Editor's note: The following guest article by Dr. John Lemons, Dr. Owen Hoffman, Lyndel Meikle, Rick Smith, and Ron Mackie is in response to Dr. Alfred Runte's article, Stephen Mather's Ghost: Revisiting The Consensus For National Parks

Introduction

Alfred Runte, in his article Stephen Mather’s Ghost: Revisiting the Consensus for National Parks, published 6 September 2015 by National Parks Traveler, takes issue with the prevailing narrative that Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, was (mostly) responsible for the 1916 origin of the NPS. Instead, Dr. Runte attributes an important role for railroads in the origin of certain national parks and of the NPS. Accordingly, Mather promised to manage parks on a ‘business basis,’ presumably similar to how Runte believes railroads managed themselves. Runte states that Mather, being a self–made millionaire, believed every park should be run like a business because doing so was preferable to relying on the federal government that always seemed short of funds. Railroads with successful business approaches and ties to the NPS would be efficient in the handling and allocation of financial resources and, in so–doing, benefit the NPS.

So far so good, at least where we are taken by Dr. Runte’s short historical narrative. But then, Dr. Runte’s writing becomes muddled. Runte wrote: ‘It was under the railroads that Americans had formed a clear understanding of what parks should be.’ Really?

Surely Dr. Runte, being an historian, knows that there never has been a clear idea about what parks should be–or are. Further, railroads have never been noted to have the pulse of all Americans when it comes to national parks. Maybe, in the early days of parks and railroads travelers were similar enough to be counted as one type of tourist. But we know that other potential park visitors lacked income or social standing to use the railroads for travel to parks. If railroads had an understanding of how Americans understood parks, it could not have been a very diverse understanding.

As of this date (06 October 2015) Dr. Runte’s article has garnered only one comment. From such a statistic, one might assume that his article did not provoke much interest from Traveler readers. On the other hand, our incentive is to clarify and further discuss some NPS issues raised by Dr. Runte because, indeed, they are important. So, for this, we offer him our gratitude.

Dr. Runte touts railroads in increasing the acceptance of early national parks such as Glacier, Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon/Sequoia, Yellowstone, and Yosemite, to name a few. People, excepting those in the eastern more wealthy part, of the country knew little about the parks. Consequently, a political resolve in the US Congress often was lacking to promote new parks until knowledge of them increased amongst the upper–socioeconomic classes, which is something the railroads fostered. Of course, for fledgling parks to thrive an administrative agency for parks, in this case–‘The National Park Service’–was also needed and was established 16 August 1916 with help from the railroads.

Growth of Railroads

Let us stop for a moment and reflect on what had been happening nation–wide with respect to railroads and land, keeping in mind Dr. Runte’s historical justification in concluding some of the nation’s railroads help to establish new parks.

Around the early 1830s, there were about 23 miles of railroad in the nation; 30 years later there were about 30,000 miles; 30 years later (circa 1890) there were about 165,000 miles; and circa 1916 (the initiation date of the NPS) there were more than 250,000 miles of railroad track. During railroads’ westward expansion, the railroad talked about most by Dr. Runte -- Northern Pacific Railroad -- received about 47 million acres in federal subsidies between Lake Superior, Minnesota, and Puget Sound, Washington, and subsidies to cover about one–fourth of the railroad construction costs of $470,900 per mile in level areas of Minnesota and the Dakotas; $831,000 per mile in the high plains of Montana; and $1,385,000 or more per mile in mountainous topography (in 2015 dollars). The subsidies of land and money were, of course, from public coffers.

According to Dr. Runte, credit can be given to Jay Cooke -- chief financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad -- who used business acumen to help develop new parks not only by building rail lines to them, but also in promoting scenery and comfortable means of travel for an eastern elite who were used to traveling in style. Yet, Cooke seems to be a strange choice for an emblematic financier of railroads that would help foster the national park idea.

Jay Cooke was a Philadelphia financier who in 1871 influenced Ferdinand V. Hayden, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories, to include in a recommendation that Congress reserve lands in the Great Geyser Basin of Yellowstone for posterity. During this time, Cooke was trying to arrange financial approval for the Northern Pacific Railroad from Minnesota to the West Coast that would skirt the northern boundary of the soon–to–be Yellowstone National Park and perhaps be given rights to establish service to the park’s scenic Great Geyser area. As a practical matter, approval of the boundaries was partially contingent upon agreements with the Sioux Indians, who had resisted the expansion of Cooke’s railroad into their territory roughly between Bismarck in the Dakota Territories and the Yellowstone River in Montana Territory.

