Industrial Tourism. The more successful we are, by its rules, the more trouble we’re in, by ours.
That, at least, is how Bob Schultz sees the situation—and, he says, the U.S. Forest Service, as well as privately owned ski areas, can be major purveyors of industrial tourism.
Schultz hastens to add that the Forest Service deserves praise for shifting its focus to recreation as its primary mission for the 21st century. However, he said, the danger is that it will measure recreational success by the same “industrial” standard by which it measures success in areas such as logging, mining or cattle grazing: sheer, simple volume. Big numbers mean big success. Bigger numbers, bigger success.
A planning consultant, Schultz is a leader in the effort to convince the agency it must find different ways to judge performance and do a better job of meeting recreational demands and off-setting their effects on the environment.
In an interview with the Aspen Times, Schultz warned that the Forest Service currently views recreation the way it looks at the numbers of trees harvested, minerals extracted and cattle grazing on its public lands. “The default setting for the Forest Service is a commodity thinking,” Schultz said. “They believe more is better. They say ‘we’re doing a good job. We’ve got 20 percent more people on the trails.’”
More, he said, isn’t necessarily better. Instead, it often leads to “industrial tourism,” a phrase that describes the overwhelming numbers of people participating in various recreational activities. The danger is that the activities—whether it’s skiing in the Rockies or biking in Moab—will be judged by the number of participants, rather than on the quality of the experience. The result can be “nature” experiences that actually move a person further from rather than closer to nature.
If too much importance is assigned to “tourist visits” in national forests or “skier visits” to the slopes, then recreational management will be based on unsustainable and undesirable outputs, Schultz warned. On the one hand, the Forest Service has embraced a new role for recreation, Schultz observed. But, on the other hand, he fears what the Forest Service and ski areas could unleash if it promotes tourism opportunities, but pays little attention to the quality.
A recent article in National Geographic magazine said recreational use of national forests has skyrocketed in the last decade, with about 325 million visitor days in 1995. National Geographic estimated that forest-based recreation will pump $100 billion into the U.S. economy by the year 2000. In comparison, timber sales will pump $3.5 billion into the economy.
While those are exactly the type of figures Schultz despises, they nevertheless prove his point that the time is ripe for industrial tourism to overwhelm the forests. It’s already happening.
Schultz said symptoms of industrial tourism include:
- Recreational activities get out of sync with natural cycles. Snowmaking extends ski seasons from mid-November to mid-April, night skiing extends the day and mountain bikers erode the trails during mud season.
- Outside ownership dominates key businesses so profits are exported. In some cases, shareholder-owned businesses might focus on rate-of-return rather than community benefits.
- Difficulty in housing the work force, a problem that plagues the Forest Service as well as private industry.
- Speculative real estate deals, often fueled by outside money.
But, Schultz sees a lot of opportunities for curing the ills both at ski resorts and within the Forest Service. The first step, he said, is recognizing that an area is affected, then setting goals to help escape its grip. Quality over quantity is the message Schultz conveys. For the Forest Service, he said, the mission must focus on stewardship of the land and providing the “inner experience” people are often seeking from forest use.
“When I talk to people in the Forest Service, they want to do this,” said Schultz.
Instead of using Disneyland’s or Vail’s head counts as a model for measuring success, Schultz believes, the Forest Service should seek alternative indicators like forest health, tailoring forest use to the carrying capacity of infrastructure and trails, and even the health of the surrounding communities.
He also warns that as skiing companies become more clearly identified as resort developers, there will be increasing demands for community planning and mitigation. In most cases, ski areas have argued to federal land agencies that local communities were responsible for planning growth and that community impacts did not require mitigation. The real estate part of the organization then argued to local communities that growth is inevitable given the ski area expansion and that profits from their development will help fund more improvements.
This dichotomy is about to collapse on both fronts, according to Schultz. Federal land agencies are increasingly interested in community impacts and local governments are no longer boosters for every proposed expansion. Ski area managers would be wise to take a leadership role in integrating real estate and ski area improvements into community planning efforts that involve all elements of adjacent communities.
Schultz also said the Forest Service must stop shirking its responsibilities to gauge what use of national forest will do to surrounding communities. Often, the agency contends that factors such as the increased need for employee housing spurred by something like a ski area expansion is outside the bounds of its concerns. Socioeconomic factors shouldn’t be off-limits for studies, they should be a key part, according to Schultz. Along those lines, Schultz said, the Forest Service must do a better job of linking its Forest Plans to community plans.
The Forest Service also has to build better relations with other major players in the visitor and recreation industry, he said. For example, the greater understanding Forest Service personnel and ski resorts have of coming innovations by outdoor-gear manufacturers, the better chance they have to anticipate and possibly offset the effects.
