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What Ken Burns Left Out

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Ken Burns' wildly popular documentary on the national parks said a lot, but not quite enough.

On October 22, 2009, shortly after the Ken Burns documentary on America’s national parks aired on National Public Television, I was invited to make a presentation to the Santa Fe Rotary Club. My topic for the talk was, “What Ken Burns left out.” Here is a slightly edited version of my presentation.

Many of us watched all or parts of the latest Ken Burn’s film on KNME-TV, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. It was typical Burns work—lavish production values, important talking heads, and an authentic star of the show, Ranger Shelton Johnson. I hope you also noticed that Santa Fe resident and Director of NM State Monument System, Ernest Ortega, was featured in one of the segments. The film concentrated on the early history of the creation of our national park system, with hundreds of gorgeous slow motion shots of early parks such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Crater Lake and Glacier. The narrative made the point that most of our park areas would not exist today but for the passion and dedication of small groups of people who sold their fellow citizens and their congressional representatives on the idea that these areas should be preserved and protected in perpetuity. That is why there have been so few deauthorizations of areas once established. It is a matter of generational equity. Succeeding generations of Americans do not want to second guess the decisions that the preceding generations have made regarding our park areas. I know that I would hate to think that a subsequent generation of Americans would seek to deauthorize areas that my generation added such as Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, or Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

What interested me, though, about the Burns film is what it left out. I’d like to spend the rest of the time we have together discussing some issues that were not part of the film.

1. National park areas may face relevance problems in the future.

Our country is becoming racially and ethnically more diverse all time. My brother just retired as an elementary school principal in a well-to-do suburb of Detroit. His school population included children from 26 different languages. We know that few African-Americans visit national park areas; the same is true for Americans of Hispanic heritage. Will these and other racial and ethnic groups support continuing appropriations to maintain our national park areas if we do not find a way to make them feel like they are owners of the system?

Moreover, some observers have noted that younger people spend increasingly less time in the out of doors. In a recent book published on the topic, one young man was reported to have said, “Why would I want to go outdoors? There’s no place to plug in my computer.” If that is representative of his peers, then our parks may suffer from decreasing public support as these kids grow up and become voting adults. Will they be satisfied, as some have suggested, with virtual hikes in Bandelier National Monument instead of actually walking the trail system? Will an I pod photo of Old Faithful be a satisfactory substitute for the real thing?

This is a very real problem. Burns made the point that early park managers recognized that they had to build a constituency for parks if they were to survive. Now, the constituency exists—after all, Yellowstone broke its all-time visitation record this year—but can we hold on to it as we become increasingly diverse and our kids are distracted by computers, flat screen TVs and game boys?

2. The National Park System is much more diverse than the Burns film suggested.

There are now 392 areas that are a part of the system. Parks are situated as far east as Acadia National Park in Maine and as far west as War in the Pacific National Historic Site in Guam where the sacrifices of American and Japanese soldiers in World War II are commemorated. The farthest south is National Park of American Samoa, which is actually in the Southern Hemisphere, and the farthest north is Gates of the Arctic National Park, a portion of which is 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The parks vary dramatically in size. The smallest is Thaddeus Kosciusko National Memorial in Philadelphia, two hundredths of an acre. The largest is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, at 8.3 million acres. If you could explore a section of this National Park each day—640 acres, an almost impossible task—it would take you nearly 36 years. That completed, you could then spend another 21 years exploring the adjacent Wrangell-St. Elias National Preserve, which is also a unit of the National Park System.

More than 60 percent of the areas of the System preserve and protect sites important to us for their historical or cultural associations. In the System, we can hear the drums and cannons of the Revolutionary War at Minute Man or Colonial. We can sense the excitement of nation building at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. We can trace the bloody trail of General Grant as he clashed with General Lee at places such as the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Petersburg, Richmond, ending, finally and mercifully, in the stillness at Appomattox. We can trace the contributions of individuals or groups of people at these sites. The contributions of Black Americans are celebrated at places such as Booker T, Washington National Monument, Frederick Douglass Home National Memorial, or Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site Sites with Hispanic associations are Castillo de San Marcos, De Soto, Coronado, El Morro, Chamizal, San Antonio Missions, and Cabrillo. We can think about the contributions of American artists at NPS sites such as Carl Sandburg Home, Eugene O'Neil, Longfellow, Poe, and St. Gaudens. American women are commemorated at Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, and Women’s Rights National Historical Park in New York, the scene of on early suffragette meeting. We can contemplate the genius of our American Indian ancestors at Mesa Verde or Chaco, or sense their pain at Little Big Horn Battlefield or Canyon de Chelly. We commemorate presidents, some great such as Lincoln and Washington and some perhaps not so great like Hoover and Taft. We celebrate scientists such as Edison and inventors like the Wright brothers. It is, in sum, a remarkable collection of places.