Before Cooke could finish building the Northern Pacific Railroad, his financing company went bankrupt in 1873; in 1875, the Northern Pacific Railroad went into bankruptcy. Significantly, Cooke’s bankruptcy stemmed from inefficient use of the large government subsidies to build his railroad. Among other dubious business dealings, Cooke also was involved in financial scandals that helped cause Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald to lose office in the 1873 election. To the extent Dr. Runte, as per his article, uses Cooke and his financial empire as a ‘business basis’ to be emulated by the NPS, Cooke seems hardly to qualify as such.

Jay Cooke and the Northern Pacific Railroad were not the only players in railroads’ promotion of national parks, typically for the gain of railroads. Others included, but were not limited to, Central Pacific's ‘Big Four’–Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. We only emphasis Cooke and the Northern Pacific Railroad because this is what Runte emphasized. Interestingly, unlike other railroad financiers J.J. Hill never accepted government subsidies for his railroads.

The Lure of a ‘Business Basis’ for Modern National Parks–Redux

Dr. Runte reminds us that the so–called ‘battles’ between the fundamental purpose of parks and tourism have never been resolved. (By ‘fundamental purpose’ is meant enjoyment of conservation values and nonconsumption of parks’ resources.) Park concessionaires always have sought profits, which is reasonable given that they are private businesses.

Following, we discuss two examples concerning why a ‘business basis’ for national parks might not be warranted; we then reflect on the more difficult inherent philosophical conflicts between business bases and other purposes of national parks.

The mid–1970s is a time period when a ‘business basis’ was gaining influence in modern NPS policies. Just as Dr. Runte discusses in his article that parks should be managed on a business basis during their early formations, so too did James Watt, Secretary of the Interior from 1981–1983, argue that a strong business ‘umbrella’ overshadow modern parks under President Reagan. Watt was a strong advocate for developing and privatizing federal agencies and government lands. Of course, Reagan was a well–known advocate of governmental deregulation and privatization of public lands.

Secretary of the Interior Watt proposed major changes in NPS policy. He recommended increased levels of visitation and development in most parks, and wanted park concessionaires to have a greater role in park management. Much of secretary Watt’s position stemmed from support of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) that acquired the previous concessionaire in Yosemite National Park. Examples of MCA proposals included in the 1980 Yosemite General Management Plan were expansion of overnight facilities in an already crowded Yosemite Valley; replacement of rustic camping units with modern motel units; construction of an aerial tramway from Yosemite Valley to Glacier Point for viewing; more accommodations for day use and parking; encouragement of higher levels of winter use with snowmobiles; and stocking of some park’s streams with nonnative species of fish, to name a few.

At the time Secretary Watt proposed major changes in NPS policy, it had long been recognized that national parks constitute the best of our natural, cultural, and aesthetic resources. However, the then–recent 1980 State of the Parks Report by the NPS identified numerous threats to parks that result from excessive visitation and use of parks as well as from external causes such as extraction of energy resources adjacent to parks. The report warned that no park is immune to major threats and that they will continue to degrade and destroy irreplaceable park resources if and until mitigation measures are implemented. These measures would have required limitations on visitation, use and development. The Music Corporation of America filed several lawsuits against the NPS regarding its concession status, but did not prevail in any of them.

More recently, the Delaware North Corporation Parks & Resorts (DNC) at Yosemite National Park has filed a multi–million dollar lawsuit against the NPS. This lawsuit is one of others that has been filed against the NPS for its handling of concessions’ contracts in national parks. The current DNC lawsuit against the NPS concerns DNC’s alleged rights to obtain and keep trademarks on names of landmarks within the park, including ‘The Ahwahnee,’ ‘Wawona,’ ‘Badger Pass,’ and ‘Curry Village.’ According to a DNC spokesman, the value of the intellectual property rights in the trademarked names is about $51 million annually. The lawsuit against the NPS is not conclusive regarding the role of concessions in parks until its adjudication. But lawsuits and the basis on which they are fought are indicative of the politics regarding visitor use and preservation in the parks.

Business and the Purpose of National Parks

In his article, Dr. Runte maintains that a ‘business basis’ is the only way to run a national park. We assert that with a business model development always increases. Businesses exist to make a profit, controlled or not by the NPS. In our opinion, Dr. Runte could have emphasized ideas from other prominent national park scholars who have argued for parks being managed in more protective ways.

