The occasion was mundane, the kind of business-sponsored function that high-profile government officials feel compelled to attend. It was Ski Industry Week 1997, and Mike Dombeck, the new chief of the U.S. Forest Service, could have delivered a humdrum address. He didn’t.

His audience included more than 300 representatives of the ski industry who had gathered at Snowbird resort in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. They were ski area owners, equipment manufacturers, industry boosters. Dombeck was there to announce a changing of the guard, and his message delighted his audience. The timber industry—a fixture on Forest Service­managed land for decades—had been usurped. The new king of the national forests was a business of a different sort. It was their industry: recreation.

The proof was in the numbers. National forests attract nearly a billion visits a year, Dombeck told the gathering. That makes the Forest Service the largest provider of outdoor recreation in the world. Almost half of all recreation visits to America’s public lands take place on national forests. Recreation on Forest Service­managed lands pumps $112 billion into local economies each year.

But recreation’s triumph was not secure, Dombeck implied. To make it so, he told his listeners, the Forest Service needed their help.

“As you are committed to providing your customers with a quality experience at your resorts,” he said, “so too are we looking to promote—and seek your help to promote—the full array of recreation products and services that we offer the American public.”

Many environmentalists also welcomed Dombeck’s message. For years, the Forest Service treated national forests as stockpiles of two-by-fours ripe for the taking, commodities in the most crass sense. The boom in recreation holds the promise of change. Swelling ranks of urban outdoor enthusiasts have no interest in traveling long distances to reach national forests, only to take in vistas of clear-cuts.

Yet a growing number of conservationists worry that the Forest Service has cast its lot with a devil of a different sort. They fear that in its rush to embrace the recreation industry, the agency may let the central goal of caring for the land fall by the wayside. In a culture that favors market incentives over government planning, they ask, is it possible to control industry’s hunger for a slice of a $112 billion pie? Is it possible to counter industry’s desire for a bigger pie, even if that brings new threats to the health of America’s public forestlands?

Over the past three years, these questions have become enmeshed in a federal initiative that at first glance seems only obliquely related: a trial program that gives the Forest Service authority to charge fees at national forest parking areas, interpretive centers and other recreation sites.

Top Forest Service managers, including Dombeck, strongly defend the program, as does the Clinton administration, which wants to make it permanent. For a modest charge—typically $3 to $5 per day to park at a national forest trailhead—the fees generate revenue that will help cover a billion-dollar backlog in pressing maintenance needs. By law, 80 percent of the revenue generated by the program must go back to the areas where the fees were collected. With that money, the Forest Service will repair trails, fix failing outhouses, replace vandalized signs. “From our perspective, fees are a tool to get funds to do work that needs to be done,” said Greg Super, who coordinates the program for the Forest Service.

Opponents say the program is more complicated than that. Although the fees generated less than $21 million last year—that’s about 10 percent of the Forest Service’s annual recreation budget—they say it gives agency managers a strong incentive to manage national forests more like revenue-generating commodities and less like wildlands held in trust by all Americans. In the future, they say, those managers are likely to favor highly developed campgrounds over primitive ones, glitzy visitor centers over low-keyed interpretive signs.

“The drive to make money will start coloring their decisions,” says Mark Lawler, public lands spokesman for the Sierra Club. “The kinds of things that generate revenue are highly developed recreation. The agency is going to be very weak in tending to wilderness-type recreation because that’s not going to generate the revenue that they are looking for.”

Some see even darker forces behind the fee program. They say it is a front, conceived and promoted by some of the most powerful outdoor recreation companies in the world. Those corporations, they say, seek a stronger financial footing in the market provided by America’s increasingly lucrative public lands.

One man—a corporate refugee who lives in a bustling resort town along the arid eastern flank of Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest—has emerged as the primary emissary of this message.

Government officials, industry executives, outdoor recreation enthusiasts and even many environmentalists dismiss Scott Silver as a kook, a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire.

A former industrial scientist who quit his job and left the San Francisco Bay area eleven years ago in favor of the natural splendor of the Northwest, he runs a bare-bones environmental group called Wild Wilderness. His office is half a room in his home in Bend, Oregon, where he lives with his wife and son. There’s a computer, a scanner, a printer, file cabinets. He has no employees, no budget to speak of.

