We all know Gold Butte is a special place and we’d be fooling ourselves to think people won’t continue to discover Gold Butte  and the number of visitors won’t continue to grow. In the wake of more efforts to increase tourism, it’s something we need to embrace and not look the other way. In doing so, we need to make sure Gold Butte has the resources to deal with increased tourism and recreation, including facilities and education. That is why Friends of Gold Butte is working hard for a National Conservation Area with wilderness designation.

The article regarding the executive order to boost tourism to public lands is below:

Allison Winter, E&E reporter/Published: Thursday, January 19, 2012

Link to original article

President Obama will launch an effort today to boost tourism to the United States, in part by promoting visits to national parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands.

The new executive order aims to increase travel throughout the United States by speeding visa processing and promoting domestic and international travel opportunities. A particular focus will be efforts to promote visits to public lands, according to the White House.

Obama is scheduled to pitch the plan this afternoon at Walt Disney World near Orlando. The Florida trip comes just before Republican presidential candidates turn their focus on the state, which has its presidential primary at the end of the month.

The tourism effort is part of Obama’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign for job creation initiatives that do not need approval from Congress. The goal is to significantly increase travel and tourism in the United States and bolster tourism-related jobs.

“Every year, tens of millions of tourists from all over the world come and visit America. And the more folks who visit America, the more Americans we get back to work,” Obama said in a statement before boarding Air Force One to Florida.

If the United States could seize a greater share of the international travel market, it could spur creation of more than 1 million U.S. jobs over the next decade, according to industry projections.

Much of the new executive order focuses on efforts to speed up visa approvals, a process that can currently take weeks for prospective visitors. The administration will try to expedite tourist visas from China and Brazil, two emerging economic powers, by adding more consuls to embassy staff and setting new deadlines for interviews for non-immigrant visa applicants.

The number of travelers from China and Brazil is expected to more than double over the next four years, according to the White House.

The administration will also propose adding Taiwan to the list of countries whose residents do not need visas.

Under the executive order, the Interior and Commerce secretaries will lead a new task force that will develop a national strategy to promote domestic and international travel. A “particular focus” for the group will be promoting visits to national parks, wildlife refuges, monuments and other public lands, according to the White House.

U.S. and international travelers made more than 400 million visits to public lands in 2010, according to the administration, spurring nearly $50 billion in economic activity and 400,000 jobs. The Obama administration says that eco-tourism and outdoor recreation have an “outsize impact” on rural economies, especially in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

Congress already established a nonprofit corporation to promote travel to the United States in 2009. That group, BrandUSA, has developed a website with travel itineraries for major U.S. cities. The executive order calls for the new interagency working group to focus on public lands and coordinate with the nonprofit board.

Lawmakers have in recent years discussed ways to promote more tourism in national parks. Filmmaker Ken Burns, whose documentary on national parks sparked a renewed interest in the park system, told a Senate panel at a 2010 hearing that the federal government should work to entice more visitors to parks.

Senators of both parties, parks officials and local business owners agreed that improvements should be made in marketing the parks as tourist destinations (E&E Daily, April 29, 2010).