Editor's note: The following op-ed column was written by Derrick Crandall, counselor to the National Park Hospitality Association.
December 20, 2016, was a Black Letter Day for America’s national parks. The National Park Service issued a new regulation – Director’s Order 100 – which invents a new Precautionary Principle designed to even further stifle creativity and innovation by the agency charged with promoting 413 special places that belong to Americans and tell our stories. This action comes 100 years after the creation of the National Park Service by Congress with this charge:
“promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
The NPS has ignored the direction of this act – and its dual missions of promotion and conservation – and has instead embraced a policy of no change, exemplified by the new Director’s Order. No change has meant a decline in real use of the national parks – visitation to the same units that existed in 1987 is actually down by 1 million visits in 2015, despite the hype of the centennial. Consider marvelous Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky – down 75 percent in visitation! The often-cited growth in visitation is mostly from four major additions on the National Mall – the World War II memorial, the FDR memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, and the Korean War Veterans memorial. All of those were changes. We need more change, not no change.
What the Trump administration needs to do with the National Park Service and all of the other federal agencies managing our Great Outdoors – 30 percent of our nation’s surface – is return to conservation principles and a new policy of Rewards for Responsiveness. No more rewarding an agency for taking no action to reduce its backlog of deferred maintenance. No more guaranteed increases in operating budgets when visitation is shrinking.
Responsiveness means information delivered via Wi-Fi welcoming visitors – including into cars as they drive through parks and other public lands. Responsiveness means modern campgrounds – that reverse a 50 percent drop in RV overnight stays in national park campgrounds since 1987 and a 25 percent drop in overnight stays in tents. Responsiveness means embracing the opportunities offered by the 21st Century Conservation Service Corps to get work done efficiently and with a very important serendipity – connecting younger Americans to their outdoor legacy. Responsiveness means attracting private investment to modernize and expand in-park lodging – mirroring the efforts of the first NPS directors Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, whose legacies of El Tovar, the Ahwahnee, and more remain cherished today. Responsiveness means adding new access on urban public lands to public waters as we invest billions to improve water quality – instead of actually closing and reducing marinas in New York and Washington, D.C. Responsiveness means following the examples of state parks in expanding services with “Learn to ...” programs and better facilities and covering a substantial part of operating expenses through fees and partners. Responsiveness means promotion of opportunities – using marketing to attract visitation and direct visitors to places and times when their expectations can be met. Responsiveness means understanding visitors – who they are and what they seek. Responsiveness means delivering value in leisure experiences, and not confusing free with good value. Responsiveness means embracing technology for convenient reservations, fees, and permits.
Are the resources available to enable Rewards for Responsiveness? Absolutely. Great examples can be found – but they remain exceptions to normal operations.
In Yellowstone, $200 million in private capital has rebuilt and replaced 30 percent of the in-park lodging and produced a LEED platinum structure for employee housing. In Golden Gate National Recreation Area, $100 million in private capital has transformed a crumbling military complex into one of the world’s finest hotels and conference centers. On the Mall, a single philanthropist has given millions – including the funding needed to fix the elevators in the Washington Monument. Unfortunately, though, this generous offer is compromised by an NPS decision to delay the repairs until 2019 – denying millions the chance to reach the top of the monument – to enable it to revamp the screening process for visitors which is scheduled to occur in 2018. In national forests, the partnership between the Forest Service and ski area operators has created world-class destinations that are now expanding further under a 2011 law which supports expansion of non-winter recreation opportunities on these same lands. And just the other week, new legislation was enacted – the NPS Centennial Act – which enables the Secretary to authorize additional, appropriate visitor services mid-contract, actions which will deliver better visitor experiences and actually boost revenues of the National Park Service!
January 2017 can and should mark the beginning of a new era in managing America’s Great Outdoors. We urge the Trump administration to implement policy changes that invite, welcome, and serve visitors to our public lands and waters – embracing innovation and partnerships – while conserving our magnificent natural and historic assets that we all cherish.
