The Sustainable Trails Coalition: Our Narcissistic Relationship with Wilderness

“Show me a picture of myself,” she said. He acquiesced. She looked at the photo on his cellphone and for only a moment was mesmerized. “Show me another one.”

The dinner party nursed stemless glasses of Turkish red wine and laughed. Of course her narcissism can be excused: she’s two years old. We brandished our glasses and wondered together when in life a person grows beyond self interest, and settled on some time between two and our own respective ages.

A while later the friends left. Sometimes a room can be overcrowded with  loved ones so that after they go away laughter radiates from the walls and furniture the way a pan is still hot after it’s been removed from the stove. (Maybe I was just drunk?)

But there was a glow to the kitchen while I washed a few dishes before putting off most of them for the morning. I felt warm, and loved, and my mind wandered a bit to a short piece I’d read earlier in the day about the Sustainable Trails Coalition.

If you haven’t heard of the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), it’s a proposed piece of legislation that would allow regional land managers the discretion to open designated Wilderness areas to mountain bikes, where they’re currently banned. It confronts a long simmering issue head on, and is controversial to say the least. The issue has pitted sandals-with-socks traditionalists against the loud talking, neon wearing new schoolers that are positioned to inherit a legacy of land stewardship in the west.

mtb
Photo: Anders Broste (I found it on the Facebook) – Thanks Anders!

While the article itself is perhaps a fair treatment of one point of view, what’s interesting is the larger sample size of opinions that come to light in the comments section:

“Personally, I hope I never see a bicycle on the trail I am hiking.”

“I thought a fair portion of the [Wilderness Act] was to get people outdoors into the land, be active and not fat. Many people like biking and think hiking is boring.”

“I like seeing wildlife when I hike, but bikers make that hard to do since they scare them away.”

“My family enjoys all these types of quiet recreation, including biking. We enjoy it without conflict.”

There is a prevailing use of the first person.

Whether we agree or disagree with the premise that bicycles should be allowed in designated Wilderness areas, the real issue at hand is the personal and emotional response to such a far reaching piece of legislation.

Some outspoken citizens appear to believe that Wilderness management policy should somehow be based on how they like to spend their Saturdays, which is about as narcissistic as truly believing that God (architect of the universe) was watching your football game and helped you throw a touchdown.

Bitterroot2015 (20 of 20)

Regardless of how we recreate, I like to think that most of the people in the room for these conversations feel strongly about the value of open space and public land.

Which brings me to another comment that I read:

“This is when I sympathize with the states’-rights-take-over-federal-lands movement.”

Both advocates for the Sustainable Trails Coalition and more resistant conservation groups are right in some of their talking points. But the conversation needs to be about strengthening Wilderness, not about individual user experience.

In this election cycle it’s easy to get distracted from the fact that public lands are under attack. Headline grabbing standoffs like in Burns Oregon or on the Bundy Ranch in Nevada are sensational, but really serve to highlight an underlying resentment of protections that we’ve come to take for granted.

The public land debate is not so different from the anti-vaccine movement. Those people out there who refuse to vaccinate their kids don’t know anyone who is paralyzed from Polio. They haven’t lost a loved one to Smallpox. The horror of the diseases that we’ve eradicated are alien to most of the people alive today.

We take vaccine protections for granted the same way that a discussion of land management policy can so quickly be reduced to how it suits our own hobbies. It’s apparently so secure in our minds that we can’t imagine it ever being taken away. The only thing to discuss, it seems, is how we should go enjoy what will always be there.

This approach to policy making is no less narcissistic than a toddler who is only interested in pictures of herself, and only slightly less so than that Tebow guy.

Both sides of the bikes-in-Wilderness issue have valid points for how their proposal serves the greater good. It’s our responsibility as citizens, and yes, as recreators, to keep the conversation on the resource and away from our next vacation.

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3 thoughts on “The Sustainable Trails Coalition: Our Narcissistic Relationship with Wilderness

  1. While I truly appreciate that your piece ranks low on the “inflammatory scale” that often accompanies discussion on this topic, I do take issue with your underlying theme that pits individual interest against that of the greater conservation good. It’s a false choice.

    You write, “But the conversation needs to be about strengthening Wilderness, not about individual user experience.” Actually, the conversation needs to be about both for the simple reason that they go hand in hand. If you read STC’s position, it very much includes the importance of building and maintaining a constituency for the preservation of wild places. We can wish all day that humans don’t exist or we can pretend that they don’t behave as humans do, but that kind of fantasy is not going to preserve nature. Like it or not, humans are part of conservation system. Conservation and recreation can and should be in perfect harmony. We have to make it so.

    We all recognize that conservation and recreation can also be at odds. However, in the case of the responsible and well managed use of boots, bicycles or horses, there is essentially nothing to indicate that any of those uses are in conflict with the land. In fact, if fifty years ago we had removed boots and horses from the Wilderness (as is the case today with bicycles), I’m confident we would have a lot less Wilderness than we have now.

    Until someone can demonstrate that bicycles have a disproportionately negative impact on the land (all the science says otherwise), then they should be allowed to visit at least some parts of the Wilderness alongside their brothers and sisters on boot and hoof. The result will be a healthier, happier and more nature-connected population of humans who will have renewed motivation to preserve the land.

    1. Hey TrailLover,
      Thanks for reading, and for taking the time to comment. You actually pointed out a sentence that in retrospect I wish I’d phrased differently: “But the conversation … individual user experience.” Instead of “individual user experience,” I should probably have put “individual users’ emotions,” because you’re absolutely right that the user experience is inexorably tied to the health of the resource. I’d hoped in this piece to identify the knee-jerk, emotional nature of the dispute as the main barrier to having a productive conversation. Thanks for redirecting the topic to the land management discussion that it needs to be.
      Thanks again,
      bh

  2. I live in Washington and quit the IMBA a long time ago. I have watched the steady loss of trails for 30 years in my state. I am constantly sickened by the messes hikers leave on trails that have been deamed to sensitive for Mountain bikes. As far as equestrians go, maybe in CA where it is dry they do little damage to trails, but here where its wet, a single horse will do more damage than 20 mountain bikes, yet they are allowed access to areas we can only dream about, and the IMBA has done nothing to help us. The IMBA is like so many other organizations. They start out small with a good mission. As they grow in size their overhead grows and a smaller and smaller percentage of the money given to them actually goes where it was intended. With the addition of corporate sponsorship, the original community the group was supposed to advocate for has a smaller and smaller voice untill, like the IMBA today, the average mountain biker no longer has a voice, and the now huge organization feels that they, and they alone know what is best, and if you speak out against them you are just a spoiled brat……….The IMBA has run its course and outgrown its usefulness and is now just a self serving organization, it is time for them to go the way of the many trails we used to have in my state.

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