But that's not all. In 1936, Congress ordered the NPS to study the impoundment behind Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, for its recreational potential. It was our first recreation area. In the public works days of the 1930's, several parkway projects were authorized and begun. The NPS now manages such places as the Blue Ridge, Natchez Trace, and the George Washington Memorial Parkway in D.C. In 1937, Congress authorized the first national seashore, Cape Hatteras. In 1972, the first urban recreation areas were created and the NPS assumed management responsibilities at Gateway National Recreation Area in New York/New Jersey and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco.

3. The debate about what is appropriate in our national park areas is becoming increasingly shrill.

The use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks has prompted an unprecedented outpouring of public comment during the various plans that have been put forward to control the machine’s use. Something like a half a million letters and petitions have flooded the offices of the Department of the Interior and its bureau, the National Park Service. Even after all the plans and scientific studies, it appears that the federal court system will be the final arbiter.

A similar controversy has erupted about the carrying of weapons in national park areas. A Bush administration rule that would have allowed the carrying of concealed weapons in parks was overruled by a federal judge. Her decision was rendered moot by an amendment to the credit card bill proposed by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), and signed by President Obama that allows the carrying of weapons in national park areas consistent with state law. This will go into effect in February 2010. 130,000 comments were received by the Department of the Interior during the rule-making process.

4. National park areas are important economic engines in the areas in which they exist.

When I was the superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, I made an annual appearance at the Chamber of Commerce and the City Council meeting. At that time, Carlsbad had approximately 800,000 annual visitors. The AAA estimated that the typical family of four in the mid-80’s spent $160 dollars per day while on vacation—gas, food, motels or campsites, souvenirs, and the like. If you take the 800,000 visitors to the Caverns and divide them by 4, that is an estimated 200,000 families spending $160 a day—or something like $32 million dollars. And, as I pointed out, these dollars circulated through the community in unique ways. These visitors did not make the same demands as regular residents on services such as police, fire, school and health. In other words, the community received but did not incur the same costs. I don’t think I ever gave presentations that were as well-received as these.

5. America’s creation of a system of protected areas such as national parks has spurred other nations to do the same.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature reports that there are now over 100,000 established protected areas in the world, not all of them national parks, of course, but all established to preserve and protect natural and cultural resources. These areas cover approximately 11.63% of the world’s terrestrial and marine areas. Yellowstone was the first such area created in the world; more than 140 nations have followed suit. In the developing world, such areas are often looked at as a way to promote the sustainable use of resources to assure a brighter future for young people. Protected areas in these countries are also the focal point for environmental education.

As community leaders in your businesses and industries, you have an important role to play in assuring that our National Park System remains healthy and vigorous. Contact Senators Bingaman and Udall and Representative Lujan and tell them that you support your national parks. Become active in the park areas that surround Santa Fe. Within a 100 mile radius, you have Bandelier National Monument, Pecos National Historical Park (including Glorietta Pass National Historic Site), and Petroglyph National Monument. If you add to those only the ones in our state—Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and El Morro, El Malpais, White Sands, Fort Union, Salinas Pueblo Missions, Gila Cliff Dwellings, Aztec Ruins, and Capulin Volcano National Monuments, you have a rich diversity of areas to visit.

Take your kids and enroll them in the Junior Ranger programs in these areas. I spent two weeks volunteering this summer at a museum in Yellowstone and was surprised at how enthusiastic the kids were about the park’s Junior Ranger program. Buy them a national parks passport and help them get the passport stamped in as many parks as the family visits. Sit with them at the computer and go to www.nps.gov and have them pick out the parks they would most like to visit and then go there.

The noted ecologist, Aldo Leopold, once said that the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. That’s what we are doing in our national park areas—we are saving all the parts. Leopold told a story in his famous Sand County Almanac. I wonder if you remember it.

