Overcrowding, at Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other parks is a growing problem. Should some parks be closed down so more resources could go to these parks?/NPS file
There’s a new book dealing with national parks, called National Parks, Our Living Treasure, A Time for Concern. As you might infer from the title, it’s not a book about what to see or do in the National Park System, but rather one that tries to bring concern to the plight of the parks.
The book is the work of Gil Lusk, who put in more than three decades with the National Park Service, a career that included stints as park superintendent at places such as Glacier National Park in Montana and Big Bend National Park in Texas.
As soon as we receive the book we’ll provide a more detailed review. But in an op-ed column Lusk titled “The Future or Extinction Of The National Park System," he makes the case that there are too many national parks in the system for too few dollars and staff for the National Park Service.
“Congress and Executive Branches over the past 30 years have allowed necessary repairs and upkeep of our treasures to go largely unfunded, with a current documented backlog of some $12 billion, six times the annual budget for the agency,” writes Lusk. “The only thing being done is adding more parks to the system. We need to close some parks shifting funds and staff to the parks that are most in need of rehabilitation and restoration.”
So insufficient is the size of the official National Park Service workforce that the agency requires another 220,000 volunteers to make ends meet, he points out. And then, while volunteers can help in some areas, they are no use for dealing with the park system’s roughly $12 billion maintenance backlog.
This is not a new shot across the bow of Congress and the National Park Service. Back in 1955 Wallace Stegner, one of the deans of conservation writing, wrote an essay titled, We are Destroying our National Parks for none other than Sports Illustrated.
Stegner wrote of the overcrowding of parks, of Americans' penchant for littering and defacing public property, and of the threat commercialization held like a knife at the neck of our park system.
"A national park is not a playground and not a resort, though it may be ideal for such activities as hiking, riding, climbing, hunting with a camera, fishing and cross-country skiing -- sports which demand no installations, attract no spectators and leave no scars," wrote Stegner. “The real purpose of the national parks -- to preserve scenery, beauty, geology, archeology, wildlife, for permanent use in living natural museums, is not affected by these, but it cannot be made compatible with weekend dances, ski tournaments, speedboat races and a million people a year."
Stegner was not the first to sound the alarm about the damage being done to national parks, either. Two years earlier, in 1953, Bernard DeVoto, wrote in Harper’s magazine that the parks must be closed.
“The National Park System must be temporarily reduced to a size for which Congress is willing to pay. Let us, as a beginning, close Yellowstone, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Canyon national parks,” wrote DeVoto. “Close and seal them, assign the Army to patrol them, and so hold them secure till they can be reopened. They have the largest staffs in the system but neither those staffs nor the budgets allotted them are large enough to maintain the areas at a proper level of safety, attractiveness, comfort, or efficiency. They are unable to do the job in full and so it had better not be attempted at all. “
And now Lusk has added his voice to the call.
“The future of the National Park Service hangs on decisions badly needed, but not being made. A review of the past 103 years is needed,” he writes. “Why have parks gotten to this place of concern they are now in? Vulnerable treasures subject to misuse, poor funding, failing infrastructure and complete lack of proper proactive planning to correct the present situation and prevent future deterioration of the treasures managed.”
As we at the Traveler have suggested, Lusk says there’s a need for an apolitical commission to “to evaluate and review the current situation and propose needed actions, to cure the present and preserve the future based on the NPS Mission.”
“One task, as a necessary holding action while the commission works, is to rank every national park site in terms of its national significance, endangerment and use. Areas below a certain level would be placed in caretaker status with most of their funds and staff reassigned to parks with significant problems and needs," he writes.
Lusk makes other suggestions for this commission, and you can find his op-ed on the Traveler. Hopefully his words won't be met by deaf ears in Congress. There have been too many calls over the decades for the issues confronting the national parks and the National Park Service to continue to be kicked down the road by an unresponsive and apparently uncaring Congress.
Comments
While the idea of prioritizing which parks get funding and attention is a good one, I'd suggest a couple points made here are slightly off base. Surely "closing" parks is something of a misnomer. Could they not be handed over to states, localities or private conservation groups to be operated outside the NPS system? And, perhaps more significantly, let's not kid ourselves that any commission appointed to create a priority list is going to be "apolitical" or "nonpolitical." Every member of any such commission would bring their own political preferences and agendas to the group. And while such commissions can serve useful purposes, they tend to serve the political class first by deflecting responsibility from those who ought to bear it, but refuse to. In the end, in a republic the resposibility rests with the people. If we really want park maintenance to be prioritized, then we need to insist that our representatives in the legislative and executive branches stop creating new NPS units, set priorities among those that already exist and get down to the business of funding them. No commission, however well-intentioned, can do that.
I wonder if many of the historical sites in the NPS like battlefields, etc. couldnt be secured with simple easements on land rather than purchasing entire tracts of land that then must be managed and maintained by a NPS already stretched thin?
It is obvious now we are beyond some sort of conventional solution of Congress fully funding the existing NPS and the maintenance backlog. Something is broken.
While states could certainly step up and colloborate on some units of the NPS, there are also states that also have chronic financial problems. One of the first things they ax or "close" are parks. I've been a longtime member of the Battlefield Trust, which protects Civil War, Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites and they do a great job. But they also have limitations of staff and interpretative capabilities to enrich the visitors experience.
There simply isnt a substitute for the NPS that can do what they do at the national scale.
Rectifying funding levels only requires the political will to do it. Geting rid of parks is likely permanent.
I prefer the first course of action.
Well said. Unfortunately too many are insisting their representatives give them freebes rather than insisting their representatives spend the monies on Consitutionally authorized activities.
Gil has some interesting ideas on fixing the problems in the system. The primary problem is that National Parks are not a priority of Congress or this administration. The 12 billion dollar infrastructure backlog is not a lot of money when you consider it is an investment in workers and the economy. Compare if you like to what we are spending in Afghanistan every month and we get no return on that.
The idea of creating a national commission to study each National Park unit for relevance is a bad idea. I have been to 397 National Park units and as an aside all 175 National Forests and National Grasslands. I worked for 34 years in the US Forest Service And experienced different administrations goals. I saw what happened in a region of the US Fish and Wildlife Service where a decision was made to create fully staffed "stay strong" wildlife refuges by destaffing other refuges. That was a total failure. Congress then cut the fully staffed units.
How does a National Commission decide which units are important and which are not without inherent bias? The idea that States should take over certain parks or historic sites is ludicrous. We will have new parks of national significance in the future and these decisions should remain in the he hands of Congress and President. We the people should push for elimination of the maintenance backlog, adequate staffing, and promoting these public lands for the benefit of the people.
I am convinced that we as a nation can afford to invest in our public lands and parks. The return on investment is much higher than acquiring a squadron of F-35 fighters.
The return on investment on a squadron of F-35 fighters, and their predecessors, is that German, Russion, Japanese and Farsi, among others, aren't the official language of our country. I agree it is up to the people to push for the elimination of the backlog. Unfortunately they would rather give healthcare and educations to illegals among other give aways.
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Healthcare. Education. Shocking.
Damn shame you and your ilk hate people who aren't just like you.