Visitor capacity: a dilemma of perspective: when is popularity too much of a good thing?

Parks & Recreation, March, 2003 by Glenn Haas

You can't see the forest for the trees. Is the glass half full or half empty? What you see depends on where you sit. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. These are but a few of the popular cliches that warn us of the entrapment of human perspective.

In the spring of 2001, a senior recreation planner in a federal land agency was contacted and asked about setting up a demonstration project to test the ideas coming forth from the Federal Interagency Task Force on Visitor Capacity on Public Lands. He declined the offer, stating, "We don't have a capacity problem. We don't want to limit visitors."

This perspective is prevalent in the recreation profession; that is, a capacity is a limit on public use and doesn't have to be addressed until there are unacceptable conditions. While the planner's perspective enabled him to make a quick and efficient decision, another perspective would view waiting until there's a problem as tantamount to handing the decision-making authority to the judicial and political system. I believe that the recreation profession may have trapped itself in a narrow line of thinking over the last 20 years and should engage in a broader dialogue of divergent perspectives in search of convergence in understanding visitor capacity.

By definition, a visitor capacity is the number or supply of available recreation opportunities to be accommodated in an area. It's a basic and fundamental decision used in managing, planning, allocating permits, marketing and visitor information, budgeting and many other functions. The difficulty isn't in deciding a reasonable capacity number, but the inputs necessary to make a sound decision. Therein lies the dilemma of perspective.

The purpose of this article is to highlight for park and recreation decision makers several perspectives about visitor capacity (historically referred to as recreational carrying capacity), and to offer an alternative view that was stimulated from the 24-month Federal Interagency Task Force on Visitor Capacity on Public Lands initiated by the U. S. Department of the Interior. The final report of the task force was recently published and is available via NRPA. (See the box on p. 74 for ordering information.)

Human Perspectives

Humans use a large array of tools or mental short cuts to deal with the complexity of life. Examples of such tools include routines, intuition, stereotypes, selective perception, saliency, anchoring, prejudice and assumptions. These tools are valuable and help to provide structure and understanding to a situation.

Human perspective is also one such tool. A perspective is a vantage point or frame for viewing the world. It's a way of seeing things, a way of thinking, and it helps to explain "where one is coming from." It's a person's reality, shaped by countless factors such as parents and friends, childhood history, religion, academic background, professional experience, personal motivations, biases and personality traits. Perspectives will often vary among individuals, but may also become institutionalized by large affinity groups, communities, professions, businesses and agencies.

Unfortunately, a perspective provides only a partial view of reality, and therein lies the trap. Human perspective has been referred to as the "mother of all biases," the giant short cut of the mind that can lead us astray, and a decision-making pathogen. Each of us is entrapped by a vantage point that doesn't permit seeing the totality of a situation. The danger lies in the fact that incomplete and imperfect information may lead to poor decision making.

Decision science reminds us that to be forewarned is to forearmed, and advocates multiframing (deliberately examining a situation from many perspectives). Decision situations take on a new reality when examined from multiple perspectives, much like viewing a piece of sculpture or the Grand Canyon from different vistas and at different times of day. Multiframing involves deliberately considering counsel from people with maximally different perspectives; multiframing is contrary to the human tendency to seek counsel only from those with similar perspectives.

Ironically, whereas diversity of perspective can be an obstacle and inconvenience to efficient decision making, it can also enrich and lead to more effective and better decisions. The following section offers an alternative perspective on visitor capacity in the hope of stimulating a broader dialogue to help advance the profession's understanding and use of this important management tool.

Visitor Capacity Perspectives

There are numerous dilemmas of perspective associated with visitor capacity. This article discusses several key ones identified in the deliberations of the task force and briefly mentions others for future deliberation.

There are two dilemmas associated with the question, "A capacity for recreation `what?'" First, the concept of capacity in the literature has been applied to many elements, such as recreation activities, design capacity, psychological capacity, biological capacity, administrative capacity and transportation capacity. Does an area have one capacity or multiple capacities? Does a manager need to make one decision or multiple decisions? Much of the literature is discipline-specific, and offers the perspective that each element needs a separate number and decision.