Let me tell you of a wild river bluff which until 1935, harbored a falcon’s eyrie. Many visitors walked a mile to the river bank to picnic and watch the falcons. Comes now some planner and dynamites a road to the river, all in the name of recreational planning. The excuse is that the public formerly had no right of access; now it has such a right. Access to what? Not access to the falcons for they are gone.

Only eternal vigilance on peoples’ parts such as those in this audience will make sure that our children and their children’s children will inherit all the parts and not a road with no falcons. Remember that outside our parks and other protected areas, we have transformed nature to our purposes and chewed up our history. As Ken Burns noted, it is in the parks where we find out who and what we are as Americans.

Comments

Land acquisition is not an abuse. It is not a compromise against freedom. It is not in contrast with the American Revolution, for goodness sake. Anyone who is a patriot knows the US Constitution provides for eminent domain takings of land, to be fully compensated. No nation can function as a nation if critical national needs are beyond the reach of the people's government. It is silly to argue about taking land for parks as if it is an aberration. Land is taken for highways, for military bases, for dams, or sanitation systems. Within limits, the government even has the right to regulate land use without compensation, for example in cases where one person's use of the land can damage the needs of all, such as when development on wetlands can pollute the water for all. In the entire history of Anglo Saxon law, if you damage your neighbor's land by the way you use yours, it is a violation and can be stopped by law.

The wonderful thing about "America's Best Idea" is that the United States applied this essential tool for all the people to the best places for preservation. It makes sense. Private development would have degraded the experience of being American for everybody. Historians today bemoan the way Greece, when it was the leading nation of the world, so degraded its landscape that today it looks nothing like the way it did when it was rising toward greatness.

Rick Smith did a service in pointing out that Burns should have made his own film, but that there are important aspect of the NP System and is programs not included. Afterall, Burns is a historian, and selectively did a history of the larger natural areas and a few cultural areas. The people he chose to interview or depict are not presented as "the best" as if it were a contest. Muir represents the struggle many organizations and individuals waged over decades to protect america's most important places. No one would think John Cook has to be thought of as the highest ideal -- any one who knows him knows he is just typical of many who were fortunate to serve the National Parks, and Terry Tempest Williams is one voice among many who see significance in parks. Burns' show may have missed the diversity of parks, but it did show just a bit of the diversity of insight and sensitivity so many people can have to the very same place. THAT diversity is a reason for the richness and meaning of the programs and parks of the National Park System.

Anyway, Burns did not do a film on parks, he did a history of parks. It would be a mistake for people to think by watching it you would learn all the meaning of parks, or all that goes on in parks, or all that is represented by the National Park System or programs of the Service. Rick Smith did a service to have us all remember that, while still doing honor to Ken Burns and his team for developing and broadcasting this film.

Everybody appreciates how painful it can be for an individual to lose her or his land, because of public need. But overwhelmingly, American's support the creation of parks, including by buying the land. Only someone on the fringe who does not believe in the american government or in individual responsibility to his neighbors or in environmental protection believes America or the park system would be better if no private land were purchased from willing or unwilling sellers.


d-2 On January 15th, 2010: Land acquisition is not an abuse. It is not a compromise against freedom. It is not in contrast with the American Revolution, for goodness sake. Anyone who is a patriot knows the US Constitution provides for eminent domain takings of land, to be fully compensated. No nation can function as a nation if critical national needs are beyond the reach of the people's government. It is silly to argue about taking land for parks as if it is an aberration. Land is taken for highways, for military bases, for dams, or sanitation systems. Within limits, the government even has the right to regulate land use without compensation, for example in cases where one person's use of the land can damage the needs of all, such as when development on wetlands can pollute the water for all. In the entire history of Anglo Saxon law, if you damage your neighbor's land by the way you use yours, it is a violation and can be stopped by law... Only someone on the fringe who does not believe in the american government or in individual responsibility to his neighbors or in environmental protection believes America or the park system would be better if no private land were purchased from willing or unwilling sellers.

Keeping one's own land despite the fact that someone else wants it certainly is a right. That is what the right of property ownership means. Pressure groups hijacking the power of government to seize land certainly is an aberration of civilization. American government was founded for the limited purpose of protecting people's rights, not as a means for controlling one group for the benefit of another that takes what it wants. This country and government were not founded to collectivize land for "parks", of which there were none.