“We live frugally,” Silver says. “I worked in a high-paying job but saved my money. I didn’t buy a Mercedes, like many of my colleagues did.”

These days, Silver spends hours at a time huddled over his computer. He trades e-mail messages with a network of activists who oppose user fees. He rummages through statements from recreation executives, bureaucrats and elected officials and tends to a byzantine home page he posts on the World Wide Web. On that Web site, he says, nestled within hundreds of documents, lies proof of a concerted drive by big business to exploit the public’s hunger for outdoor recreation—proof that anyone who takes the time to pull the pieces together can find. Powerful forces are at work to turn wilderness into a profit-making commodity. He calls it the “Disneyfication” of public lands.

“Disney sells experience,” Silver says. “It doesn’t have to be a Magic Kingdom, it doesn’t have to be rides. Corporations are trying to sell nature—real live animals.”

The Silver hypothesis, in a nutshell, goes like this. Top executives of powerful corporations have pooled their resources in an attempt to tap the enormous economic potential of public lands. The executives include purveyors of recreation experiences—the Walt Disney Corp., for example, and Kampgrounds of America (KOA). And they include groups that sell the goods that outdoor enthusiasts use—Coleman; Yamaha; manufacturers of off-road vehicles, ski equipment, outdoor clothing and RVs. These executives recognize that if their companies are to thrive, their customers must have places where they can use their mountain bikes, their personal watercraft, their all-terrain vehicles; they must have places where they can wear their Gore-Tex.

Their goal is to pry open public lands to private enterprise. They want to turn these lands—national forests, national parks—into money-making commodities.

The companies work under the umbrella of a Washington, D.C.­based lobbying group called the American Recreation Coalition. They forge ties with key members of Congress, they educate and mobilize their customers, they make a point of establishing friendships with top federal land managers. And they seize upon an effective first strategy: Make the public pay to play on public lands.

The user fees, according to Silver, accomplish two key corporate goals simultaneously. First, they accustomize people to the idea of paying for access to public lands, to think of those lands as products. Second, they encourage federal land managers to provide a wider range of activities on public land by tying their budgets to the amount of fee revenues they can collect. The fees in essence create a market mechanism within the Forest Service: Agency managers are motivated to give the people what they want—i.e., what people are willing to pay the most for. Typically, that includes RV electrical and sewer hookups over primitive campsites, chaperoned interpretive excursions over remote hiking trails.

The Forest Service, unwieldy bureaucracy that it is, is unable to provide the array of recreation opportunities that the public demands. So the agency increasingly turns to private enterprise, establishing contractual partnerships that will allow businesses to sell recreation on public lands and turn a tidy profit. “This fee program is only the thin edge of the wedge,” Silver maintains. “It is a way of demonstrating that public lands can be used to generate revenue from recreation.”

Silver sees evidence of this strategy everywhere. It’s in the statements of Derrick Crandall, president of the American Recreation Coalition, which helped establish the fee program. It’s in the statements of Dombeck, including his speech to the Utah ski executives. It’s in a 102-page Forest Service booklet called Private/Public Ventures Desk Guide, which includes chapters entitled “Seeking a Developer” and “Authorizing the Project.” It’s even in the signs that dot the highway that spans the Cascade Mountains between Bend and the Willamette Valley, advising motorists that they are driving on an official scenic byway and thus luring them—and their disposable income—to public lands.

All of which leaves Crandall shaking his head.

“I don’t have the time to waste to try to outdo Mr. Silver with his purple prose on the Internet,” Crandall says. “But I don’t think there is any doubt that he plays pretty loose with the facts.”

Top Forest Service officials say there are no plans for a Disney destination resort anywhere on the lands they manage. And, they say, there are battle-tested checks in place to keep corporations from running roughshod over public lands. Those checks are called the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Wilderness Act, and all the other landmark laws that protect wildlands from degradation. Not to mention Dombeck’s oft-cited assertion that everything that happens on national forests has to be done within the carrying capacity of the land.

“It’s not possible that the doors are just going to spring open,” says Kenneth Karkula, who oversees the permits that allow private companies to do business on Forest Service­managed land. “Our policy is natural-resource driven, not urban driven. Golf courses are not going to spring up on national forests. Disneyfication is not going to happen.”

The fee system has staunch defenders, including Dombeck and Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons, who oversees the agency’s operations. Many environmentalists support the fees, too.

