Smoking the great outdoors

With the Marlboro Man leading the way, our wilderness is being tamed, once and for all.

By Tom Washington

Feb 6, 2001 | Against the backdrop of wind-eroded red rocks in the desert outskirts of Moab, Utah, a bus the size of a jet airliner pulls to a stop in a cloud of dust. Eighteen members of the Marlboro Adventure Team and an entourage of foreign journalists step off the bus. The journalists are here to cover the company's month-long, all-expenses-paid outdoors vacation in which four teams of handpicked participants will raft the Colorado River rapids, power their way up sand dunes by jeep and race across the desert on motorcycles and ATV's in the name of high-powered adrenaline adventure -- footage from which will be broadcast overseas in Marlboro ad campaigns and as promotion for the next year's event.

In response to its rigorous international promotion campaign aimed at young adults, Philip Morris claims to receive nearly 1 million adventure team applications worldwide for its annual desert event. After conducting telephone interviews and a boot-camp selection process meant to measure charisma and athletic ability, the cigarette maker whittles its final choices down to 100 men and women aged 18 to 25 -- most of them nonsmokers -- who come from countries with the highest smoking rates in the world.

To welcome them to Marlboro Country, motorcyclists do doughnuts in the sand while Marlboro jeeps toot their horns and rev their engines. Cowboys on horseback whoop and holler with their packs of dogs yipping underneath. A camera crew pans in for close-ups of the team members, whose eyes are pinched shut from the sunlight. Someone announces the cameras are rolling, and a flood of questions shoots through the hot air.

"How does it feel to be in Marlboro Country?"

"Are you ready for adventure, the thrill of a lifetime?"

"Is this what you dreamed of?"

Moab has more than 5,000 miles of off-road trails. Mining companies carved many of them in the 1950s to reach pockets of uranium. The trails wind through sandstone cliffs and sand washes hidden by salt cedar scrub bush and pinyon. When the mineral boom went bust, a different industry took over. Today, Moab and its rocky environs are a top destination for outdoor recreation. The town hosts millions of visitors annually -- cyclists, climbers and ATV enthusiasts among others. Its chic center, a modest strip of shops just a couple of miles long, offers all the tourist amenities from art galleries to smoothie outposts.

For at least a century, policymakers looked at logging, grazing and mining as the best means for turning a profit on America's natural resources. Now it's the land itself that's the cash cow. Big companies like Philip Morris are part of that process, taking their products to the outdoors and roping us into their scheme through a kind of subliminal seduction of the way we see nature.

Philip Morris, for example, would have you believe the West is about a man on a horse roping cattle and taking cigarette breaks against the view of a snowcapped peak. It's an association that the company drills into its team members (and those who watch the footage in ads back home) as they experience the American outdoors -- as presented by Marlboro. The links between nature and cigarettes, and between the outdoors and Marlboro-sponsored adventure sports, are cemented as the landscape becomes merely a backdrop for smoking and desert toys.

"The Monkey Wrench Gang" author Edward Abbey saw this coming more than a quarter-century ago. He called it "industrial recreation" and used the term to refer to the deliberate selling out of landscape for profit. It goes by other names today: "wreckreation" or "ecotainment." To some degree, the new use results in higher wear and tear on the land; it also helps to change the way we imagine public space, and potentially the way we experience it.

I asked a Bureau of Land Management staff person if he thought there was something illogical about a branch of the federal government issuing Philip Morris a public land use permit under the pretense of outdoor adventure, given the laws against tobacco advertising in the U.S. Technically, of course, the company isn't breaking any laws. As long as no Americans take part in the event and as long as the event originates outside U.S. borders and Philip Morris is careful not to display the traditional red, white and black Marlboro jeep in the desert, they're off the hook. But even given the murky legalities of Marlboro's ad scheme, should we be using public lands to sell products?

"What makes the presence of Philip Morris out here any different than Budweiser promoting the Olympics?" the BLM staffer replied. "Isn't that what America is all about?"

His response may have been facetious, but according to Jim Lyons, former undersecretary for natural resources and environment, the staffer is right. Lyons said as much in a speech to the American Recreation Coalition's Great Outdoors Week when he declared: "We can make the national forest the Microsoft of outdoor recreation. We've got a great product to sell. And, with your help, we can make it even better!"

Next Page: 25 million parkgoers will need somewhere to eat

• View blog reactions