National Parks In Trouble

[BTFT]

Below is a link to a Sunday Review article from the New York Times about how our National Parks are in serious trouble.


For all of us who love and respect and value our National Parks and who visit them in our Campers and RV's and enjoy them this is must reading.


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/o...sultPosition=1

[Agesilaus]

1> Most of us couldn't read it if we wanted to do so. It's behind a paywall.
2> As much as I hate to do this, [moderator edit] who can believe anything in the NYT. They stopped being reporters years ago and now are just a pack of proven liars.

[knightstorm]

The Times will allow a limited number of articles per month without hitting their paywall, but here is the article for those of you who would like to read it.

I’m having a hard time composing a response to the previous poster that would be within the forum guidelines.

“Our National Parks Are in Trouble
Blame overcrowding, invasive species, climate change and money woes.

By Jon Waterman
Mr. Waterman is a former park ranger and the author of National Geographic’s “Atlas of the National Parks.”
Nov. 22, 2019

360
CARBONDALE, Colo. — Deep inside Alaska’s six-million-acre Denali National Park and Preserve, I could see miles of space beneath my feet as I stood on the summit of the tallest mountain in North America. The startling view from the 20,310-foot Denali of rugged wilderness spreading out in all directions, plus the challenge of climbing it, were just two of the many wonders and adventures that I’ve experienced in America’s national parks.

I recently finished writing a book for National Geographic, “Atlas of the National Parks,” based on extensive research, a lifetime of exploring the parks and several years in the 1980s working as a ranger in two of them, Denali and Rocky Mountain in Colorado.

I meant the book as a celebration of the 103-year-old national park system, and it is. But what I also discovered was an operation in deep trouble, with some parks degraded by ruinous overcrowding; invasions of nonnative plants and animals that are upending delicate ecological balances; and a warming climate that is melting glaciers and withering away the rare yuccas that give their name to Joshua Tree National Park.

Adding to these woes, the system is badly underfunded and suffering from neglect. This is not a new problem, but it is getting worse, with deferred maintenance that mostly predates the Trump administration now topping $11 billion. But President Trump isn’t helping. He wants to cut the National Park Service’s budget by $481 million next year and is reportedly considering privatizing campgrounds and commercializing the parks in ways that contradict the agency’s goal of harmonizing with nature.
We need to arrest this decline and make the park system the national priority it should be. We need to assess the health of these magnificent parks and ask some hard questions about their capacity to withstand the millions of visitors who arrive every year. In 2016, the centennial of the Park Service’s creation, 330 million were recorded at the 419 parks, recreation areas, monuments, seashores and battlefields and other places that make up the system. The agency’s mandate of wide-open access and preservation has become a paradox that we need to sort out.

As Dan Wenk, the former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, put it, “The least-studied mammal in Yellowstone is the most abundant: humans.” Unfortunately, a lack of leadership has prevented the Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, from determining at what point crowds interfere with the preservation of each park.

The challenge is a tough one. Mr. Wenk told a group of businessmen in 2016 that he could foresee a peak-season cap on visitors to Yellowstone. The new superintendent has said he has no plans to limit access to the park.

Our parks were intended as havens from the stresses of the modern world and places where the nation’s natural and historic legacies would be preserved. But the world continues to close in on them. In May, the National Parks Conservation Association said that 96 percent of the parks were compromised by “significant” air pollution problems, with most having unhealthy air for portions of the year.

Yellowstone has 1,386 native plant species and 225 nonnative ones. And this is only a fraction of the more than 6,500 species of disruptive invasive animals and plants found proliferating on some of the 85 million acres administered by the Park Service.
Even high up on frigid Denali, I saw troubling changes. Three years ago, we skied past melt ponds on the Kahiltna Glacier at an elevation of 8,000 feet; before that, I had never seen water there in my more than 40 years of climbing the mountain. Since 2004, the glacier has consistently thinned. In Washington’s North Cascades National Park, as much as 56 percent of the ice has disappeared over the last century. Montana’s Glacier National Park is on the way to having no glaciers.
And when climbing Denali in 2016, I had to wait my turn behind dozens of other climbers to clip into fixed ropes safeguarding our passage. That had never happened on my previous Denali climbs, but traffic on the mountain and in the park has nearly doubled since I was a ranger there in the early 1980s. Over a thousand climbers now attempt Denali each summer. Like the three most popular national parks in the Lower 48 — Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain — Denali National Park’s renowned mountain, at least on its easiest route, has become crowded. Fortunately, elsewhere in that enormous, remote place there is still plenty of room for visitors.

