Re: [Paddlewise] Wild women of the Colorado

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 11:23:32AM -0500, John Fereira wrote:
> >It's a sickening perversion of our national park system for private gain.
> >(And, as you might guess, any attempt to reform it is met with howls of
> >protest by the commercial outfitters, whose greed knows no bounds.)
> 
> You were doing so well until that last sentence fragment.  While I don't 
> have a huge amount of experience with commercial outfitters, my general 
> impression has been that most are not in it for the money.

There's little doubt that many of the *guides* aren't in it for the money.
I know folks who have worked the rivers for years in West Virginia, Colorado,
and other places, and all of them do it for the love of the river. There
is no place they'd rather be, nothing they'd rather be doing, and most
of them barely scrape by.

The same, however, cannot be said of the companies which employ them,
and which, in the specific case of the Grand Canyon, have acted in concert
with the NPS to maximize revenue at the cost of *everything* else.
There's been years of discussion about this in a bunch of places;
one place to look is http://www.gcpba.org, though it's certainly
not the only one.  The picture that emerges after reading through
there (and the referenced pages and sites and documents) is that the
commercial outfitters exert the overwhelmingly majority of the political
power necessary to effectively control access to the river: or to put it
another way, they have enough clout to cause NPS regulations to reflect
their wishes.

This is not to say that commercial trips are entirely bad and should be
discontinued.  (*I* take commercial trips about once a year.)  It is to
say that commercial concerns should be not the sole, overiding determination
of how precious natural resources are used.

But as in so many things, principles go out the window when profit comes in.

---Rsk
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