National parks across the country continue to lag behind a court-ordered schedule to complete air-tour management plans and are failing to conduct environmentally required studies as they develop those plans, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Despite more than two decades to get the task accomplished, and almost two years after a federal judge ordered the Federal Aviation Administration and National Park Service to get the job done by this summer, air tour management plans for eight national parks will not be completed on schedule, according to court documents filed by the two agencies.

Continued declines in the level of Lake Powell have limited access to Rainbow Bridge National Monument in southern Utah.

Who owns the national parks? The answer used to be decisive – all Americans, and for all time. Indeed our national parks, proclaimed Wallace Stegner, are “the best idea we ever had.” But some of our citizens regard the national parks as evidence of dispossession, places stained by the sins of a nation that is not their own and whose history they now repudiate.