Tag: outdoor recreation

Milking a hollow Senate hearing

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.

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March madness, campground-style

There’s a different sort of March madness that has nothing to do with basketball: it’s the annual flood of numbers and statistics for the previous year, compiled from various year-end reports and surveys. Some are revealing, some are of dubious value and some hint at truths that may unfold over the next year or so. Almost all get trotted out on behalf of one agenda or another, and all are enough to make anyone’s head spin.

One of the most questionable bits of accounting has to do with the size and economic impact of the outdoor recreation industry. A malleable business segment whose definition will vary from one person to another, it generally eschews any kind of government involvement—until there are tax dollars to be dispensed, at which time various PR engines kick into high gear to extol the importance of outdoor spending to the overall economy, to the health of the planet and to the wellbeing of all Americans. And so as the Outdoor Recreation Act lurches toward Congressional adoption, supporters have been underscoring its importance by claiming that outdoor recreation contributes a whopping $862 billion to the U.S. economy and therefore is not to be taken lightly. The RV Industry Association has chimed in by claiming that its piece of the action has been $140 billion, and of that, $35.7 billion is attributed to RV parks and campgrounds.

Yowza! $140 billion from RVing? Almost $36 billion from RV parks and campgrounds? Sounds impressive as hell—until you realize that the International Dairy Foods Association claims the dairy industry had an economic impact of $753 billion in 2021, or 3.5% of that year’s U.S. gross domestic product. Just for cow juice. Meanwhile, the bottled water industry says it expects its revenues to reach $95 billion this year, a bit more than the $91.4 billion in projected spending this year for beauty and personal care products, and even the justifiably maligned tobacco industry has U.S. sales of more than $100 billion a year. Those 11- and 12-digit numbers start adding up pretty fast, and as you slice and dice the economy into its various products and services, you soon realize that their combined “contributions” to the overall economy are larger than the whole. Since that’s mathematically impossible, could it be that each group of industry promoters has been just a wee bit fast and loose with definitions and numbers?

Realistic or not, though, industry representatives by their very nature will portray their businesses as economically important, growing and vital. In that regard it’s instructive to look at RVIA’s recently released survey profiling last year’s new RV buyers. A key finding: the new buyers are unquestionably younger than in past years, with 65% categorized as millennials and only 3% as boomers. With a median age of 32 and a median household income of $80,900, last year’s buyers were buying RVs priced at an average of $92,415—suggesting either that this is a generation with unexpected wealth or one that is willing, because of its youth, to take on some lengthy financing. The latter seems more likely, but either way, RVIA is intent on letting us know that this is a growth industry with a bright future and not just some fuddy-duddy backwater.

But there are other considerations. While the RVIA survey reports that almost a third of the new buyers expect to be camping at privately owned RV parks, a national survey released yesterday by the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds suggests those parks may not be as roomy as needed. Although 48% of campground owners had projected they would add a total of 81,000 new RV sites nationwide in 2022, the actual number was closer to 17,000. Moreover, fewer RV parks anticipate adding new sites this year—only 28%, for a projected increase of 44,000 sites—so given recent history, it’s fair to assume that the actual inventory increase may well be less than 10,000. That won’t go far in relieving the increased demand.

Meanwhile, although ARVC’s study is reasonably helpful in its national overview, its sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about various parts of the country—which is a shame, because the numbers it does have hint at significant regional differences. Overall, the study suggests that the campground industry is considerably stronger in the 12-state southern region than in the 13 states west of the 100th meridian, including a larger percentage overall of corporate-owned and franchised operations—and therefore deeper pockets— in the south than elsewhere. It therefore may not be surprising that only 18% of western campgrounds added sites last year, compared to 31%-32% in the rest of the country; this coming year, 50% of southern campgrounds plan to add sites, compared to just 10% in the west.

As mentioned, the sample sizes for each region (66 campgrounds in the west, 71 in the south) are too small to be more than suggestive. But they are in line with another set of regional differences: while only 9% of southern campground owners expect to sell their RV parks this year, that percentage doubles for the western operations. That could mean one in five western RV parks will change hands in 2023, making an an already turbulent industry even more so. On the other hand, a lot of those campground owners may have missed their best window and may end up changing their plans. According to an interview in the April edition of Woodall’s Campground Magazine, RV park prices have fallen from 10% to 30% in the past year, due not only to market conditions but to year-over-year revenue declines.

“Generally, the high interest rates are raising cap rates marginally, which is decreasing the overall value of properties,” Jesse Pine, a broker at NAI Outdoor Hospitality Brokers, told the magazine. “Also, 2021 was a banner year for most owners and in 2022 parks were down 5%-10% in gross income commonly across the country, [which] coupled with higher expenses like rising utility, labor and construction costs, [means] the result was lower than expected net income.”

Up, down, sideways—you can probably cobble together whatever scenario you find most pleasing from all the numbers getting slung around. The only thing certain is that being in the campground business these days means one helluva wild ride.

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