While we're spending National Park Week trying to enjoy the parks virtually, we also need to spend time pondering the condition of the National Park System and asking what needs to be done to show we really believe the parks are America's Best Idea. Just saying those three words doesn't make it so.
Digging Up The Past
If the park system really is our best idea, why have we let half of a historic plantation’s slave village within a park be destroyed?
That would be at Virgin Islands National Park, where the operators of the Caneel Bay Resort inflicted that insulting damage by installing "diesel tanks, trenched throughout the property cutting though prehistoric ceremonial sites, installed tennis courts, swimming pools, and sidewalks," according to a 2011 letter from the park's superintendent.
The superintendent mentioned that while seeking a legal opinion from the Interior Department's Solicitor's Office regarding "federal jurisdiction and subsequent federal laws, executive orders, and federal mandates as they pertain to preservation and protection of cultural and natural resources." To the best of our knowledge, that opinion was never rendered.
Oil Exploration Impacts
Why is the National Park Service silent when energy exploration obviously is impacting the landscape of Big Cypress National Preserve? You can look at our videos, or read the environmental consultant's report, and come to your own conclusion. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers certainly thought Burnett Oil Co. was damaging the landscape...until it didn't.
True, oil exploration and development in Big Cypress are allowed under the preserve's enabling legislation. But that legislation also gave the Interior secretary the authority to "develop and publish in the Federal Register such rules and regulations as he deems necessary and appropriate to limit or control the use of Federal lands and waters" for oil exploration or development.
The Park Service did issue 47 requirements for Burnett Oil to follow as it took its 30-ton vibroseis trucks and chainsaws to Big Cypress' backcountry. Among those were specific requirements that impacts from those incredibly hefty trucks will be restored to original contour conditions concurrent with daily operations using shovels and rakes. Another stated that field reclamation of impacts will begin immediately as the survey continues. Soils will be decompacted and returned to match the original grade.
As the videos show, and as the environmental consultant found, that hasn't been the case in areas surveyed after exploration. That exploration, by the way, occurred in 2017 and 2018, while the videos and latest consultant's report date from this past March.
Losing The People Vs. Cars Battle
Fifty years after National Park Service Director George Hartzog Jr. banned traffic from the east end of Yosemite Valley, saying that was "the turning point in the people vs. cars battle," vehicles most certainly have won, and not just in Yosemite National Park despite pledges in 1970 that the Park Service intended to remove personal vehicles from the entire valley.
"The automobile as a recreational experience is obsolete," Hartzog told John McPhee for an article that ran in The New Yorker. "We cannot accommodate automobiles in such numbers and still provide a quality environment for a recreational experience.
Banning vehicles won't always protect parks, their natural resources, and the national park experience from visitors. That's most evident at Zion National Park in Utah, where you have to take a shuttle bus into Zion Canyon unless you have a lodge reservation. Even with that shuttle system, there are roughly 30 miles of unofficial "social trails" in the canyon, vs. about 13 miles of official park trails.
Parks from coast to coast are struggling to accommodate crowds and their vehicles. Some progress is being made (for example, Acadia National Park and Muir Woods National Monument), but Arches National Park struggles to find a plan acceptable to the current Interior secretary, and Glacier National Park is just beginning to go through the steps to decide how best to manage traffic on the Going-to-the-Sun Road.
Taking Care Of The Caretakers
And when you're thinking about the needs of the National Park System, don't forget about those of the National Park Service workforce. Sure, it's nice to live there and enjoy sunrises and sunsets, but some decent housing goes a long way, too.
According to NPS, deferred maintenance for employee housing totaled more than $186 million in fiscal year 2018. Compare that with the $2.2 million NPS received that year for its Housing Improvement Program. With such inadequate yearly funding, it’s no surprise the problem continues to grow.
Repair needs include leaky roofs, outdated plumbing and electrical systems, moldy, rodent-infested interiors, and deteriorating historic structures. Not addressing these problems can present serious health and safety threats to staff and their families. -- Restore America's Parks, The Pew Charitable Trusts
The overall maintenance backlog for the park system is crippling, too. Nearly $12 billion. (News came from Yellowstone National Park just the other day that it needs about $50 million for a new bridge across the Yellowstone River.) Congress can pass a trillion-dollar-plus tax cut, but it can't provide $12 billion to improve roads, structures, sewage plants, and other needs in the park system, needs that help ensure the safety of park visitors and employees.
America's Best Idea? Please tell me the tax cut is not our best idea.
There are other issues demanding attention: What happened to the directive that all national park superintendents establish carrying capacities for their parks? Is the National Park Service's history mission holding up? How can smaller units of the park system enjoy the same IT help that larger units such as Yellowstone do?
If we really believe the national parks are America's Best Idea, we need to act like they are. Politics, if it's not possible to totally remove them, must be greatly reduced when it comes to management decisions made by a professional Park Service staff. Those professionals should not have to fear for their jobs if they speak out about damage being inflicted on the parks and move to remove or mitigate that damage. At the same time, Congress must provide sufficient funds to maintain and operate the parks, and it has not been doing that.
