blast from my possibly overstated concern for these constituencies (mountain bikers and climbers, and now outdoor retailers) being split off from the ranks of those who should be supporting Wilderness designation.
“The majority of our members do represent human powered,” Roberts confirmed, “but we have members who sell into both groups (motorized and non-motorized). We support the continued use of motorbikes on trails in roadless areas as long as it’s consistent with the travel plan for the area.”
I tried to explain that continued use of motorbikes on trails is the beginning of the end for any prospects for Wilderness. The Forest Service often allows ATVs to use the same trails they open to motorcycles. Then, the agency tends to confirm existing use, authorized or unauthorized, in travel plans, so if dirt bikes or ATVs have been allowed to use a trail, which is the case on almost all trails except those already in designated Wilderness, that trail shows up in the travel plan as open to motorized. Later, motorized recreation lobbyists supported by the FS use the travel plan and established use patterns as anti-Wilderness ammunition to shoot down proposed legislation. With its position, OIA essentially supports the basic evolution of land use that prevents Wilderness designation for our last roadless lands.
Even though most OIA members make a living selling equipment for recreational activates geared for Wilderness and even though the organization has threatened to pull its immensely popular and profitable biannual trade show out of Salt Lake City because the Utah governor opposed Wilderness, the OIA does not support Wilderness designation for inventoried roadless lands either in its own official position on roadless lands or in my recent phone conversation where Roberts confirmed that OIA has no plans to support any Wilderness designation.
I personally find this demoralizing if not insulting. Here we have an organization of outdoor retailers who more or less depends on Wilderness for its existence that does not have the backbone to even say the word, even though its official position statement concludes with this statement: “OIA strongly supports the continued protection of all of Colorado's Roadless lands.”
Earth to OIA! You may wish for alternative land designations to come along and save the political day, but right now, the only way to truly protect these roadless lands is Wilderness designation. OIA is, in essence, supports the real alternative, decades of continued Wilderness drought and gradual erosion of our wildland resource—most often, incidentally, by motorized recreationists—until it’s all a moot point. Individual retailers or manufacturers might rightfully fret about losing sales by coming to the surface on a controversial issue like Wilderness, but the OIA should not worry about this.
I’m confident most OIA members agree that Wilderness is great for business—their business and many other businesses—so please help me encourage the outdoor industry to re-write its position and support the only viable option we currently have for real, long-term protection of our roadless lands, inclusion in the Wilderness Preservation System.
Send your e-mails to OIA President Frank Hugelmeyer at or Amy Roberts at . You can also send a note to the Kim Coupounas, CEO of GoLite and current chair of the OIA board, at her company website, . (Don’t forget to include a copy in the comment section on that follows this article.) Even better, have a chat with your local outdoor retailer, who is probably an OIA member, about a new position statement.
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Comments
I cancelled my membership with REI some years ago when I learned that REI and other members of the OIA opposed Teaming for Wildlife, a plan to generate funds for conservation through excise taxes on outdoor gear. Teaming for Wildlife was based on the Pittman-Robertson Act (1937), which hunters supported throughout the 1930s to generate funds for habitat through excise taxes on sporting arms and ammunition.
Since hunters have been willing to tax themselves for habitat for decades, not to mention pay additional taxes on outdoor gear for habitat, I was profoundly disappointed that other outdoor recreationists and the outdoor gear industry--a pretty well-off bunch, to think of it--both opposed Teaming for Wildlife vehemently. What a bunch of selfish slobs!
Now, to hear that these folks refuse to support wilderness. We should banish them to empty swimming pools to ply their trades.
Best,
Robert
Krista Hanada
NFPA
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OIA expects outdoor activities to morph into one. That can include snowboarders and cross-country skiers who use snowmobiles to access terrain further from the trailheads and to use for transportation to get back up the hill to ski or board down or to haul camping gear out into the woods so more time can be spent skiing, shoeing, and boarding.
Since only about 5% of the forest visitors use the Wilderness, you are asking OIA to cater to the 5% of the users and to ignore the other 95% of the users. Do you think that would really be good for outdoor recreation to ignore the majority of the users?
I think your State of the Industry link in the first paragraph sums it up as to why the OIA SHOULDN'T support more Wilderness.
Until earlier this week, I directed the AAC's public policy program for 10 years, and I can say with great certainty that the AAC and most climbers are passionate about protecting wilderness. We testified before Congress in 1964 to support the Wilderness Act and have supported many other wilderness designations over the year--most recently the proposed Wild Sky Wilderness in the Washington Cascades. Most of the significant mountaineering and climbing destinations are located in wilderness, and if not for climbers like Muir, Brower, Marshall, Leonard and others, we wouldn't even have the concept.
Over the years the AAC, Access Fund and other climbing organizations have argued with the federal agencies and some purist wilderness organizations over appropriate interpretation of wilderness regulations, but this has always been an internal fight among passionate wilderness supporters. (In many cases the federal agencies adopted rigid interpretations of the Wilderness Act that could not be justified by Congressional intent, some of which ultimately were rejected by the courts.)
Schneider's biggest failure is to recognize that there can be intermediate forms of land protection between designated wilderness and effectively no regulations. Many, including the AAC, argued that non-wilderness roadless areas were a great place to allow human-powered, but in some cases mechanized recreation, without allowing motorized access. And, when I was fighting to protect mountaineering on Denali National Park's non-wilderness southern park additions from snowmachine and scenic flight incursions, it sure would have been nice to have Schneider at the table helping.
