Adventure Pass Program

In 1996 the United States Congress authorized a new fee program on federal public lands called the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program (RFDP). Here in Southern California, this resulted in the Forest Service establishing the Adventure Pass, a $5-a-day or $30-a-year fee to park your car on national parkland.

And so the divorcement of Americans from areas of the world that they have not paved marches on. Starting with early Puritan ideas of forests being the domain of the devil, moving to the clear-cutting march of Paul Bunyan across the continent, alongside the industrialization and urbanization of the lives of citizens, on to the progress of man conquering nature, this program is the culmination of our divorcement from the very world that sustains us. After all, humans are part of the planet’s ecosystem.

This fee program represents one of the last actions to totally separate our society from nature. To require a fee to enter a forest while cities remain relatively free to roam through is to say that we are not a part of the natural world; we don’t belong out there. Worse, because of this fee millions of underprivileged children who are already often oblivious to the world outside cities now may never set foot in wilderness because they can’t afford to get in. To not know the source of your life is to not know life itself.

We should wake up before it’s too late. This issue may seem lofty and overwhelming but that does not mean we cannot and should not take action. First, don’t support the program by buying into it. Don’t buy an Adventure Pass. You have the right to enter public lands without one. Second, assert your 1st Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Write to your representatives and senators and demand that they repeal the program.

To sit idle is to allow it to go from a demonstration program to a permanent reality; it is to support the program. I, for one, fear such a future reality.

MICHAEL ZIERHUT, Ojai