Why shouldn't work be done now to add Elakala Falls at Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia as part of a Potomac Highlands National Park/Zack Frank

Raise the prospect of expanding the National Park System and you'll likely illicit one of two responses: "That's great!," or, "Why bother, the National Park Service doesn't have the staffing or funding it needs to properly maintain what it has?"

"As a true national park lover (we’ve been to all 63 national parks and over a hundred other national park sites), I really feel our current parks should be appropriately funded and maintained before establishing new national parks," Marlene wrote to me in response to my weekly "From The Editor's Desk" column that e-letter subscribers receive.

And, frankly, that's a position I took back at the end of 2014 when Congress passed the Defense Authorization Bill that, among other things:

• Established Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park "to help preserve, protect, and interpret the nationally significant resources that exemplify the industrial heritage of the Blackstone River Valley;"
• Designated Coltsville National Historical Park in Connecticut;
• Created Tule Springs National Monument near Las Vegas;
• Created Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site in New York City;
• Established the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in New York and Maryland;
• Designated the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which would spread across a handful of states, from Washington state to New Mexico and on to Tennessee;
• Created the nearly 90,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico and transfered it from the U.S. Forest Service to the National Park Service.

And while Congress did include more than $570 billion for the military in that legislation, it did not appropriate any more funding at the time for the Park Service to manage those new units.

Now, nearly a decade later, I have a slightly different take on the question of expanding the park system. And that's because as incredible as the National Park System is, it is lacking. According to a 2017 National Park Service report:

• Of the primary terrestrial ecosystems in the United States, 111 are completely unrepresented in the National Park System, and 392 ecosystems (55%) are underrepresented in the National Park System (underrepresented is defined as an ecosystem with less than 5% of its total land mass held in protection).
• The size, spatial distribution, and ecological integrity of the landscape surrounding many park units leaves the ‘scenery, natural objects, and wildlife’ of the National Park System increasingly vulnerable” to stressors such as climate, air pollution, nonnative species invasions, and land-use change.
• ... there are other important natural resources and ecosystems that have essentially zero conservation protection by the NPS or any other federal agency, state, local government, or privately owned conservation areas.

There also are gaps among the cultural chapters the park system currently holds, though progress has been made in recent years.

We'll delve further into the details in the coming weeks, but the question we should consider is this:

Should potential additions to the park system that fill these gaps be put at risk now by inaction, or should they somehow be added to the park system or protected until they can be added and adequate funding is available?