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Comments
Seeing as how the National Park Service has resurrected the post World War II road building craze by planning one lane roads and calling them accessible bike paths, I welcome any push back against development. Theo key word the author failed to embolden in the Organic act is, "UNIMPAIRED."
So, this "op-ed" promotes the circus like atmosphere of our National Parks? And he uses Mammoth Cave, Korean Memorial (the forgotten war, obviously), and Martin Luther King as prime examples. Well, what about the increased crowds at Zion, Arches, Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, etc that are creating serious repercussions on the park resources?. This site is filled with articles about these problems that are occurring year after year, and obviously major critical decisions need made if park resources are to be preserved into the future. If not, this circus like atmosphere will only erode these resources to the point where our National Parks will look like environmental wastelands.
All the major parks are choking in the circus atmosphere that this guy is promoting, and I don't see this benefitting the conservation of the parks resources in any shape or form. In fact, it was industrial tourism that recently created the inferno in the Smokies. People, don't want to acknowledge it, but I will. I've said it before and i'll say it again. All the transportation, and pollution that is generated for industrial tourism played a major part in acidifying the forests that set the ground work for the destructive inferno as debris from dead trees choked the forest. Then, you get a product of industrial tourism - two dumb kids that sounded like the reincarnation of beavis and butthead climbing up to the top of a mountain to toss lit matches off the top to "make the chimneys" smoke. If only we promoted a smarter system that curtailed the beavis and buttheads from the world away from doing such an activity in the parks. But, alas when you allow 12 million visitors into a place, you're bound to get a large concentration of people that are going to destroy the resources in the name of "entertainment" and "fun".
Then after the fire starts during the worst drought in recorded history, bringing heavy hurricane force mountain wave winds fueled by climate change, we see 2500 properties (many of which were built for the industrial tourism machine) incinerated within a 7 hour timeframe as the fire grows from 500 to 17000 acres. All this incinerated debris is now a major environmental catastrophe that will taint the soils and watersheds for a long time.
It's a lesson for sure about the failures of industrial tourism, and I hope some are paying attention. Industrialized tourism is a failing system, and it needs changed, not promoted. If there is one group that doesn't want to "change" - it's those that want to hang on to this system and promote it even further to the point where it destroys the resources in the parks.
Historians have gone round and round on these issues, especially the Park Service's so-called dual mandate, what Mr. Crandall herewith describes as "its dual missions of promotion and conservation." Note the one he puts first. And note the one put first in the Organic Act. It is clearly preservation.
No doubt, the parks are to be "enjoyed." But again, what is meant by enjoyment? Do we really want a modernized Wi-Fi system delivering information "into cars?" I don't. I want interpreters. I want drivers to stop and listen. I want them to meet rangers who know and care. Enough about displacing the rangers with tablets and smart phones. Good grief. Does only Mr. Crandall deserve a job?
Agreed. The concessionaires have done some mighty good things, especially with historical properties. Of course, the costs of those renovations get passed along to the users, so the concessionaires really aren't paying, after all. But yes, I give them credit for taking the initiative, as did the railroads a century ago.
The difference is that the railroads made very little simply by altering the national parks. They rather made their principal profits on the trains, selling seats and sleeping berths to incoming passengers.
If Mr. Crandall would assure me of that--yes, we'll bring back our trains--I would accept that he knows the problem, which remains to force upon the parks themselves the impact of new visitation.
Put it outside; keep it outside. Make your profit the old-fashioned way. And even there, know your limitations. Not every park can grow indefinitely.
But this? The only thing wrong about the parks is the lack of development, e.g., "attracting private investments to expand and modernize in-park lodging?" No, Mr. Crandall, that does NOT "mirror" the legacies of Stephen T. Mather and Horace Albright. El Tovar, opened in 1905, predated Mather and Albright by ten years. Yes, Mather wanted the Ahwahnee in Yosemite, and promoted it, but that was to be Yosemite's first true luxury hotel. Neither Mather nor Albright promoted building hotels indefinitely, which itself would have defeated the purposes of the parks.