This is not true at some other parks. At Zion National Park, which has more visitors per acre than any other national park, I had to wait my turn in a long line to finish the classic hike up to Angels Landing. At Arches National Park, I watched as tourists blithely walked off trail across the desert, destroying fragile cryptobiotic soils. In Grand Canyon, I saw Ancestral Puebloan petroglyphs on sandstone walls defaced by graffiti artists. And in Rocky Mountain, I paddled my pack raft past thousands of acres of reddened pine-needle trees killed by the invasive pine beetle that is ravaging many Western national parks.
ImageA crowd at Yellowstone National Park waiting to photograph the eruption of Old Faithful, the park’s famous geyser.
A crowd at Yellowstone National Park waiting to photograph the eruption of Old Faithful, the park’s famous geyser.Credit...Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor, via Getty Images
Last winter I visited the 1.5-million-acre Everglades National Park, and I delighted in identifying dozens of different native wading bird species, from roseate spoonbills to storks. But I also saw a nine-foot-long Burmese python wrapped around the axle of a neighboring camper’s truck. Numbering in the thousands but mostly invisible because of their camouflage-patterned skin, this invasive predator from Southeast Asia, which can grow more than 20 feet long and weigh up to 200 pounds, is slowly squeezing out some species of the park, including small deer and an occasional alligator. Bounty hunters are trying to make a dent in the population. The python is one of more than 100 animal and plant invasive species pushing out natives in the park.

I came away distressed by my visit. The park is often overrun with motorboats tearing up sea grass; it suffers from a lack of clean freshwater from the north because of human diversions, while ocean storm surges in the south contaminate the freshwater marshes with salt water. (To his credit, President Trump signaled support in May for $200 million for federal work on watershed restoration in the Everglades.)

Over the decades, this park has accumulated a huge backlog of maintenance problems that affect everyday tourism. And tourists have gotten wind of this decline: Visits dropped to less than 600,000 last year after averaging about a million annually over the previous six years. Does Everglades National Park offer a portent for other parks?
Perhaps it’s no surprise that my most instructive visit was to the Interior Department’s Washington headquarters in 2018. The spacious hallways of the five-acre, stone-quarried edifice, where the Park Service’s bison motif was omnipresent, were strangely empty. Some 1,500 employees during the Trump administration, including many scientists, had been dismissed or reprimanded. So the three longtime Park Service officials I was there to meet with about my book were clearly demoralized.

One of them spoke to my fears when she told me that they couldn’t recommend anyone there to write an environment-focused foreword for the book, even though the Park Service had collaborated on it with my publisher. Not long after my visit, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would resign under pressure as he faced investigations into his business dealings and policy decisions. He was replaced by David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist.

At the president’s bidding Mr. Zinke had shrunk two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by 85 percent and about 50 percent, which will open the way for the newly unprotected land to be exploited by mining and fossil fuel companies. Despite his departure, these pro-development park policies remain unchanged.

Amid this lack of respect for our protected public lands, it will take a dedicated course change to stop the impending tragedy facing our park commons. But as a lifelong visitor and former ranger, I know it’s not too late for a rescue.

Congress must provide more money to turn around the deferred maintenance and run the park’s day-to-day operations. We need to strengthen essential environmental laws like the Clean Water and Clear Air Acts. We must preserve these places, not open them to mining, grazing and timber cutting. And we need to address the international urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, the national parks that define us as a country and are visited by hundreds of millions each year will be beyond saving.”

[1bigmess]

(Should I wade into a topic that will probably just get shut down because it has extreme potential for being closed due to political bickering)

(No. Not this time. But now that I've left a comment I will get notices for new comments )

[twogypsies]

As volunteers in our national parks for many years we saw the issues long ago. It keeps getting built upon year after year and it's to a point of no return. Bottom line... money from the General Fund is not even close to what is needed to keep the parks in good repair. The parks have to pick and choose as to what projects to do each year.

Grand Canyon gets its water piped from down in the Canyon at the Colorado River. The piping has broken often over the years and it keeps getting patched.

