Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell the National Parks service to keep corporate advertising out of our national parks. Yes, our government wants to embark upon yet another adventure in "public-private partnerships" -- or "synergy," or whatever other ridiculous corporate buzz word you can imagine -- by mandating that parks actively seek out corporate donations, and permitting parks to let corporations buy naming rights. Really, do they think we go to our national parks so we can see the same corporate advertising crap we see in our neighborhoods when we're home? I've got a better idea: let's properly fund our national parks by closing corporate tax loopholes and raising taxes on millionaire income back to where they were in the 1950s -- and then shame into submission any Congressdolt who objects in the name of "free markets" or "Big Gummint" or "the private sector is always better than the public sector." And let's keep corporate logos and advertising off signs, benches, and vehicles in our parks. Corporations have a place in American life, but that place is not everywhere.
Meanwhile, the Forest Service plans to allow logging in the Wrangell Island area of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, clear-cutting a third of the area and selectively harvesting the rest -- but this would also threaten critical salmon streams. We don't find this plan suspicious only for environmental reasons, of course; Alaska depends heavily on its salmon industry, to the tune of $1 billion in revenues annually, and logging corporations will send the trees out of state for processing into usable wood, meaning it won't create jobs that replace the salmon-industry jobs that'll be lost. And since this is a one-time sale, any revenue our government collects will be decidedly short-term. So, to sum, the Forest Service's plan injures local salmon, injures the human industry that depends on salmon, and injures the quality of our government's holdings in the Tongass -- but makes logging corporation executives richer. That's not a good enough reason to do anything, so the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Forest Service to abandon the Wrangell plan for logging in the Tongass National Forest.
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