“If the funding is going to stay in the area and help with trail maintenance and construction, that seems like a reasonable thing to do,” says Bob Ballou, executive director of the Pacific Crest Trail Association. “We pay user fees for lots of things in this world, and the fees are not that great.”

Some conservationists support the fees for other reasons. Although national forest logging has dropped fourfold since the 1980s, the Forest Service’s budget structure still favors timber. The only way to change that, they say, is to give agency managers a financial incentive to pursue more benign programs, such as recreation.

Yet Silver’s impact on the debate is considerable. At the very least, he has put Crandall and other corporate representatives on the defensive. And he has delivered a tangible blow to the user fee program. The fees have struck a nerve among many national forest users, sparking protests from New Hampshire to Southern California.

Although some of the vitriol springs from old-fashioned anti-tax sentiment—and from the conviction that people should not have to pay to walk through forests owned by all Americans—Silver’s take on the fees has clearly resonated with many opponents of the program. He has found a receptive audience among old-guard environmentalists (the Sierra Club, which opposes user fees, has taken a position very similar to Silver’s). This spring, after Silver and Lawler, the Sierra Club spokesman, met with REI president Wally Smith, the influential outdoor gear cooperative announced it was withdrawing from a lobbying group called the Recreation Roundtable, an offshoot of the American Recreation Coalition that counts among its members CEOs and top executives from Disney, L.L. Bean and KOA.

Unlike two years ago, when Silver embarked on his quixotic mission to derail corporate America’s designs on public lands, a few powerful players, at least, seem to be taking him seriously.

“It sure as hell sounded like a conspiracy theory when it first came out,” Silver says. “But my story has never changed. The world has changed to adjust to my story.

“The fact that I’m right helps a whole lot.”

Is Silver right? For better or worse, the Forest Service has always maintained close ties to private enterprise. When the agency commissions a timber sale, for example, it doesn’t send government employees into the forest to cut trees, it awards a contract to a private company that then does the logging.

Private industry has long had a hand in national forest recreation, too. Half of the roughly 4,000 campgrounds on national forests across the country are run by private concessionaires. Sixty percent of all downhill skiing in the United States takes place on 135 private resorts located, at least in part, on Forest Service­managed land. The Forest Service administers about 6,000 permits that allow private parties to conduct guide services on national forests. Those businesses offer backcountry pack trips, whitewater float trips, high-lakes fishing trips, big-game hunting trips—all on public land managed by the Forest Service.

But those partnerships are sprouting at a quickening pace. Multinational corporations and grassroots entrepreneurs have taken note of the steady rise in public demand for wildland recreation (the number of recreation visits to national forests has nearly doubled since 1980). They want a piece of the action.

This burgeoning interest fits hand-in-glove with a growing consensus among government leaders that the public sector should forge closer ties with the private sector, emulating the values, processes and efficiencies of business. In the 1990s the refrain “government should operate more like business” has evolved from a minority sentiment held by small-town politicians and conservative Republicans into a widely shared bipartisan maxim. Less than a year after taking office, Vice President Al Gore released his National Performance Review, designed to streamline the operations of government. Its chapters included “Giving Customers a Voice—and a Choice” and “Using Market Mechanisms to Solve Problems.”

The Forest Service has shared in this embrace of the private sector, especially when it comes to recreation. During his introductory message to Forest Service employees in January 1997, Dombeck unveiled his guiding management philosophy, which he christened “collaborative stewardship.” A central thrust of this concept, as implied in his speech later that year to the ski industry, is to enter partnerships with outside interests, including businesses.

In that inaugural message, Dombeck introduced his chief of staff, a man plucked from America’s mahogany boardrooms. Before joining government, Francis Pandolfi had served as CEO of Times Mirror Magazines and vice president of CBS. He had also served a term as chairman of the Recreation Roundtable.

Pandolfi has since left government service, saying he wants to spend more time with his family. He says people make too much of the closening ties between government and private enterprise. Federal employees understand, he says, that many government services should never be doled out to the private sector. Besides, he says, businesses seeking to forge partnerships often grow frustrated with the bureaucratic inertia and red tape that goes along with dealing with the federal government. As a member of the bureaucracy, Pandolfi says, he often found himself at odds with Crandall, the American Recreation Coalition president.