Normal, decent people can enjoy scenery without going berserk and using it as an excuse to seize what they want for preservationism, dropping all context of rights, morality and civilized behavior. Moral objection to such abuse does not mean being on the "fringe". Moral objection to such arrogance is not "silly". It is the root of this country.

Using one's own land rather than preserving it is not "damage" to one's neighbor's land. Viros have extended the concept of "pollution" to mean anything they don't like and use it as an excuse to control everyone around them.

You do not have the right to seize someone else's property and you don't obtain such a "right" by ganging up on him in a group, calling yourself "democracy" while you parade yourself as representing the "public interest". There is no such entity as a "public" with an "interest", the public is only an abstraction referring to a group of individuals, each of which have the same rights to their freedom and their own interests. There is no such thing as a fair price of something that is not for sale. The government was not supposed to be your tool to bully other people.

The arrogant attitude by the statists in the park lobby that the rights of the individual are subordinate to their pressure group's cynical, ends-justifies-the-means political warfare is morally reprehensible. It has no place in this country. There is no "public need" for it and no justification for it. If you want to preserve land, then do it on your own time and money without making a religion out of it and without bullying and rolling other people.

NPS abuse of property owners is not "popular"; it is kept hidden. Just as in the nationwide, popular revolt against the Kelo Supreme Court decision, normal people are horrified when they learn, for example, what NPS did to the people whose property it took at Minute Man in the name of "commemorating" the beginning of the American Revolution for freedom from tyranny. They are horrified by both the abuse and the hypocrisy practiced by NPS and its apologists. Only those who have no regard for other people's rights don't care and find moral objections to such arrogant power to be "silly".

That is why NPS, which falsely claims to present history in its "education", to this day hides its own history at Minute Man and everywhere else it brutally trampled people the same way. NPS hides its abuse behind the scenery to protect its "image". It does not stand up and say, "for goodness sake every patriot knows the individual must be sacrificed to the group and this doesn't contradict the American Revolution." If they are ignorant and arrogantly evil enough to believe such statist nonsense they do know that it would not be tolerated.

This is why, to suppress controversy over a proposed expansion or new area, NPS and its boosters hide the record and the intended coercive means of acquisition, and is why they lie about a "willing seller policy" -- when they have to address the subject of means of acquisition at all -- to keep people quiet until it is too late to stop the takeover. It is why NPS and its boosters lied to the people they had targeted in the establishment of Minute Man 50 years ago and is why that political chicanery has not changed.

And it is why the Duncan/Burns film -- originated when Duncan was appointed by the Clinton administration to the board of the Congressionally created National Parks Foundation -- dishonestly "left out" so much of NPS history. The film is a promotion never intended as an independent, unbiased "documentary" at all.

Rick Smith's topic "what Ken Burns left out" certainly does deserve widespread public discussion, for the same reason that NPS and the apologists for its abuse don't want it.


Anon, please read something of the law. ANY country's law, or just the law of this country. From the beginning, the country IS the sovereign. In the United States, the people designed and restrained that governmental power, by extending rights to individuals, such as the right of compensation of lands acquired by the sovereign government, or reserving powers to the states and individuals not innumerated for the central government. No one ever eliminated the right of federal or state governments from buying, or taking, land with compensation. EVER. Some parks do not have the right to acquire land by condemnation, some do, because the legislation establishing them expressly provides for the limit.

Most people in using their land DO NOT damage the land rights of their neighbors. Again, it is silly to imply that I or anyone else is saying anything different. Extreme distortions is why cant is called 'extremist.' But when damage is happening because an owner believes she/he has an unrestrained license to do whatever she/he wants on that land, the government or fellow citizens can act, either through federal, state or civil action.

This HAS ALWAYS been true. If one prefers "romantic myth" to "silly" or whatever, fine. But your analysis NEVER has characterized the law in the United States.

