By Michael Frome, Ph.D.
August 23, 1999
I believe the public protests during the summer of 1999 against a test program of recreation fees at many national parks and national forests have been wholly justified. Those protests likely will become more widespread, for Americans should not be required to "pay to play" on public properties they own and maintain through taxes. Yet the issue goes deeper than admission charges to questions of proper use -- and improper misuse -- of these federal lands.
Based on years of observation and involvement, I feel a sense of concern and distress. Yes, I recognize that outdoor recreation spans a variety of interests, tastes and goals. Commercial resorts and campgrounds bring the conveniences of urban living into outdoor life away from home, which is fine for those who want it that way. Disneyland and other profit-making theme parks furnish mass entertainment like television and movie theaters do. But public parks are like art galleries, museums and libraries, meant to enrich society by enlightening and elevating individuals who come to them.
Public parks and forests provide an antidote to the physical and psychological pressures of urban living. Expansive areas like the national forests and national parks afford the chance to exercise mind and body in harmony with the great outdoors. These public lands approach the last representation of primeval life. In settings largely free of human intervention, visitors are able to absorb the "feel" of nature -- of plants, animals, natural features and weather.
There is no way to place a dollar value on a "park experience" or a "wilderness experience" and yet the simple act of visiting the natural world has become a commercial transaction. Worst of all, the agencies in charge, the National Park Service and US Forest Service, have lost their sense of mission and commitment to safeguarding the very resources that people come to enjoy. They make "partnerships" with profit-driven entrepreneurs bent on introducing motorized forms of recreation and commercializing wilderness. Step by step, the process leads to privatizing public lands.
Howard Chapman, who retired from the National Park Service after seventeen years as regional director and more than twenty years as park superintendent and ranger, has warned as follows:
"The National Park Service complains bitterly about not having enough money to protect the parks. Yet each year they get more money than the previous year, while citizens hear about budget deficits and balancing the budget. The public gets less interpretation but the Service continues to send people to meetings and lay plans for expensive improvements that also will be costly to maintain.
"More money and partnerships seem to be what consumes them instead of what is really important in the arks and what they will mean to future generations. Somehow the American public needs to be awakened to more than a cry for more money -- the public needs to know what is REALLY at stake."
A recent Associated Press dispatch (August 7, 1999) helps to understand "what is really at stake." It quotes the regional forester in the Southwest, Eleanor Towns, declaring: "Free enterprise in this region is alive and well," ignoring her mandate to protect the public interest. Ms. Towns was referring to approval of a giveaway of 272 acres of the Kaibab National Forest at the gateway of Grand Canyon National Park, for construction of 1270 hotel rooms and 270,000 square feet of retail shopping, the equivalent of four large department stores.
For his part, the park superintendent, Robert Arnberger, was all for creating this new city as the companion piece to unlimited tourism at the Grand Canyon. He said that living space at the park has grown scarce for 3,500 permanent residents, when he might have proposed better stewardship by cutting that number of permanent residents in half, or more. A leading Navajo tribal member decried commercialization of sacred land. Area businessmen and officials of nearby Flagstaff and Williams are threatening to sue. I hope they do.
Theodore Roosevelt when he was president called the Grand Canyon "one great sight that all Americans should see." He did not, however, say they should all see it at once. He strongly advocated the protection of nature in its own right and would be shocked and appalled at degradation of the reserves he established.
Providing sanctuary for America's wildlife heritage should be the single most important role of the national parks and wilderness of the national forests at a time when diversity on the planet is so thoroughly endangered. The National Park Service and Forest Service should be apostles and advocates for mountain lions, wolves, grizzly bears, buffalo. Wild animals make a park a park, but wildlife has been crowded out of its habitat in every national park without exception. Animals are not protected from snowmobiles, sightseeing airplanes and helicopters, tour buses, cars, concessionaires, hikers, bikers and park administrators.
The urbanization and degradation of wild places has been underway for forty-plus years. As a case in point, Adolph Murie worked for the National Park Service for thirty-two years as a scientist, principally in Denali and Grand Teton national parks. On November 8, 1956, he sent a memorandum to the park superintendent of McKinley (later renamed Denali) National Park, expressing concern over construction proposed in Mission 66, the ten-year development plan for the national park system. The park superintendent of the time, Duane D. Jacobs, brushed him off: "It is quite reasonable for anyone of your many years of intimate knowledge of McKinley as purely a wilderness area to be somewhat alarmed as Mt. McKinley finally emerges across the threshold of a new era, that of a great national park set aside for the use and enjoyment of the people, which is soon to receive the intended use and enjoyment."