“We got very mad at each other after I joined the Forest Service,” he says. “He wanted to rush ahead and do all sorts of projects, and I said, wait a minute—we can’t do all this stuff.”

Still, Pandolfi believes the Forest Service and other federal agencies have important lessons to learn from the private sector. In government, he says, too many decisions are based on anecdotal evidence. The Forest Service should do a better job of determining what the public wants.

That, he says, is basic marketing.

“A lot of people think marketing is hucksterism—selling people something at an exorbitant price that they really don’t need,” Pandolfi says. “It’s not. It’s so utterly ironic to me that so many people in government think that marketing is a bad thing, when it is the purpose of government to find out what people want and try to deliver it to them.” (With Pandolfi’s encouragement, the Forest Service has established a marketing team to do just that for the fee program.)

Yet the Forest Service has already suffered scandals stemming from efforts to emulate the processes of business.

In February 1998, Congress’s investigative arm blasted the agency for entering into a marketing agreement with Subaru. The automaker agreed to donate thirty-four Foresters, its sport utility model, to the Forest Service, which pledged to use the vehicles in “prominent locations.” Also, Smokey Bear, the popular Forest Service mascot, was required to attend ten major auto shows per year, chosen by Subaru. The General Accounting Office found that a key purpose of the agreement was “product promotion” and, as such, violated federal policies and regulations.

This spring, the Forest Service came under fire for awarding a public relations contract worth as much as $600,000 to a Utah firm. The purpose was to launch a promotional campaign to let the world know that some of the most popular events at the 2002 Winter Olympics will take place on Forest Service­managed land near Salt Lake City. Forest Service officials commissioned the firm to “design an integrated image piece and develop slogans,” among other tasks. Before administration higher-ups pulled the plug on the contract, the firm developed a Join Us 2002 logo and derived a “national brand” slogan that the Forest Service could use at the Olympics: The Nature of Discovery. Critics accused the agency of unabashedly boosting recreation as a mission that could fill the gap left by the decline of logging.

Agency officials say those incidents are anomalies, that virtually all partnerships that the Forest Service establishes with the private sector are well conceived and comply with all laws and policies.

On one point, at least, all agree. The Forest Service has a strong incentive to forge many more partnerships with the private sector in the future. The impetus has more to do with budget constraints than it does with faith in market mechanisms, or any philosophical conviction.

“Right now, funding for the public lands as a percentage of total domestic funding is half what it was in 1962,” says Chris Wood, a close aide to Dombeck. “We have major problems in maintaining our facilities. We don’t have the budget to do it.” That, Wood says, has left the Forest Service with the choice of letting its recreation infrastructure lapse—trails will decay, outhouses crumble—or turning to the private sector for assistance.

The agency’s decision seems clear.

“The outdoor recreation community has organized itself, they speak with one voice, they bring partnerships to the Forest Service, and they leverage money for the Forest Service,” Wood says. “We need to use public-private partnerships to help meet the demand for recreation on national forests, but we need to do it in a way that either moves people away from places that are too sensitive, or in a way that keeps people within sharp sideboards that don’t compromise forest health.”

Those partnerships seem unlikely to produce theme parks or luxury hotels. But they will bring changes to national forests and to the way they are managed. To convince private interests to invest in public lands, federal managers have to provide avenues for making profits. And in the interest of profits, a private party is likely to push for a higher level of development than would a government bureaucrat whose funding derives from tax dollars alone.

“You won’t see major camp stores or movie theaters,” says Karkula, the Forest Service manager who oversees contracts with private parties. “But you’ll probably see more water spigots at campgrounds, accommodation for more RVs, things like that.”

Which leads back to the basic challenge posed by Scott Silver. Is there anything wrong with adding flush toilets to campgrounds, installing interpretive signs, shuttling fee-paying tourists down wild rivers, or providing all the other amenities that private parties are prepared to offer?

“People have picked up the perception that the agency is growing too close to the private sector, and I think they’re wrong,” says Super, the Forest Service’s recreation fee coordinator. “There’s nothing wrong with primitive hiking, but there’s nothing wrong with families going out and enjoying nature in RVs, either. The agency is in the position of trying to balance those things.”

Counters Silver: “When you put a sign in front of a tree, you’re creating a product you can sell. These private parties are not going to go away. They are going to keep pushing and pushing because there is an enormous opportunity to make money here.”