In the White Clouds and Boulders, where motorized recreation has competed with backpacking and grazing and heavy use by organized groups such as the Boy Scouts, a “consciousness of the commons” has sprung up, creating a kind of wary cooperation between natural antagonists. Motorcyclists have cleared and maintained trails that the Forest Service couldn’t. Grazing allotments have undergone a mostly voluntary restriction as Allan Savory’s theories of holistic land management have penetrated the local agricultural community. Backpackers managed to have minimal impact on the land in the absence of regulation. Even the Boy Scouts have quit seeing themselves as 19th century pioneers and have begun to educate their members to be stewards of the land. There are of course exceptions, but in general, humans have treated the White Clouds and Boulders well in the 35 years since I first worked there. The area is in better shape than it was in 1970. Barry Commoner’s vision of educated and conscious caretakers of the environment has been shown to be possible in the microcosm, without government coercion and in the presence of vastly increased population.

For people who have been supporting the idea of a Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness, these positives aren’t good enough. Representative Mike Simpson’s Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act (CIEDRA) bill has become a way of avoiding the consciousness issue. Groups like the Idaho Conservation League and the Wilderness Society have been getting money from the Pew Foundation, whose way of keeping score on the protection of the wild has been the number of acres designated as official wilderness. Those grants will continue if the scorecard shows more acreage as wilderness, regardless of the character of that wilderness.

The Pew Foundation has also begun promoting the idea of public-private cooperation in public land use. In the baldest of terms, that means that other money—private capital—is going to be invested in public lands management. Private capital always wants its investment back and more. It tends to view assets under its control as its property to dispose of as it wishes.

The other features of CIEDRA—such as the wholesale transfer of public land for trophy-house subdivisions, and the dilution of the 1964 Wilderness Act by the introduction of wheelchair-accessible trails and motorized access to within a day’s walk of most of the area’s recreational attractions—these dovetail nicely with a future where access to Wilderness is not a matter of democratic or economic freedom or even of education or intelligence. Looking at plans by the American Recreation Coalition and Disney Corporation, you can see that both the manufacturers of recreational vehicles and equipment and the prime manufacturer of a particularly sanitized and regimented recreational experience are turning their sights on American wild lands. Their vision of wilderness as a capital-intensive recreational experience has given CIEDRA much of its shape.