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National parks have been an important part of my life, continually rewarding, inspiring and challenging. Over the past half-century I've witnessed many changes in the parks, some few for the better, but many highly damaging and cause for serious concern. Simply stated, these precious places are overused, misused, polluted, inadequately protected and unmercifully exploited commercially and politically. Clearly, we need to redefine and reassert the rightful role of national parks in today's high-tech, materialist society. John Muir wrote that wildness is a necessity, that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, after camping with Muir among the ancient sequoias of Yosemite, listening to the hermit thrush and the waterfalls tumbling down sheer cliffs, wrote that "It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man."
Because I love the national parks and have worked long in their behalf, I feel deep concern and fear for their future, especially with the mindless, destructive plans promoted by the current crop of anti-environmentalists riding high in Congress. They have tried to close many of the parks, declare them surplus like old military bases and turn them over to the states or counties or private entrepreneurs. When parks were closed during the federal shutdown late in 1995, stopgap funding was allocated but solely for visitor services, without regard for protection of the resources that attract visitors in the first place. Another proposal would have required the National Park Service to support itself from entrance and use fees, meaning that park managers would make raising money, instead of park protection, their top priority.
Then there was the idea advanced early in 1996 by the governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, that his state assume management of Grand Canyon National Park, not to save this world treasure, but to keep the tourists coming. To some people, a national park is valid or defensible as long as it helps jingle the cash registers of local merchants and tour companies.
The traditional formula has been to preserve, protect, enjoy. The first two plainly come last today. The National Park Service, if you ask me, has lost its way, lost the sense of commitment to a long-term goal, and acquiesced to pressures of political expediency in place of principle. When the agency was established in 1916, Congress assigned it the responsibility of conserving scenery, natural objects, historic objects and wildlife for the enjoyment of the people and by such means as to perpetuate these resources for the enjoyment of future generations. That goal doubtless seemed logical and attainableÑthere were fewer Americans and lots of elbow room. While species of wildlife already were threatened with extinction, as yet none of the landforms was, with the exception of certain types of forests. Today, by contrast, everything is threatenedÑmarshes, deserts, prairies, the few remaining virgin forests and living creatures dependent on them.
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 hikers, horseback riders, mountain bikers, snowmobiles, sightseeing airplanes and helicopters, roads, tour buses, cars, concessionaires or park administrators.
Despite Yellowstone's year-round importance as wildlife habitat, each winter it welcomes 75,000-plus snowmobilers who intrude in areas frequented by bison, elk and other animals at the very time of year when they should be at rest and undisturbed. In response to questions or complaints, park officials will respond, "Yes, there could be a problem. We are considering plans to do a study."
In any direct conflict, the animal loses. In June 1992 an off-duty ranger called from Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado to tell me that two bears that wandered into a campground looking for food were shot dead on official orders. That didn't sound right. If it's a question of clearing an area of campers or bears, safeguarding the bears or any native species ought to come first. However, Robert M. Baker, regional director of the National Park Service, wrote me that dispatching the two to bear heaven was justified to prevent "an unacceptable risk to human safety and property."
I can't agree. Anyone going to a national park or wilderness ought to prepare for risk and be properly advised to do so. Many of these places are run like zoos or popcorn playgrounds where visitors go around in padded comfort.
Voyageurs National Park, in Minnesota, actually endorses snowmobile races and would already have built new snowmobile trails across the Kabtogema Peninsula, a wild area sheltering wolf, bear and other wildlife, had it not been for citizen protest. The former superintendent of Voyageurs National Park, Ben Clary, in a 1990 letter set me straight on things. "If you are young, or relatively healthy, and have the time," he wrote, "one can have a tremendously rewarding experience in backpacking or skiing within a park. But who is to say that those not as fortunate have any less of an experience if they use mechanical equipment to access the park? In fact, the vast majority of all use in our national parks relates in some ways to motor vehicles." He's absolutely right, but that doesn't justify the dominance of polluting vehicles and of highways where there should be trails.
