I had been ranting for years about the impacts an Industrial Tourism economy could create. My pleas fell on deaf ears, especially with the mainstream environmental community. Organizations like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) embraced the change and even devoted an entire issue of its newsletter praising the amenities economy as a clean, non-polluting way to bring economic prosperity to areas that had previously depended on the extractive industries to survive. What they failed to consider was that while coal mining and oil and gas exploration and ranching could scrape bare the skin of the rural West, a massive monolithic tourism economy would eventually bare and destroy its very soul.
