Spike in violence by offroad vehicle riders related to industry ads, rhetoric?

Across the country, clashes between reckless off-road vehicle (ORV) riders and other users of green spaces, including campers, sportsmen and rural residents, seem to be on the rise. At least that’s the impression you get reading a new report by the environmental group Responsible Trails America (pdf), whose catalog of aggressive and violent encounters includes a few in Minnesota. The Responsible Trails report speculates about one possible factor in the spike in these clashes:  ATV ads that lay the machismo on thick. An analysis of five years’ worth of ads by the top four ORV manufacturers found a local company with the “most aggressive” ads — Medina-based Polaris.

Responsible Trails’ advertising study found that the four companies — Polaris, Thief River Falls–based Arctic Cat, Bombardier and Suzuki — spent around $47 million on advertising over five years. Many of those ads encouraged aggressive use of snowmobiles, ATVs or other off-road vehicles.

Polaris ads, for example, typically use language like “no compromises” or “if it intimidates you, step aside.” A 2006 campaign uses the metaphor of gunslinging: Polaris’ CEO challenges his counterparts at other ORV companies to “a duel.” Responsible Trails’ listing of violent incidents by OVR users, unsurprisingly, includes plenty of gunplay: a woman speaking at a Montana ORV planning meeting was threatened with “a bullet in her head” for her opinions; ATV riders in Idaho were accused of shooting at National Guard tanks; and in our own Boundary Waters Canoe Area, several drunken men terrorized campers at Basswood Lake using gunfire, and their anger was fueled, according to Responsible Trails’ report, by the ban on motorized vehicles in the canoe area. (Here’s the tally of violent incidents: pdf).

Some ads promote illegal use of ATVs as well. A Suzuki commercial shows riders of its KingQuad ATVs buzzing past the entry sign to Death Valley National Park. “There’s not a trail where I couldn’t take it,” boasts one rider. Apparently so, as Death Valley prohibits offroad vehicle use within the park.

The second part of Responsible Trails’ study looked at rhetoric by ORV industry leaders over the past two decades, finding machismo and aggression in abundance. The Blue Ribbon Coalition, a nonprofit “dedicated to preserving responsible access to public lands and water,”  has long antagonized environmental activists. In official communiques, the group has variously referred to green-space advocates as “soldiers of environmental jihad,” “Nazis” and “hate groups.”

And this kind of rhetoric prevails on web sites BRC links to, according to Responsible Trails. Many sites, from Off-road.com to ATV Nation and Hummer X Club, revel in constructions using “eco-” and “enviro-” prefixes, calling land-use activists “eco-Nazis,” “eco-bitches” and “enviro-nuts,” among others. (These enthusiasts seem to toggle between racial persecution and victimhood: One site framed ORV riders as “today’s ‘niggers,’” while another included a 2007 posting that referred to “Barack Osama Obama getting Nigger-ish with Hip Hop Artist“).

Despite all this extreme language, Responsible Trails doesn’t fall into namecalling of its own. The organization is quick to acknowledge ORV users’ rights to enjoy their pasttime and emphasizes that their beef is with reckless riders, not law-abiding ORV users. The report’s conclusion, which urges the industry to review their marketing materials and ties with the Blue Ribbon Coaltion to ensure they aren’t contributing to reckless and aggressive ORV use, offers a far-from-incendiary parting shot.

“[W]e believe there could be a correlation between the messages these companies are promoting and the lawlesss  behavior taking place on ORV’s throughout the country.”