The issue, in the takings case in Connecticut -- the concern -- is something altogether different. Regardless of how the Supreme Court actually ruled in that case, what has disturbed people over the years, since Robert Moses, is the idea that the sovereign's acquisition authority can be used NOT for public purposes, but for private development purposes. The concern was: was that CT development a public purpose at all? Is establishing a Development Corporation and permitting that entity the right to use governmental condemnations authority, and then to permit the corportation to flip the properties to a for-profit developer, constitutional? The restraint, if there will be one, on such practices does not get to the heart of what Anon. says it does, which is the right of the government to acquire land for public purposes. The fact that the national parks are run by the government and not by some corporation should be a distinction available to even those who avoid all consecutive thinking in their political passions.

Yes, as I said in my post, for the individual, a taking by government can be a horror. Government should really think twice, a hundred times before doing it. When the government recklessly displaces people for an unworthy project, people do become disaffected, even to the point of escalating hostility against government and fostering any number of preposterous political theorists. For several generations, condemnation has always been the last resort for the NPS, even when crucial properties are at stake. In the case of Flight 93, where the Bush White House and the Congress officially only recently passed a law to permit a taking, the Obama Administration jumped in to hold back that park's determination to take the land even for this sacred shrine. The NPS remembers horror stories when Army Corps of Engineers land employees who originally had been working to build an Army Corps dam at the Delaware Water Gap, just switch over to keep buying land when congress decided they wanted a park instead of a Corps dam and reservation. Well, the acquisition style of the Army Corps destroyed the peace in those communities, as every cabin that did not meet local zoning requirements was snapped up, and story after story of heartbreak came out. The NPS regained control over that acquisition and stopped the takings. Despite this, the Congressman behind all this, who was first defeated, was later reelected in the same district.

It is interesting to me that extreme libertarians, those who go to the point of suggesting that the federal government should have NO authority to acquire private land, don't seem to challenge the right of the Corps of Engineers when they routinely employ far more brutal tactics in acquition than the NPS ever would. Or, the highway department. Or Port Authorities for port or LNG development. No, they take on the national park service, which unlike those agencies still has a checkerboard of private lands within parks that are 10's of years old, and uses taking as the last not the first tactic. Highways aren't built with private land astride them, but we only hear about parks. It is pretty obvious what the real agenda is.

Government and the american people need to be mindful of worst case examples of the abuse of power, and should be vigilant to eliminate excess.

But the American people know how lands are acquired for roads, for military bases, for parks, and with caution and care generally support them. The park service retains the consent of the governed not by hiding it, as Anon says, but by good steps the people support. The silliest thing of all is to suggest that the Burns film should have been a history of the condemnation process. Throughout the Burns film he shows the tension between privatizing the land or setting it aside for public purposes. For most of the parks Burns chose, the lands already were in federal ownership. In much of the west, the private land holdings only happened at the great effort and subsidy of the federal government, who did everything it could, including practically giving public land away to private owners, & promoting and subsidizing infrastructure development, just to get individuals to go out there. There are exceptions of course, but modern libertarian romantics seem to envision themselves as Jim Bridgers or Robin Hoods, when in fact these supposedly rugged individualists were subsidized into existence. No, we don't hear about that.

It would be interesting to see how long these individualists would last if they really were on their own, and lacked the sustaining power of liberal democracies like the United States. I know the perfect part of Afghanistan you should try your theories, and luck, on. Long may you wave.


Last anon--

Maybe you think that I feel that Burns should have devoted large sections of his film to your, well, unusual theories of property ownership. I do not. I agree with d-2. In the vast majority of cases that the NPS has used condemnation authority to acquire land, it happened because the land in question was about to be altered so that it would no longer serve conservation or preservation piurposes. It was almost always within the boundaries of a congresionally-authorized park area. No, you're going to have to take your arguments against land acquistion somewhere else. The NPS is pretty clean in this area.

Rick Smith


anon: You seem to speak like an intelligent person and you seem to know of at least some history. So, I challenge you to combine the two with your ideals on land rights and hopefully a little bit of logic which should make your argument self-defeating. How can any of the nearly all Anglo/Euro property owners you so defend lay claim to one parcel when said land was never for sale to begin with. Was not only originally taken; was not only not compensated; but was done so at the murder of men, women, children who were merely using the land for sustenance. Pick a better fight my friend; you'll lose this one everytime!