Keeping people out is not the issue. Adventures in the outdoors are essential to appreciation of the land, but when people come into national parks they find scant emphasis on self-reliance or on the need to respect the natural environment. Urbanites are made to feel comfortable in the back country with treeless, barren camping suburbias. The heart of Yellowstone, our oldest national park, the "flagship," has been reduced to an urban tourist ghetto complete with crime, litter, defacement and vandalism. Yosemite Valley may be even worse. In Virgin Islands National Park a few years ago, I saw beautiful palm trees uprooted to make way for pavement and parking, a hillside bulldozed flat so that a quiet road meant for leisurely touring could be "upgraded" into a high-speed highway to accommodate cruise-ship passengers on quickie excursions.
These examples are not the exception, they are the rule. National parks in our time are being reduced to resource commodities for the benefit of for-profit park concessionaires, tour companies, and business interests in park-bordering communities like Gatlinburg, Tennessee; International Falls, Minnesota; Cody and Jackson, Wyoming; and Moab, Utah. Such groups hold the political clout to get their way. Thus the airport in Grand Teton National Park, the only commercial airport in a national park, keeps growing instead of being phased out and closed. In Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, where a choice must be made between protecting whales or increasing the number of large intrusive cruise vessels, the decision comes down in favor of the cruise companies.
Thirty years after passage of the Wilderness Act, the National Park Service deliberately has kept classified wilderness small and unprotected. The agency leadership claims its own basic legislation is adequate and effective, but all the evidence points to continuing willingness to back away from preservation, to sacrifice wilderness to construction and development. National parks cannot be all things and still be national parks; we cannot allow them to be reduced to outdoor amusement centers. Prudent and intelligent people must realize that unrestrained pressure on the parks for profit is not progress.
Political pressures are not new. Stephen T. Mather, first director of the National Park Service (from 1916 to 1928), showed a willingness to stand up against what he called "desecration of the people's playgrounds for the benefit of a few individuals or corporations," but politics has become a powerful influence, more deadly to wild animals than a poacher's rifle. This is the politics of profit that weakens laws, regulations and the resolve of public administrators. I believe in the political system and that every viewpoint should find the appropriate avenue to express itself. History shows that every national park came into being because private citizens cared and campaigned for it through the political process. Citizen organizations and individuals have provided the enthusiasm and energy to establish and then to guard the integrity of the parks. In more recent times, were it not for caring citizens, the Colorado River would be dammed where it runs through the Grand Canyon, the great forests would be long gone from the Olympic Peninsula, the Great Smoky Mountains would be scarred with a transmountain highway and Civil War battlefields would be covered with shopping malls and subdivisions.
The best defense is an alert and involved public. Over the years, I have interviewed many people, of all stations of society, in national parks and in cities removed from the parks, and found that virtually all support protection of park values. The growth of the National Parks and Conservation Association as a major advocate and watchdog, with almost 500,000 members, has been an encouraging development in voicing this feeling. In 1995, NPCA played a key role through its grassroots network in mobilizing public opposition to the park-closure scheme. Many of the best Republicans, in fact, scorned the Contract with America to heed their constituents and take a stand for parks.
National parks are nonpartisan by nature and often bring out the best in politicians. Harry F. Byrd, a conservative Democrat, was governor of Virginia in the 1920s when Shenandoah National Park was authorized. Every acre was in private ownership and Byrd played a key role in working with citizen advocates and the legislature to acquire the land for presentation to the federal government. Years later, as a U.S. senator, he would write: "In the tragedies and other strain of our modern world, generations to come will receive peace of mind and new hopes in lifting their eyes to the peaks and canyons of the Shenandoah National Park, and those who made possible its establishment can justly feel that their labors were not in vain."
John P. Saylor, on the other hand, was a loyal Republican from western Pennsylvania, who championed national parks in the House of Representatives for more than two decades until his death in office in 1973. "I cannot believe that the American people have become so crass, so dollar-minded, so exploitation-conscious," he once said, "that they must develop every little bit of wilderness that still exists." Although he received the John Muir Medal from the Sierra Club, he also was given the Distinguished Service Award from the ultraconservative Americans for Constitutional Action, showing that conservation belongs to no party and to no single point of view.