Missing here is that original sense of proportion the railroads provided parks. In exchange for your privacy, you got to see the parks. From start to finish, you were part of a community rather than cloistered in your car. The car came faster than even Mather and Albright anticipated, but no, they were not blind to the disadvantages of the new business model shaping parks. I really think, from the historical record, they always expected there would be trains, setting the pace, as they still modestly do at Glacier, for what it means to arrive at a national park. And don't forget the red buses, the pace-setters throughout the park.
We need to slow down, and build far less, if the parks as we know them are to survive. "Appropriate" is more than an adjective. It should also be a state of mind. The principal "value" of parks still is preservation. If within preservation there is a profit, fine, and history proves there is. But it will not do just to expand facilities without considering first what expansion means.
This sounds like a demand for opening the door (or back gate) to more and more and more and more "private" development in our parks.
If anything, we need less and less and less of this kind of demoliton in our parks.
With the Drumpf administration coming into power, I'm afraid we are going to hear a lot more of this stuff. We need to be prepared to stand up and fight hard to preserve our parks instead of developing them into destruction.
There are things far more valuable in our parks than mere dollars. We need to protect them.
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I came back to this later in the evening and re-read it. It is so full of misinformation -- or downright false material -- that it's hard to believe it was written by anyone with any knowledge at all. For example: Responsiveness means modern campgrounds - that reverse a 50 percent drop in RV overnight stays in national park campgrounds since 1987 and a 25 percent drop in overnight stays in tents."
Wow! That's not been the case in any parks I've visited lately. Reservations are mandatory in most of them. (Or this just a thinly veiled request for full hook-ups in our parks?)
Or this: "Responsiveness means attracting private investment to modernize and expand in-park lodging"
Translation: Build more and more motels inside our parks.
Or: "using marketing to attract visitation and direct visitors to places and times when their expectations can be met."
Right. Attract even more visitors to Zion or Yellowstone or Arches or Canyonlands or any of a large and growing numbers of parks that are overwhelmed by visitors as it is. (Perhaps we really need to put more effort into helping Americans learn the importance of realistic expectations in our parks instead of expectations of an artificial Disneyesque form of entertainment.)
In other words, what this op-ed is asking is that we ignore the "preservation" portion of the NPS mandate in favor of finding creative ways to pump more dollars into pockets of members of his association.
Thank you for taking time to write this piece, Mr. Crandall -- and many thanks to Kurt for publishing it so Traveler readers may have a chance to learn more about what some people out there are trying to accomplish.
Thank you for the warning, Mr. Crandall. Now it's up to us who value our parks to do all we can to stand in opposition.
I'd love to see where the author of this drivel got their statistics from. The Traveler usually does a good job in vetting it's conributers but sure dropped the ball on this one.
I hope this means they will not allow cell phone coverage in Wilderness areas. We do not need EMF pollution in Wilderness, as we do not know the ramifications of such actions.
No, Wild, we need to thank Kurt for keeping Traveler an open site. It prevents it from becoming just another echo chamber. It's vital for all of us to pay attention and read or listen to what the other side is saying. That's the only way we can be ready to counter their destructive efforts.
Traveler is a lot like our daily national park intelligence briefing. None of us can ever assume we are so smart we don't need it.
Only an egotistical ideologue would do that.
Dr. John Lemons has written an excellent response to Mr. Crandall's op ed. Thank you John. For those that would like to have a very enjoyable and educational read that touches on some of issues discussed above, try "Inferno by Committee" by Tom Ribe. Tom's book is a history of the Cerro Grande (Los Alamos) Fire. It goes into a very readable and in depth account of the incident. But equally important is "how difficult it is work at the interactions of humans, earth, air, fire and water especially when the circumstances are a tangle of past errors". The quote from former NPS Director Roger Kennedy.