It is not more cars or trains that we need in national parks. Existing levels of use and development in most parks degrade the scenery and natural resources: this is without question. According to Joseph Sax, it is worse: they hinder the very purpose of preserving those things, which is to allow visitors to contemplate and reflect on their connection to the natural world. Sax based his ideas on those of the 19th–century social critic Frederick Law Olmsted, who would have thought large modern hotels and traffic, were anomalies in parks. Such commercialism and crowding intrudes upon our ability to contemplate the mystery and grandeur of this thing called ‘nature.’ In Olmsted’s view, conservation of national parks is incompatible with high levels of use and development, with anything having to do with management based on business, because national parks should give the ordinary citizen an opportunity to exercise and educate the contemplative faculty. For that reason, Olmsted wrote in 1865, the establishment of nature parks and public places was ‘justified and enforced as political duty.’

The more nature there is, the greater allowance is made for the free roaming of the human spirit and intelligence: conservation begets freedom. (Something Edward Abbey taught us) The setting is a precondition for activities that cultivate human independence, curiosity, and self–directed thought. It is only those areas, free from development, that allow contemplation and reflection, and that do not depend for our attention on artificial entertainment found in such places as modern hotels, bars and ski slopes–things that followed automobiles into parks and no doubt would follow trains. The ideas of Olmsted and Sax provide a strong basis for a contemplative, reflective and non–consumptive experience in national parks.

Sax and John Livingston, in the latter’s book The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, have many of the same conclusions about the need for parks to be free of development and heavy visitation. However, Livingston rejects the idea that conservation should serve human needs. He reminds us that the human assault on such places as national parks will not lessen until we change to recognize that we are neither separate from, nor better than, other animals. We are only different. Relatively undeveloped national parks serve to benefit animals, not human beings, no matter how sympathetic those humans might be. When it comes to national parks, technology, politics and complicated public transportation schemes will not provide the solution. And this, of course, is one of the things that haunts Dr. Runte’s essay, which is that although light–rail systems might help mitigate problems in national parks, they will not make them go away.

It is not, then, the standoff between conservation on the one hand and use and development on the other that is the most significant problem for national parks. Rather, it is the challenge of communicating the founding ideal of the parks to a wider public, and persuading them to expect their national park experience to be an authentic one, with little or no human–manufactured distraction.

Many people hold a memory of experiences in some of the world’s national parks. These memories have helped to foster good times, and sustained people through more mundane or even difficult times: another gift that national parks and other special places can give us, even when we are distant from them. Yet for such treasured memories to be created, national parks must be places in which heightened sensory or aesthetic experiences can be had, either in moments of intense awareness, or over long periods of time in which we familiarize ourselves with the ecology and landscape of a place. These experiences must be sufficiently authentic and profound to etch themselves into our very being. This etching cannot be done in the midst of crowded conditions, excessive development, or traffic jams on narrow park roads.

Conclusion

We agree with Dr. Runte that light–rail systems in conjunction with limitations on park visitors might be a partial solution to overcrowding in national parks. However, we submit that his article would have been stronger had he discussed the need for light–rail systems with overcrowding of parks. But we disagree most with the rest of his article. Why, e.g., is Jay Cooke used as an exemplar of railroads? Why are railroads said to be so knowledgeable in running their business on a ‘business basis’ when some went bankrupt and others relied on major federal subsidies?

One bothersome thing that we surmise is lurking behind what Dr. Runte wrote in his 6 September 2015 article in the Traveler is that it was first printed in PERC (29 July 2015), which stands for ‘Property and Environment Research Center.’ PERC has a clear political focus of using free market–based principles, individual property rights, and deregulation in matters of environmental affairs. Whether the principles of PERC are those appropriate for national parks is debatable.

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Dr. John Lemons, Emeritus Professor of Biology and Environmental Science, Department of Environmental Studies, University of New England, Biddeford, ME 04005 and former NPS Ranger–Naturalist; Dr. Owen Hoffman, president, Oak Ridge Center for Risk Analysis, Oak Ridge, TN 37830 and former NPS Ranger–Naturalist;  Lyndel Meikle, National Park Service, Grant–Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, Deer Lodge, MT 59722; Rick Smith, retired National Park Service Ranger;  Ron Mackie, retired National Park Service Ranger.