Perennially, the issue of motorized access to national and state interest lands comes up in public conversation. Tied to this is the question of access in general, impacts and user fees. There are always those who advocate banning any motorized access whatsoever and limiting the numbers of visitors granted a permit to enter the land so sharply as to accomplish an effective ban for all but the privileged. (Odd, how the wealthy and connected seem to be able to get into anything.) Others advocate charging admission fees to lands that theoretically belong us--user fees effectively causing public lands become the property of administrators. For these folk--most who are in some way connected to the administration of public lands, and so cannot be considered disinterested parties in contemplating user fee revenue--the way to control damaging access to public land is to offset it by charging the folks who enter public lands.
One's first reaction to all of this is to say: 'they'll be making outlaws of us all, yet,' and oppose any measure to address the access problem, and refuse to obey any laws that do appear. In the end, this may be the only choice open to those who consider open access to wilderness a legacy and right, rather than something optional to those who can afford to pay to enter the 'king's lands'---particularly in the light of the fact that no practicable limits to access appear in the path of those who wish to exploit national and state public lands for extractive uses. (Extractive industries are able to marshal armies of lawyers, lobbyists and planners to make the case for letting them do what they will. Often, all they have to say, over and over again, is the word 'jobs,' or sometimes, 'resources'.)
[For example of this, see http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200907/coal.aspx. A Delaware-incorporated partnership of investors want the Alaska Department of Natural Resources to approve construction of one of the largest open-pit coal mines in North America, and the largest ever in the State of Alaska. Of course, the usual dumping of millions of gallons of waste water into a key salmon stream--dumping which ultimately enters Alaska's Cook inlet--and the stripping of 5000 acres (7.8 square miles) in the first phase of mining are the known side effects. Never mind that coal is a key greenhouse gas and the main source of anthropogenic mercury pollution. Never mind that local and area residents don't want the mine. Never mind the devastating effects strip mined coal is having upon other areas of the the country. But I digress. Still, this is but a single example.]
Suppose we take the growing concern with access and other forms of intensive recreational use at face value as something those who are calling for regulation are truly concerned about. (In other words, let's stipulate the absence of a hidden agenda.) A case could be made that it is the ease of mechanized access that is destroying wilderness. The Alaskan historian Morgan Sherwood (http://www.jstor.org/pss/3984230, http://books.google.com/booksid=IGmj2lOKRLMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false) makes a strong argument that easy motorized access to remote areas spells the end of wilderness as we understand it. If so, the problem is less one of total numbers of people entering popular public lands for recreational purposes, and more the means they use for travel within them. I will relate but a single example with which I am fairly familiar. Admiralty Island National Monument lies a short airplane flight or boat ride across Stephens Passage from Juneau, Alaska's capital city, and the largest settlement in Southeast Alaska. The Monument is a popular fishing and hunting site---legal and illegal. As currently administered, almost no regulations govern motorized access to any part of the Monument, nor the use of motorized access within or in the air space above the Monument. It is not unusual for visitors owning or chartering private aircraft to land on any one of the more popular freshwater fishing lakes, fish from the floatplane for a few minutes to a few hours, and then take off to check out the fishing elsewhere. Whatever our answers, still the questions must be asked: Is this how we want users to come and go from our public lands, and is this how these lands are meant to be enjoyed? Is there something fundamentally wrong, and profoundly disturbing with an approach to wilderness access which equivocates it with instantly gratifying entertainment of the kind one finds at the mall, on the big screen TV, or in the cinema? Are there deep reasons, instead, to encourage long term and physically demanding contact with wilderness---what might be called a wholly involving or 'agonistic' experience?
If we decide in favor of wilderness as physically and spiritually involving, and yet wish to preserve the idea of wilderness access as a legacy and right, a solution to the problem of a tension between the ability of the land to absorb visitors, and the heartfelt need of many to visit these lands might be found in limiting not the fact of access, but the forms it can take. Perhaps we might require that visitors can only enter certain lands under human power (or, in some cases, with the assistance of animal power). In the case of Admiralty Island, a small handful of coastal boat and floatplane landing sites might be designated at authorized motorcraft and aircraft entry points. Once within the boundaries of the Monument---which would include saltwater within 250 to 500 meters of the shore---travel could be limited to any non-motorized means of conveyance: foot, bicycle, kayak, non-motorized sailboat, dogsled, pack animal, etc...
The model could apply to many of the more popular wilderness destinations in Alaska. In some areas, exceptions for bona-fide subsistence activity could be made, perhaps seasonally limited (access being seasonally limited, not the activity itself). In other areas, depending upon the situation, few limits to motorized access might be enforced, but in heavy-use areas these would be in the minority--not like today, where motorized access becomes the norm. Remote areas would be different, of course. There would be many details to work out, and the issues at stake would be surrounded with much controversy, and there would be those who would flout the law, but these represent practical details that could and would be worked out if the will were there to do so. There is no theoretical reason for such an access limiting scheme not to work, nor is there any reason for it to be applied to every single tract of public land. Certainly, though, a case might be made for many areas now open to motorized forms of travel by default.
We hear much from the right wing these days (who generally oppose--vroom! vroom!--any limits on motorized access) about how this is an era of self-responsibility, and how we all must be willing to 'work hard to get anywhere,' but we see very little of this in the actions on public lands by some of the loudest proclaimers of the doctrine. What could be a more profound manifestation of self-reliance, responsibility and respectful restraint than the notion that one must enter key tracts of wilderness on one's own or animal power, and depend upon one's own skills to flourish there as long as one is visiting? The aptness of this observation notwithstanding, somehow I think such a proposal as I make here will fail on the right, for lack of courageous sponsorship, as well as on the left, for lack of interest...
As to the matter of user fees--something I'm sure too many on both the left and the right would be happy to embrace as a simple solution that doesn't address the real problem but looks like something is being done: I would always stand up against them. Failing that, in compromise, I would strongly advocate that each and every resident of the US has a right to fee-less access to federal and state public lands closest to his or her place of residence. (One might create a 200 mile radius or some such, or allow persons to choose specific areas that lie farther away if no lands are closer. These are details, though. There would be many ways assuring fair and non-restrictive fee-less access for local residents.) With respect to federally-administered lands, for the people living where I lived not long ago, that would be the Tongass. For people living where I live now that would be Denali National Park and surrounding BLM lands in the area.
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