National parks are the essence of patriotism. Not just the scenic natural spectacles, but all of the 369 natural, historic and cultural sites and shrines that comprise the National Park System. That was my thought while on a visit to the USS Arizona Memorial, built in Honolulu over the hull of the sunken battleship. I can't imagine anyone, of any nationality (and I toured the site in company with many Japanese), coming away unmoved, or not imbued with new caring and compassion. The Navy established the memorial to protect the final resting place of 1,100 Navy men and Marines who lost their lives on December 7, 1941 and are buried with their ship, but the National Park Service administers the site as a treasure belonging to everyone.
National park units like the Arizona Memorial are special places. They may not cover as much space as Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, but that doesn't diminish their meaning or their message to our generation and generations to come. National parks like these are meant to be forever; they are priceless time capsules to tomorrow that we are privileged to know and enjoy today.
In setting the national parks agenda for tomorrow, miracles large and small are within reach. Theodore Roosevelt said at Stanford University in 1903 that "there is nothing more practical than the preservation of beauty, than preservation that appeals to the higher emotions of mankind." That should be the goal and, yea verily, those who safeguard a national park as a sacred cathedral of harmony and hope will be blessed.
Another time T. R. called the Grand Canyon "one of the great sights which every American should see," but he didn't say they should all come at once. We Americans love to travel when, where, and however we want. National parks are so readily accessible to increasing numbers of people who want to enjoy their wonders that only restraints can protect them as national parks. Permit systems and limitation of visitors are likely to be implemented in more and more parks.
I hate to moralize, or to advocate strict rules and regulations, or restraints on individual freedom, but with freedom of mobility comes the responsibility to protect the environment and the ability of others to travel freely. I believe that Americans make mistakes in the out-of-doors without malice. When problems are explained properly, they will understand and respond appropriately and, hopefully, influence the body politic that serves us.
Overuse and misuse clearly deplete the visible physical resource that people care about, but they do something to the invisible spirit of place as well. Rainbow Bridge, just north of the Arizona-Utah border, curving upward to a height above 300 feet, once was a sacred destination for religious pilgrimage, reached by toil, sweat, endurance and pain, proving to the pilgrim that the great things in life must be earned. That makes sense even to the European mind, for as Jung wrote, "There is no birth of consciousness without pain." Now, by contrast, the impounded waters of Glen Canyon Dam have made painless visits possible via boat on the reservoir called Lake Powell, to the Bridge Canyon landing, then walking about one mile. Surely some element of critical value- 2Dthe sense of connecting with spirit- 2Dis lost.
With reference to consciousness and pain, I cite the experience of Mark Wellman, an accomplished California mountaineer who broke his back in a climbing accident in 1982 and was left without the use of legs. He lost direction in his life until a chance visit to Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco led to enrolling as a volunteer ranger. It was a new beginning, the start of Mark's climb back from pain, loneliness and shattered dreams. He took courses in park management that ultimately led to a summer job as a ranger in Yosemite. He worked at the visitor center and entry stations, and on his own time, absorbing the Yosemite scenery and swimming in chilly, snow-fed waters. Mark pushed himself to see as much of the park as was humanly possible in a wheelchair. But how far could he go? Mark Wellman advanced bit by bit until he made history when he and a partner climbed the 3500-foot granite face of El Capit‡n. Then two years later he pulled himself to the summit of Half Dome though it took 13 days to make it.
"I've always believed that true adventure involves discovering things about yourself as you edge ever closer toward the boundaries of your personal limits," Mark wrote later, in his book, Climbing Back. "I learned plenty about myself on El Capitáan and Half Dome."
National parks are true adventure, places for discovering things about oneself, for edging toward boundaries of personal limits. It doesn't have to be intensely physical, either. Walk only a short distance from the crowded paths. In solitude, allow yourself to encounter and examine flowers, trees, birds, rocks and water 2Dseparately and then collectively. It's astonishing how you can train your eyes, ears and nose to note things most people ignore. Looking at scenery can be a passive experience, but as you explore with the eye and mind, patterns of nature become evident and logical. You can be your own ecologist and enriched in spirit in the process.
The more the country becomes developed, the more America needs national parks as sanctuaries, sacred space where Americans can escape cities to look at stars 2Dto touch stars and be touched and empowered by them. National parks open the heart to inner feeling and emotion; they enable the pilgrim to appreciate the sanctity of life, of all life, and to manifest humility and love. That, above all, is what national parks are about.
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