Word games about a policy of condemnation used only as a "last resort" means "agree" to sell or NPS will take it. Holding a gun to the head of an unwilling seller is eminent domain. Yet people who give up under this threat are dishonestly called "willing sellers" so that NPS can pretend its acquisition is something other than what it is. Such was the case with the Flight 93 takings -- faced with adverse press coverage the Obama administration wanted to create an appearance of "willing sellers" while ensuring that no one had a choice but to "agree" to sell.

The Kelo Supreme Court decision extended the elastic notion of "public use" to "public purpose" seizing and transferring private property to those who will pay higher taxes in exchange for the land they develop. The essential similarities with NPS expansionism is allowing a pressure group to gang up on a minority in the name of "public interest". In both cases, well-heeled, politically-connected insiders use the power of government to take what they want, as has been the history of NPS expansion from the beginning.

The Duncan/Burns film did not report the policies of arrogant coercion throughout NPS history. It hid them. The film is promotion, not an unbiased documentary. It repeatedly belittled and disparaged private land and industry and ignored the use of condemnation except for the Smoky Mountains, at which the population displacement is too well known to ignore -- and that was given only a minute and quarter and dismissed as the irrelevant ancient past as if it hadn't been done all over the country to the present day. The park lobby doesn't want the public to know what actually happened to so many people -- including at the parks featured in the film promotion. Even the portion on Indian removal specifically for parks in the west was a whitewash.

For all the rambling sophistry, d-2 has clearly revealed that he is an authoritarian holding that government power, to be used for his purposes, is above all else. He claims that in the US "sovereign government" came first, only "extending rights to individuals" as some kind of gift that can be revoked at any time instead of recognizing and protecting our rights. He claims that individuals settling unowned land in the west were "given" "public" land through "great effort and subsidy of the federal government". He knows fully well that "taking by government can be a horror" but he doesn't care -- shut up and do as your told.

All of that is an obscenely statist, collectivist inversion of the history and purpose of the founding of this country and the proper relationship between the individual and government -- whose proper purpose is to protect our natural rights as individual human beings, not to exercise "sovereign" control over us. In contrast to other governments around the world, in this country private individuals were to be free to act, limited only in what we can't do to others -- not limited to what we can do only by permission. Government was to be limited in what it can and must do, not acting out of discretionary policies. It was to be a government of law and not men.

But this NPS insider d-2 cynically sees government as a tool to coercively take what he wants. That makes him and his cohorts a personal, physical threat to every innocent person, just as the NPS acquisition agenda to take over more private property is a physical threat to anyone in its way. They should be treated accordingly in response to the war they have declared on us. It is morally reprehensible. This is supposed to be America.

With unspeakable, cynical arrogance d-2 contemptuously denigrates and personally smears those who reject his avowed authoritarianism as "silly", "fringe", "extremist", "Robin Hoods", hopelessly "romantic" and worthy only of banishment to "Afghanistan" -- a false alternative to his rabid progressive statism foisted on us in the name of "liberal democracy". NPS officials and lobbyists have a long history of the same arrogance, which continues today; it didn't start or end with Army Corps of "Engineers" acquisition officers (who were fully supported by NPS officials).

What a great way to "promote" parks. How fitting that d-2, an NPS pressure group insider, is an apologist for the NPS abuse that normal, decent people find abhorent -- when they are allowed to find out about what NPS and its boosters normally try to hide from the public. What an ambassador for parks this one is.


Rick Smith
On January 16th, 2010

Last anon--

Maybe you think that I feel that Burns should have devoted large sections of his film to your, well, unusual theories of property ownership. I do not.

There is nothing "unusual" in objecting to preservationists using the government to seize private property, not in this country. The Duncan/Burns film was dishonest in not reporting that NPS has harmed people whose property it has seized for a century all over the country. Duncan did this because the park lobby doesn't want the public to know it; the film is an NPS promotion, not an independent documentary. No one said that the film should have "devoted large sections" to "unusual theories of property ownership". That is a strawman.

In an ironic way it is better that the film didn't deal with the subject because given the purpose and standards used it would have been an even bigger whitewash.

I agree with d-2. In the vast majority of cases that the NPS has used condemnation authority to acquire land, it happened because the land in question was about to be altered so that it would no longer serve conservation or preservation piurposes.

NPS has a long record of seizing homes, businesses and farms. But neither does a property owner "altering" his own property serve as an excuse to take it.