For instance, the "blue ribbon" Yellowstone River in Montana is often completely dewatered by irrigation withdrawals between Gardiner and Livingston in droughty summers. But because the headwaters of the river are in Yellowstone Park (effectively a wilderness area) where no withdrawal is permitted, the river has sufficient flows to maintain high quality fishing. Ditto for other well known western trout streams including the Madison, Gallatin, South Fk. Snake in Wyoming, Salmon in Idaho, and so on. So someone "fishing" on the Madison is "using" wilderness even though they may not walk a single trail.
We should not underestimate the value of just natural scenery. One of the great pleasures I had when I lived in Livingston, Montana was looking up at the peaks of the Absaroka Range within the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness. Those peaks and the scenic vistas of them had a lot to do with why I loved living in Livingston. Whether I hiked in those mountains or not, I benefited from the lack of clearcuts on the slopes that often characterizes other non-wilderness areas.
Even the people in RVs and of that ilk benefit from wilderness. There are plenty of "scenic" highways around the country whose outstanding scenery is protected by wilderness designation. Everything from the Kanamugus Highway in New Hampshire's White Mountains to the San Juan Sky Way in Colorado to the Big Sur Highway in California are all good examples of roads that run adjacent to designated wilderness whose scenic value is protected by the wilderness.
Similarly if you look around the West at where all the best elk hunting districts are located, you will find them adjacent to or in designated wilderness areas. Why? Because these roadless lands provide the best high quality security cover in the West.
I could go on and on with examples, but there's plenty of evidence to demonstrate that wilderness is a big economic engine as well as a major contributing factor to a sense of quality of life for people whether it is actually directly "used". If you take such an expanded view of wilderness, OIA is missing the boat by not supporting more wilderness.
In all of these cases, vital parts of the "system" are sustained only and can be sustained only through controls of one type or another, with formal wilderness designation seeming to be the most reliable over the longer term, especially as my generation passes and a new generation that holds so many urban, gasoline-powered, air-conditioned "entrepreneurial" neo-cons takes increasing control. Certainly not all of the younger crowd fits this stereotype. Unfortunately, the many that do seem to wield disproportionate influence and are using their influence to preach and spread among their peers a hollow and twisted religion of selfishness, predation, and greed only thinly disguised as some overhyped, but ultimately meaningless and self-serving, commitment to "free-market forces."
Which brings me to REI and the starting point for this string of comments. I hate to throw rocks or see rocks thrown at REI because I have gotten my long winter underwear there for years and staying in denial is more convenient and comfortable for me. At the same time, I have noticed, over the years as I have received my annual ballots for new board members, that things have been changing. REI has become "bigger" business and the board has shifted to more business types, people who either tout their business credentials first in their campaign blurbs or who put in happy pablum that says nothing about who they really are because they aren't sure they want people to know who they really are. The proportion of teachers, coaches, social workers, and outdoor "free spirits" has gone down and the presence of MBAs, retired brokers, accountants, and old CEOs and CFOs has gone up as our society's perceived frenzied need to squeeze an extra percentage point of profit growth out of everything has intensified.
I am not saying that REI is unique in this transition; they simply seem to be following a national craze both inside the outdoor sports industry and across our culture. Neither am I saying that every MBA, accountant, or retired CFO is a bad person.
I am saying that, once a commitment to act according to a set of goals and principles devolves into a commitment to do so IN A MANNER CONSISTENT WITH MAXIMIZING REVENUE GROWTH AT AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF RISK, then, despite anything else that you might think you are doing, you truly have already put yourself on the path to knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing and that applies to knowing the value of wilderness itself. You can mask yourself with a disguise of patriotism or Christianity or whatever you choose and may feel better about yourself for it; but, if you act, day-to-day, in a manner primarily driven by revenue maximization, then you will inevitably find yourself supporting the paving of paradise to put up a parking lot ...as long as the ledger sheet shows that to be your most profitable market-based move.
Wilderness is a public good that we must all pay for, not to produce profits in the market, but to ensure our survival and the survival of all species. It is a public good that makes our non-economic lives better and more fulfilling. It is a public good that gives other species a fighting chance to survive in this selfish world of ours. It is a kind of control, a restriction, on ourselves, to protect non-economic values that cannot compete in markets but without which, in the end, we cannot survive at all.
The point I was trying to make in the article is that the Outdoor Industry Assn, as a representative of most outdoor retailers, large and small, as well as manufacturers, sales reps and a variety of other businesses, is really the one that should stand up for Wilderness. I intended no criticism for REI or any other OIA member. Having owned an outdoor business myself for twenty years, I also made decisions not to stand up on controversial issues. I wanted to sell to everybody, of course, just like every OIA member.
REI has done more to promote Wilderness preservation, as well as many other green causes, than most businesses. Yes, they have become more "corporate," and I'm sure even REI would agree with that, but in my humble opinion, REU is still a leader among businesses in conservation ethics.
My point is: REI doesn't need to make the tough call. OIA should do it for REI and the rest of its 4,000 members. This could really make a difference.
Bill Schneider
So...who's the narrow minded one here?
You're incorrect about one thing--the Roadless Rule only precludes the construction of new roads, but does not preclude use of these areas by motorized vehicles such as ORVs. Nevertheless, the use of these roadless areas by ORVs can later preclude their potential designation as wilderness. Thus by supporting motorized use of roadless areas as quoted above in Bill's article, OIA is in effect taking a stance that is anti-wilderness designation.
As far as OIA "making the call" for REI and it's other members, if a majority of members don't want new wilderness designations what happens to an organization that ignores its majority? Not too hard to figure out!
I would like to see how much support you would get for your "no one allowed to recreate idea"! Tell the horsepackers they can't use the land, and they will have a fit. Tell the hikers they can't use the land, and they will also have a fit. Can you tell me why we need land where people can't go?
Mountain bikes are non-polluting, which significantly distinguishes them from "dirt bikes and other thrillcraft", as well as horses.
David Brown, America Outdoors