The outdoor recreation industry’s ambivalence about climate change and what it means for business was on ample display this past Wednesday, when the Senate Budget Committee held a public hearing titled “Recreation at Risk: The Nature of Climate Costs.” Scarcely longer than an hour in duration and sparsely attended by less than a handful of its 19 committee members, the hearing featured five witnesses, only three of whom paid attention to its ostensible subject matter.
Those threadbare qualities did not, however, prevent the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR) from trumpeting the event as an example of how it’s fighting the good fight on behalf of the environment. In a press release headlined “Outdoor Industry Highlights Impacts of Climate Change,” faithfully reproduced by RVBusiness, the roundtable reported that its president, Jessica Wald Turner, “emphasized the economic implications of climate change on one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industries.”
“As we’ve heard today,” the release quoted Turner as saying, “climate change is increasingly impacting how people can recreate outside, and businesses of all types and all activities know the climate crisis needs to be addressed.”
All of which may be true—Turner may indeed have said as much—but it wasn’t before the committee. The roundtable didn’t have a seat at the hearing. Nor did any of the largest outdoor recreation industries or businesses that one might think would have the most at stake in a fraying environment: not OHI, representative of the “outdoor hospitality” segment, nor the RV Industry Association, nor any of the big RV manufacturers, like Thor or Winnebago. Instead, the “outdoor industry” was represented by Theresa McKenney, a director of NEMO, a family-owned camping gear manufacturer with 50 employees; a Montana-based fly-fishing guide and shop owner; and a 23-year-old Nordic skier.
All had compelling stories to relate about how a warming climate and increasingly violent weather have severely affected their businesses and outdoor passions, but they were no more “the outdoor industry” than any cluster of three or four words on this page tell the story I’m unfolding. Arrayed against them, meanwhile, were two suits and one smarmy Louisiana politician. And the first suit, Joao Gomes of the Wharton School of Economics, must have wandered into the wrong hearing, because all his remarks were about “the dangers of excessive U.S. debt,” which while compelling, never once touched on the hearing’s subject of outdoor recreation.
The smarmy politician? That would be the unfortunately named Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who sidled into the hearing apparently for the sole purpose of rattling an earnest but still young world-class skier by demonstrating the latter’s jejune understanding of greenhouse gases and carbon economics. Were this a debating society, Kennedy would have won hands down. Were this a serious exploration of an existential issue in which Kennedy was seeking to expand his own understanding—but that’s a silly supposition. (Kennedy’s 7-minute assassination can be seen here, starting at around the 1:08 mark, after which he just as promptly exited the hearing.)
The second suit, meanwhile—Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center—opened by lamenting the lobbying efforts of outdoor apparel manufacturer Patagonia, as though that were somehow un-American. His expertise, he claimed, is “in political operations from groups that try to influence public policy while enjoying complicated funding streams enriched by billionaires. The phenomenon often appears in environmental debates, including with pressure groups that claim to represent outdoor recreation interests but often engage in merely partisan political battles.”
Not, of course, that there’s any money on the opposite side of environmental debates—or that there’s any unraveling of outdoor recreation interests from partisan politics.
But to give Walter his due, the second half of his remarks touched on the inherent contradiction within the positions staked out by those outdoor recreation interests—the same contradiction that explains why those interests had such thin representation at Wednesday’s hearing. It’s the same contradiction that explains why the ORR’s press release highlighted its support of the America’s Outdoor Recreation Act and the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experience Act, both of which are designed to increase use of public lands—but completely ignored the Inflation Reduction Act and efforts to modernize the Farm Bill, both intended to reduce greenhouse gases, and both explicitly endorsed by McKenney in her committee testimony.
Reducing greenhouse gases requires moving away from a carbon-based economy, which is why a Louisiana politician can’t stoop too low to shoot down the idea. And it’s why the ORR, whose members include motorcycle, power boat, snowmobile and off-road vehicle interests—and, yes, OHI and the RV Industry Association—censors any mention of the subject even while patting itself on the back for its advocacy for “healthy people, places and the planet.”
Walter, on the other hand, pointed out that such lobbying efforts “never mention some obvious, powerful threats to outdoor recreation” posed by those very same business interests. “For example,” he contended, “it is obvious that in the foreseeable future, outdoor recreation cannot flourish without the availability of inexpensive transportation for ordinary Americans. And that transportation will require fossil fuels for cars, trucks and planes, and support for the roads and parking needed for those cars and trucks. . . . The hostility of environmental extremist groups to forms of travel that most Americans now take for granted is intense.”
One doesn’t have to accept Walter’s questionable conclusion about requiring more fossil fuels—there are alternatives—to acknowledge his underlying observation: more people traveling to outdoor recreation destinations adds to the environmental burden. So do the people flooding outdoor spaces in their boats, all-terrain vehicles, RVs and snowmobiles. No wonder, then, that those who profit from selling, servicing, accommodating or otherwise feeding off the motorized exploitation of outdoor spaces stay silent about the environmental consequences of such activities—even as they seek to make them more widely available.
The upshot was a meaningless public hearing that a shameless ORR nevertheless presented as some kind of bold statement by outdoor interests that would just as soon not look too closely at their complicity in a worsening crisis. On that score, a comment by committee chair Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse during his opening remarks should be especially eye-opening: one-third of this country’s prodigious national debt, he averred, was created in response to climate emergencies. Without a change in how we do business, that proportion will just keep growing. Tick-tock.
Most Recent Posts
Renting Dirt 