It was almost always within the boundaries of a congresionally-authorized park area. No, you're going to have to take your arguments against land acquistion somewhere else. The NPS is pretty clean in this area.

NPS had better restrict its acquisitions to "Congressionally authorized boundaries" because that is the only place it has legal authority to do so, but it has also been known to redraw boundaries after the legislation, such as at Acadia.

Moreover, NPS repeatedly interprets Congressional authorization to mean it should exercise its authority to the maximum extent possible. This illustrates why such awesome discretionary power should not be delegated to a bureaucracy, let alone one backed with a well-financed political lobby with an anti-private property agenda.

The arrogance of the apologists for NPS abuse is unspeakable. They waver between dishonest denial and openly arrogant advocacy. But what they do to people is usually kept strategically hidden, especially in their slick media campaigns for NPS expansions, because they know very well how controversial these practices are when people know the truth. They deceive even their own allies to keep those with a conscience from balking. NPS is not "clean"; it is morally repugnant. Normal people have no difficulty seeing this when they learn what NPS does to people, despite the practice of NPS lobbyists who cynically try to marginalize their victims by demeaning, mocking and caricaturing those who object.


Blackfeet Dreamer
On January 21st, 2010

anon: You seem to speak like an intelligent person and you seem to know of at least some history. So, I challenge you to combine the two with your ideals on land rights and hopefully a little bit of logic which should make your argument self-defeating. How can any of the nearly all Anglo/Euro property owners you so defend lay claim to one parcel when said land was never for sale to begin with. Was not only originally taken; was not only not compensated; but was done so at the murder of men, women, children who were merely using the land for sustenance. Pick a better fight my friend; you'll lose this one everytime!

This is the standard, tired sophistry attempting to deny all property rights because the land was allegedly "stolen" from Indians. The Indians had a stone age tribalist culture that did not recognize property rights. Their tribes exercised a primitive kind of political control over the people within a region, not a protection of their property rights, of which they had no concept. There was nothing to "steal". That was not the "fault" of any particular person, Indian or not; it was simply the primitive state they were all born into at that stage of human evolution in that region.

European settlers had as much right as anyone to use and claim the land in what was an extremely sparsely populated region. They did not "steal" it. There was no moral primacy to primitivist tribal control over anyone entering the region. The establishment of the institution of property rights and eventually the American form of government protecting the rights of the individual, to the extent it succeeded, was an enormous improvement for mankind, including descendants of the Indians, lifting humanity out of the stone ages and feudalism to civilization.

That is not to say that injustices were not committed or that the earliest approaches, such as European royalty handing out land grants, was the best or even proper. Europe was out of the Stone Age and the Dark Ages but still pre-Enlightenment individualist. It took time for a better system and more knowledge to evolve. That does not mean that no property rights are valid now simply because the system had to be invented and refined through evolution before civilization could rise out of the cave, the teepee, and the feudal castle. We are beneficiaries of the progress, not slaves to the past.

Those who deny property rights on such fallacious reasoning are denying property rights for all time. They are statists and collectivists ideologically opposed to property rights, disingenuous in their alleged concern for human rights. They feign concern for rights while denying them.

It is not surprising that such sophistry in the guise of concern for rights occasionally shows up to rationalize seizing property for government preservationism; the preservationists don't want to have to defend their own trampling of other people's rights. They can't defend it. They baldly deny it, either by denying that it happens or by denying that there are rights to trample or both. They constantly look for excuses to flim flam the public to deny what they are doing and what they want to do to people next. Indian wars centuries ago have nothing to do with us. They have nothing to with NPS stealing people's land in America and do not justify it.


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The Essential RVing Guide

The Essential RVing Guide to the National Parks

The National Parks RVing Guide, aka the Essential RVing Guide To The National Parks, is the definitive guide for RVers seeking information on campgrounds in the National Park System where they can park their rigs. It's available for free for both iPhones and Android models.

This app is packed with RVing specific details on more than 250 campgrounds in more than 70 parks.

You'll also find stories about RVing in the parks, some tips if you've just recently turned into an RVer, and some planning suggestions. A bonus that wasn't in the previous eBook or PDF versions of this guide are feeds of Traveler content: you'll find our latest stories as well as our most recent podcasts just a click away.

So whether you have an iPhone or an Android, download this app and start exploring the campgrounds in the National Park System where you can park your rig.