Our public lands are our heritage and our birthright. We own these lands. They are not a recreational commodity.
We already support the public lands agencies and our public lands through our federal taxes. Furthermore, hunters, fishermen and others pay liscensing fees on top of access fees and taxes. This new fee amounts to nothing more than double - or even triple - taxation.
Fee Demo sets a precedent of classism where only those who can afford to recreate will be able to do so. Those who can't afford it will be barred from their own public lands.
The act of paying fundamentally alters the way one relates to the outdoors. People won't feel the reponsibility of being on their own land. Rather, they will feel like they are visiting Disneyland where someone else is being paid to clean up after them.
Fee Demo has nothing to do with the stewardship of public lands. It is, in fact, the beginning of an attempt by corporate America to privatize and commercialize our public lands.
Businesses that sell passes are selling-off our freedoms. These vendors make a profit from the loss of one of our basic rights as American citizens: our right to access our public lands.
The Forest Service is basing the success of its fee projects on compliance. The threatened $100.00 fine is nothing less than extortion!
The Forest Service cannot justify sticking the public with a fee or a fine while it continues to lose millions of dollars a year due to its own mismanagement.
Making the public pay a fee to use its own public lands, while at the same time providing federal subsidies for timber, cattle, and mining interests on public lands, is not only illogical, but immoral.
Due to its cumbersome nature, Fee Demo is not generating anywhere near the needed funds for the Forest Service, nor does it apply much of the funds that are raised to forest maintenance. In fact, many of the fee receipts do little more than pay for fee collection and enforcement.
Our priceless, God-given, wild country is being held hostage. Forest Service officials are threatening to close-off large portions of public lands if the fee program fails.
The American people should not have to pay again for wilderness areas where there are no man-made improvements, where they don't want any improvements, and where there shouldn't be any improvements.
People need a place to go - relatively free and un-fettered from society's pressures. Our public lands are the last of these places, and Fee Demo destroys this ideal.
Requiring a fee to use wilderness while cities are free is the same as saying that we are not a part of the natural world - we don't belong out there.