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NEWS RELEASE: For Immediate Release August
30, 2005
DECLARATION ON THE PRINCIPLES OF PARKS
Signed by 73 Canadian and US Environmental
Groups
Contact: CANADA
Anne Sherrod, (250) 358-2610
Valhalla Wilderness Society,
New Denver British Columbia
Contact: USA
Scott Silver, (541) 385-5261
Wild Wilderness, Bend, Oregon
Seventy-three Canadian and US environmental groups
have issued a declaration on the principles of parks. The joint statement is a
repudiation of the privatization and commercialization of parks now occurring in
both countries. It says that the primary purpose of parks is to preserve land in
a totally natural condition, for the maintenance of healthy ecosystems and the
enjoyment of the public.
“Parks were a public trust to be protected from
economic exploitation,” says Anne Sherrod, Chair of the Valhalla Wilderness
Society. “But in the last few years, anti-environment governments are literally
destroying our park systems by dismantling the laws that imposed barriers
against private control, economic exploitation, and damaging activities."
In British Columbia, the BC government has
rewritten the Park Act to allow resort development. A new policy,
called the BC Park Lodge Policy, allows the government to use taxpayers' dollars
to aggressively market leases of BC park land in Japan, the US, Europe and
Canada. Most recently, another policy invites private interests to make
applications to the government to rewrite park boundaries to further their
business interests. And leaked documents reveal that the government plans to
completely rewrite the Park Act by 2007.
"In the US, special interests favoring industrial
tourism and motorized recreation have been working with the Bush Administration
behind the scenes in an effort to commercialize, privatize and motorize
recreational opportunities within America's National Parks", says Scott Silver,
Executive Director of Wild Wilderness. The recent discovery of a hitherto secret
proposal written by the Department of Interior's Paul Hoffman, further confirms
the scope of these efforts to discard the very principles by which parks have
been managed for the past century. "Never before has it been so vital to
restate, reaffirm and rally in support of the principles that have guided the
management of our parks as it is today," says Silver.
How do the groups that signed the Declaration know
what these principles are? "Firstly," says Sherrod, "the driving forces behind
all our protected areas were the spirit, the willpower and tax contributions of
the public," says Sherrod. "The organizations that signed the Declaration
represent thousands of those people and did much of the work for preservation. Secondly, the laws that created our park systems are clearly based on these
self-evident principles. Thirdly, park planning processes have repeatedly
confirmed that the majority of the public passionately believes in these
principles. They include:
*** The purpose of parks is the
preservation of nature.
This means no logging, mining, drilling, hydro
development
or human settlement. Commercial tourism development
should
stay outside park boundaries.
*** Preservation is the most important
purpose and top
management priority over recreation.
*** Parks must not be sold or privatized;
they should be
fully supported by taxes.
*** Parks are for the public interest;
private leases in
park land undermine the rights of the
public.
*** Parks are meant to be
permanent. Unmaking parks,
changing their boundaries, or changing park
laws to weaken
protection are all betrayals of the public
trust.
"The Declaration forms a guidepost against which
all claims about the purpose and intent of our parks can be measured," says
Silver. "In these troubled times, with wild winds of change blowing, our parks
help connect society with our most outstanding natural, cultural and historical
treasures. The more firmly we hold fast to the principles of parks, the greater
will be the benefit for all."
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