From Mission 66 to the present, visitor comfort, facilities and enjoyment have received higher priority than protection and perpetuation of the natural systems. To illustrate further: Between 1959 and 1971, John and Frank Craighead studied the movement of grizzly bears in Yellowstone through the use of radio tracking collars, a system they pioneered. They warned the grizzly population was in very serious trouble and the administration should follow a cautious, conservative approach. For their troubles they were dismissed from the park by Superintendent Jack Anderson, who subsequently declared: "We're finding grizzly. My concern would be that because of a low sub-adult mortality the numbers might get too high." Numbers of grizzly too high? Plainly he had the same idea as Superintendent Jacobs in Alaska that naturalness must have its bounds, secondary to tourism.
Moreover, in 1973 Superintendent Anderson received the First International Award of Merit from the International Snowmobile Industry Association for his "enlightened leadership and sincere dedication to the improvement and advancement of snowmobiling in the United States." Anderson barred the Craigheads because he didn't think it natural for bears to run around with collars on their ears, yet sanctioned the intrusion of noisy, smelly machines during the one season when Yellowstone is quiet enough to be natural. Then he said that elk, bison, moose, even the fawns were unfazed by snowmobiles -- in winter, the very season when they are the weakest and need to be alone. And now, in 1999, the National Park Service, is considering a plan to plow roads in Yellowstone that would more than double the number of winter visitors, with additional intrusion and disturbance to the park's wildlife.
Agency officials claim fees are necessary to raise funds to protect natural resources. They are placing the burden on local administrators to serve as fee collectors and marketers of recreation as a commodity -- that is how they will be judged. It's a terrible idea, thoroughly incompatible with principles of conservation. I'm reminded that the late Philip Burton, of California, one of the foremost conservationists in Congress in this century, believed in safeguarding the public's assets as a major responsibility of government and was adamant that the public should never have to pay a fee to enter parklands and forests. Burton's 1978 omnibus bill -- "the national parks bill of the century" -- tripled the miles of national trails tripled the acres of park wilderness, doubled miles of wild and scenic rivers, and much, much more. He insisted that public parkland and open space, whether in the heart of an urban community or above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, provides an outlet for physical, emotional, artistic and spiritual and intellectual senses.
Max Peterson, former Chief of the Forest Service, recently (August 10, 1999) set down his thoughts on the subject, as follows:
"I too have some grave reservations about the present idea that you can somehow market your favorite National Park or National Forest like Madison Avenue. At the same time I recognize that people do not arrive at the Park or Forest with either adequate skills or outdoor gear to make the visit safe and enjoyable. Also there is no question that accommodating even the current level of use costs a lot of money. I think there has to be an answer that lets the public that loves and appreciates these areas contribute to their upkeep. I have always favored some type of stamp that would be very economical both to the user and to the agencies. The high cost and intrusiveness of present systems really bother me. Unfortunately I doubt that we can expect increasing federal appropriations for such uses. How can we build or envision a better system?"
His question is fair, but money and more money are not the answer. Federal policies subsidize miners and ranchers, who pay a pittance for public resources they extract for profit, while unrestrained recreation -- of the kind people can pursue without ever leaving home -- has led to overuse and abuse. I think it more fundamental to recognize that public lands serve as the basic reservoir for meeting outdoor recreation demands in America by persons of all economic levels. Federal lands, in particular, most continue to be important sources of recreational opportunities.
Yes, adequate management must be provided to assure protection of the resource base, but .the challenge is to offer primitive experiences with only minor sacrifices in efficiency, while maintaining health and safety standards, and to move away from rather than toward urbanization of recreation sites.
If the government takes in less from recreation sites than it costs to maintain them, does this make recreation a net loss? To the contrary, the government's role in recreation should be to support conservation, physical fitness and healthy outdoor leisure away from a mechanized supercivilized world. The ongoing protests against fees are a wakeup call to Congress and the federal agencies. The sooner they get the message the better off the country will be.
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Michael Frome, Ph.D., author, educator and environmentalist, has been critic and friend of national parks and national forests for many years.
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
Wild Wilderness
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org