It's probably not a bad thing that many of the parks are closed to the public and most are closed to a certain degree. Many of these places are tired and worn from long seasons and so many feet and vehicles. No doubt the elk and bison and deer and wolves and bears and coyotes and raccoons and skunks and other wildlife appreciate the freedom to roam without threat of being run over. If the closures last long enough, perhaps it will convince some of those animals that they really don't need human handouts to get by.
Enjoy National Park Week virtually if you must. But let’s hope we can return to the parks soon, and we all can begin working to ensure they receive the respect and resources fitting for being America’s Best Idea.
Comments
I have other things to work on and don't have time to debate the deplorable nincompoops; but, there are some thoughts from my work that we need to start considering as quickly as possible. The pattern in Asia is confirming that there will be multiple waves of this plague; each one entailing another round of lockdowns; and, probably, the only thing that will come close to effectively stopping it will be inoculating practically everyone with a multiphase sequence of vaccines that provides defense over time against multiple strains. However, when, as, or if we come out of this mess, we are going to need "bridging" programs like the ones FDR instituted to get Americans through the Great Depression and the "shovel ready" projects and funding Obama used to ramp the economy back up in the wake of the Great Recession. And, FDR and Obama both used projects in the national parks as part of their programs.
Let's face it; our national parks, in fact all NPS assets, are in poor shape today. With regard to protecting and preserving historic assets, the issues sure aren't limited to Caneel Bay and Flamingo. Just for example, of Herbert Maier's four historic educational museums, Fishing Bridge is the only one in even close to reasonable condition. Old Faithful no longer exists; Norris needs at least a restoration and new roof, although the surrounding landscape structures need a tremendous amount of restoration themselves; and Madison is literally on structural life support. Concessionaires will invest in such work when it benefits their lodge concessions, but ignore facilities and structures that don't directly make them money. New programs are required to deal with those needs.
With regard to protecting our protected lands, some places need additional LWCF acquisitions of mineral holdings, like at Big Cypress, or inholdings, like in Grand Teton; but, there is also a tremendous need for on-the-ground pick and shovel repair, invasive species control, and native species restoration, all of which would provide jobs, at least for Americans willing to do that work.
With regard to "the people vs cars battle," there are plenty of construction, manufacturing, and even software development jobs to be had in the development of better transportation systems for the parks. Whether the solution is shuttle buses combined with advance reservation systems or trains combined with advance reservation systems or monorails combined with advance reservation systems, focusing jobs and funding on gaining some control over the traffic and overcrowding problems that plague many of our national parks certainly makes more sense than pouring more good money after bad into another ridiculously bumbling Lockheed Martin aerospace effort. Space is not any final frontier; the final frontier is learning to live in a civilized manner right here.
A "shovel ready" program would be a good bet to get working class Americans back to work in the wake of this plague; but, two things burdened the Obama effort in the wake of the Great Recession. First, it takes time to conceptualize a good project and many of those "shovel ready" projects could have benefited from an earlier start and more upfront design development time. We need to start thinking about our Great Recession, part deux "shovel ready" projects right now. Second, deplorable nincompoops left embedded in the agencies by the administration that caused the Great Recession were, in many cases, able to stall, block, and run out the clock on the use of stimulus funds and thereby foil the efforts. We need to work hard and vote hard to see that doesn't happen again.
And, tax cuts really aren't our best idea and haven't been for a very long time.
Good comment, Rump, and I see you're coming around to trains. On that score, there has been no shortage of nincompoops in every admininistration since Nixon's. Lyndon Johnson was the last to convene our railroad presidents at the White House and ask that they save passenger trains. It is even worse for national parks. When was the last time they were any administration's priority?
Looking to the future, are they Biden's? Did he say a peep about them in the debates? Not as I recall. Sure, they always make the party platform, then go right to the back of the bus.
How do we reverse that? Good question. I haven't found the answer in 50 years. Talk is cheap--and politicians love to talk. ALL of them, remains history's point.
Great back-to-back comments above.
Mr. Runte cares about his choo-choos but seems to miss that his right-wing friends are actively hostile to them even if the other side is kind of indifferent.
It's not his "right-wing"friends that are hostile, its the market.
Actually, at the federal level, the worst "friend" of the passenger train was Jimmy Carter. I testified in Congrsss against his gutting of Amtrak in 1979. As for the "market," EC, how are the airlines doing? I know; it's not their "fault." Poor babies. They need help now--and couldn't wait to ask that it be FREE. As for my right-wing friends, I don't have any. I always call the action, not the label. We lost our passenger traiins because oil, asphalt, airline, and auto lobbyists convinced Congress to go along. And they did. They weren't right-wing; they weren't left wing. They just followed the money, as they are doing now. My God! Amtrak couldn't even squeeze $1 billion out of Congress. Talk about a lost opportunity. Even my wife's unemployment check is higher than her salary. And she works in a museum.
The sooner we are rid of Amtrak, the better. It's time that the railroads ran the trains again. Are they needed? Well, how ready are you to jump back in the middle seat? Achoo! God bless you! Thank you for passing the virus along. Ain't gonna happen overnight, folks. Not this time. A bigger market is weighing in.