The latest multiple-use

Pop-up shops!  What is a pop-up shop?  They are defined by someone who provides them as “temporary retail spaces that sell merchandise of any kind … Pop-up shops are taking over the retail world and rethinking traditional brick-and-mortar and big-box stores…”    The National Forest Foundation apparently had to jump on this bandwagon with Busch beer.  So here you go …. ,  a pop-top pop-up shop, coming to a national forest near you.

Conservation lands in many places have been overrun by crowds attracted by social media.  This seems like it has the same potential.  It would be interesting to look at the NEPA analysis for these permits.  (Do you suppose it’s in grizzly bear habitat?)

10 thoughts on “The latest multiple-use”

  1. This is just gross on so many levels. Shame on the National Forest foundation for helping big business promote their products. Also, plenty of new evidence and research has come to light in recent years that tree-planting on National Forests can have many negative and unintended consequences to public lands ecosystems.

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        • Oh my goodness, another one of those, “it doesn’t always work” articles. I think there is a difference between (1) what SP does (2) what the FS used to do (3) what the FS does now in terms of planting trees.
          As to the bark beetles, in the places I’ve worked no one ever had to plant lodgepole as it was quite (or overly, aka “doghair”) successful at coming back on its own. And I haven’t seen salvage (or any)logging of whitebark. Maybe those are Montana practices?

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          • Thank you, Sharon for identifying these types of articles that way. There are always exceptions. And there are researchers who still make pretty big assumptions about forest management practices without really checking it out. But there are definitely some places in the Forest Service that are still doing things without stopping to think about what they are doing and why and whether or not something needs to change.

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  2. Some of these more veiled corporate partnerships with the Park Service I find on the verge of creepy. I do like the virtual reality one.. for the FS, coupled with slowing down NEPA for permitted recreation, would really decrease the people on forests and help the environment ;)!

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    • Here’s another revealing take from Jim Stiles on industrial recreation effects.

      EXCERPT: The New West is also where virtually every successful company that comprises what we might call the Recreation Industrial Complex (RIC) now primarily sells sanctimony and only secondarily sells the good or service that keeps its owners and executives well-fed. In a way, it’s an ingenious twist on Robinson Crusoe: we should speak only of our arduous journey toward self-actualization but, yeah, by the way, we also happen to be fabulously wealthy thanks to the Brazilian plantation we own.

      In canyon country, specifically, we can observe how the RIC manufactured both the demand for “Bears Ears” and the satisfaction of that demand. In statistical terms, approximately no one seemed to need to visit “Bears Ears” before December 2016, but now every outdoor athlete with a shoe contract and a Personal Brand to burnish — an “influencer” in the postmodern vernacular — seems determined to make an Insta-pilgrimage to “Bears Ears” or to at least engage in a bit of slacktivism from afar. The hoi polloi cannot be far behind.”
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      http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/2019/04/01/the-new-west-and-the-problem-of-affluence-by-stacy-young/

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  3. I found this whole “pop-up” thing appalling – I thought that NFF would have more sense than this – and that the Forest Service itself would have had more sense than this. But I suppose there are already plenty of corporate-sponsored commercial events on the National Forests – just not a Busch Beer pop-up shop. It’s just a slippery slope…what next (or do I even want to ask?). It’s bad enough to have the Rainbow Family adopt a national forest for their gathering(s) each year – now we’re inviting pop-up shops?

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