The article talks of invasive species of plants. We spent many hours along with others digging out purple loosetrife from a national park and returning a few years later and seeing it all back. You can't eradicate a species if you don't pick up every single seed dropped. Salt cedar is another plant that has taken over. People bring these plants in for some reason and we pay the consequences.

The article also talks of too many people smothering our parks. The only way to solve this problem is limiting how many can come in daily. Not many people would go for this.

This problems will never go away.

[BTFT]

Originally Posted by Agesilaus

1> Most of us couldn't read it if we wanted to do so. It's behind a paywall.
2> As much as I hate to do this, [moderator edit] who can believe anything in the NYT. They stopped being reporters years ago and now are just a pack of proven liars.

I am sorry you couldn't access it. It was not behind a paywall for me. Like another poster said you can read a certain number of NYT articles for free.

[knightstorm]

This appears to be the same article, without a paywall.

https://trendingpress.com/our-nation...re-in-trouble/

[RickNC]

For those who haven’t figured it out the article is in the opinion section of the NYT not a news section. I agree with the gist of the article and I am not a fan of the potus. But to be fair the current administration has kept pace with the previous decade of NPS funding which has maintained it at average of ~ +4% per year or about the same as the rate of inflation . IIRC the Discretionary budget for NPS was up the past couple of years so while the 481 million proposal is a hard hit (%14) it isn’t a death spiral. As previously said park attendance is way up , admission fees and concessions aren’t covering the expense of dealing with large crowds nor the additional wear and tear on infrastructure. If it is something that matters to you need to be letting your congressional representatives know.

[RVThere]

As another lifelong explorer to our National Parks, the problems of infrastructure and overcrowding have existed long before our current administration. Frankly, the political bent of the story probably turns off many who may actually be concerned.

But like most articles, long on problems and short on solutions.

As my son is a National Park Service law enforcement ranger, I can say that over the last three years I've seen tremendous morale and commitment from him and his fellow rangers. I joined him in July for a multi-day back country patrol to the Heart Lake geyser basin in Yellowstone. No overcrowding, pristine vistas, visitors who respected the environment and this great natural treasure. Like any experienced outdoorsman, we tried to do our part by stopping and cleaning any trash left by others.

In October, we were in the Everglades and Crocodile Lake NWR patrolling for invasive pythons. Not bounty hunters - just concerned citizens who try to do our part.

So instead of picking sides, blaming the other guys, making it political, take the time to volunteer your time and do a small part to make our parks better a little at a time.

[Isaac-1]

I agree the political spin on this article is annoying, having said that as I see it, yes there are issues with the national park system. I feel a lot of it is based on no clear direction or mandate, as we have two or more competing ideologies, on one extreme we have those that think national parks should be some sort of human free preserve zone, on the other we have people that want to encourage visitations to the parks, and somewhere in the middle we have the group that wants to limit visitation, but for some reason they should be exempted from this this limitation.


Simply put you can't have it both ways, as one group will vehemently protest the efforts of the other, resulting in no progress being made, and more overall dilapidation of the parks.


p.s. one other thing to remember when it comes to the long term trend of increased visitation, the US population has more than doubled since 1950, also many of the major national parks are in the western US, and the western states populations have increased even more than that over the last few decades. For example California's population has more than doubled since 1970, and has almost quadrupled since 1950. Arizona is ever worse having going up nearly six fold since 1960, the list goes on and on. Putting more and more people within a one day drive of many of the major national parks, so it is only reasonable to expect visitation to go up.

[NLOVNIT]

CAUTION!

Tread very carefully here folks. We will not tolerate any political oriented commentary.

Lori-

[shootist]

Just open the gates, turn off the utilities and leave, that's all I ever want from the gov. , just get out of the way of the people you're supposed to be serving.

[camper8251]

Originally Posted by shootist

Just open the gates, turn off the utilities and leave, that's all I ever want from the gov. , just get out of the way of the people you're supposed to be serving.

yeah that will work.. NOT.... You all saw what happened to the parks when the Govt Shut down last time. People are just plain rude and dirty....
The trash and damage done to the parks at that time was sickening..

https://psmag.com/news/national-park...g-the-shutdown

[JpalmerCass]

Originally Posted by shootist

Just open the gates, turn off the utilities and leave, that's all I ever want from the gov. , just get out of the way of the people you're supposed to be serving.

That would turn many NPS historical sites into ruins in quick order.