Here Comes Mickey Moose?!?

Mickey Moose and the West’s newest frontier (From Writers on the Range - subscription required)

The Walt Disney Company is coming to Yellowstone National Park, and already the "Mickey Moose" jokes have started. What’s not funny is the way this venture by a multinational corporation marks a new frontier for the West.

In a quiet announcement last month, Disney said it intended to test-launch a "Quest for the West" weeklong vacation tour of Yellowstone, Grand Teton and the Jackson Hole area. Wyoming and Hawaii are the first two destinations for "Adventures by Disney," a vacation concept marketed to people who already take Disney vacations such as cruises.

Disney thus enters the eco-tourism market — one of the West’s latest ways of selling itself. Eco-tourism, defined as nature-oriented tourism that seeks to minimize environmental impacts, is a frontier because it’s a new, unorganized market, much like the Internet a decade ago.