One visit to a popular reach of Utah’s Escalante Canyons left me with a feeling that we are loving our natural treasures to death. Very few visitors hike into the remote Escalante Canyons, but even those few affect the ecology of the canyons. How might we better restrict the use of, and the human imprint on, our fragile ecosystems?

Some people advocate for a marketing approach. They argue that judiciously applied, user fees will discourage use and encourage respect because we must pay for the experience.

Others suggest that turning our public treasures into commodities cheapens our experience in nature. I find myself more in agreement with the latter view. We are bombarded with nonstop marketization of everything every waking hour as we watch TV, listen to the radio or drive along our highways. We need to find space for reflection and re-creation of our spirit. It cannot be found by delving deeper into economics, marketing and finance.

Why not set our public land apart from all this, as a safe haven from crass commercialization? A dollar vote may indeed curtail use in areas loved too much; but for many, the social price of such a policy is too high. We find ourselves unwilling to pay, unwilling to even entertain the idea of turning our public wilderness into pay-per-view theme parks.

If we rule out markets as a means to ration use, what means do we employ? Must we trust our fate to legislative and administrative politics? Like markets, politics tends toward messiness and unfairness. The allocation problem includes not only how much, when and where, but also whose interests will be served. In our quest for recreation variety, we have created, and continue to create, many forms of motorized and nonmotorized recreation.

Recreation advocacy and use groups are often at war with one another, fractured not only on the motorized-nonmotorized front, but also among various categories within each. Cross-country skiers detest snowmobilers. Hikers dislike mountain bikers, and off-road vehicle users even more.

Forgotten is the fact that almost no one is free from motors. We live in a modern world with modern conveniences in our backpacks or saddlebags. The differences that divide users and advocates are nuanced at best.

There are no easy answers. Public agencies often talk about collaboration, but few, including few agency professionals, really want to collaborate. It proves hard to talk across interest-group and ideological boundaries. Worse, our cultural roots encourage conquest, not cooperation and compromise.

The battle between those who advocate for fees and those, like me, who’d rather do it by other means is far from over. As this battle rages, the best we can do is better understand ecosystem limits, better understand one another and honor various types of pursuits on public land.

That is not to say that we ought to accept race-to-the-bottom approaches where administrators either put their heads in the sand or pander to powerful interest groups at the expense of the less powerful. We must learn to engage the public in identifying and dealing with politically wicked problems of public land use management.

But we are at a disadvantage. Instead of looking for a third way of inclusiveness and engagement, we continue to look for quick fixes and easy wins. It is not clear how long the stalemate will last or what the outcome will be. What we know is that the stakes are high.

As the stalemate over public land use drags on, advocates of the free-market approach stealthily advocate for privatization, for letting the market sort it out. It all sounds so easy to politicians.

If the marketizers win, public land will be no more. In one form it is Disneyfied, privatized in part with major costs borne by the public at large. In another form, it can be privatized outright and sold off in a vain attempt to pay down the public debt to cover for past abuses of political power. Either way, much of the primitive character of public land as we’ve known it is lost.

Those of us who hope for a more primitive vision of public land need to be eternally vigilant because our culture is nothing if not commercial. Most everything is a sales game, a con game. To keep public land as we’ve know it, and simultaneously allow for multiple uses, separated as needed in space and time, remains a daunting challenge.