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Take a kid to the mountains

Tuesday, March 20 at 4:45 AM

This Speakout has not been edited

By Roberto Lopez Moreno , Leadville and Denver

As America moves to a minority majority by 2030 and the federal government is overwhelmed by the crush of 78 million Americans who will become pensioners and medical dependents of U.S. taxpayers, we will see a dramatic convergence of events which will not bode well for the legacy of our national parks and forests.

Why? Because millions of U.S. kids today- who are mostly multicultural- are growing up with no relationship to our mountains and so are destined to vote to sell public lands when America's failure to control spending eventually reaches crisis proportions.

According to the David Walker, Comptroller General of the U.S. and head of the General Accountability Office (GAO), faced with massive entitlement programs the U.S. cannot afford to fund- exacerbated by the increased costs associated with providing increasing Medicare and social security benefits to "baby boomers" who are living longer lives- the federal government will be able to do little more than pay interest on mounting U.S. debt and some entitlement benefits.

In fact, Walker says ""I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility." He says no money will be available for national defense, no money for homeland security, no money for education. Walker's predictions are supported by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the left-liberal Brookings Institution, and the non-partisan Concord Coalition.

So is there anyone naïve enough to think any money will be available to support our national parks and forests given the fact that according to the Colorado Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (COAHPERD), 80-90 percent of Colorado kids never ever get to the mountains during their entire life. What makes anyone think an ambivalent electorate won't simply sell our forests rather than vote to sustain them? Public lands will become a sort of "home equity line" that the government will use to feed its insatiable need to spend and a Congress which doesn't have the courage to tell its constituents that we either need to stop spending or raise taxes.

That's why our lack of youth participation in mountain recreation is a big deal? Simply put, if you're not exposed to mountains as a kid you're not going to care about mountains as an adult when you can vote!

Beyond that, the pernicious lack of nature in the lives of most Colorado youth and minorities in particular is terrible because it can be linked to rises in obesity, diabetes, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and depression. It's what author Richard Louv- author of "The Last Child in the Woods-" calls Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD). Not to mention it denies Colorado kids of the "educational options" mountain recreation creates.

In Colorado, a State defined by its mountains and where the benefits of mountain recreation are well documented, this is unconscionable. While educators desperately seek ways to lower epidemic drop out rates and know that mountain recreation experiences give kids something to aspire to and learn from, many still equate a trip to the mountains with a trip to Elitch's.

The problem begs the need for Colorado mountain recreation, snowsports, legislators and business to step up to the plate and acknowledge that it is not in the interest of anyone to allow Colorado's forests to be largely non-inclusive of youth. So who is to blame? Well, it turns out there are lots of reasons- but one of the chief culprits is decades of escalating elitism in mountain recreation; elitism that doesn't understand that people with no affinity for our mountains will simply sell them or misuse them! What's the solution?

Take a kid to the mountains!

Your kid. Any kid, the irritating kid down the street with the backwards baseball cap whose vocabulary is limited to the discourse markers "dude" and "like." Creating meaningful mountain recreation experiences for kids is a practical way of heading off the large scale sale of our forests for fossil fuel extraction and continued real estate development by thousands of well heeled "baby boomers" who are snapping up luxury mountain real estate as fast as it is built.

If you think the wholesale sale of our forests is unlikely, ask yourself this question: If the average American is faced with the choice of higher taxes and $5.00- $10.00 a gallon gas prices or giving up all or any part of the 23 million acres of U.S. forest lands in Colorado, where they don't go anyway- what do you think their choice is going to be? To prove the point you need only look at the flat and falling national participation rates in snowsports, new studies that show the first declines in twenty years in U.S. forest use and lack of buy-in for an I-70 mountain corridor solution. The ski industry's principal research arm, RRC Associates of Boulder reports that total numbers of skiers and riders actually fell last season from 10.8 million to 10.5 million during 2005-2006. Fewer people rode, but did it more often and apparently did it mostly through early increased discount pass use; the Northeast U.S. actually lost skiers and poor snow in the Northeast is expected to drag down national figures below the 58 million mark of last season.

Congress believes voters are ambivalent about forests- but believes they are scared stiff of guys named Mohammad, the gay couple down the street and Pedro from Mexico standing on the street corner looking for work.

It's time for us all to tell our legislators that we care about the legacy of America's forests and national parks and we need to exponentially expand mountain recreation experiences for kids NOW.

Roberto Lopez Moreno is Founder and President of the Colorado based snowsports diversity initiative ALPINO and now writing the nation's first "Guide to Snowsports Diversity Best Practices," a project of the National Ski Areas Association, the United States Forest Service and ALPINO.

READER COMMENTS

If it wasn't next to impossible to drive west to the mountains on the I-70 corridor, more people would go to the mountains for recreation of all sorts. It's time for a double deck hiway from Idaho Springs to the Tunnels.

Posted by Jay on March 23, 2007 11:26 AM