National Parks: ‘Where Is Everybody?’
November 27th, 2006
The National Park Service protects America’s greatest natural treasures, not just as lonely wildernesses, but as sites for Americans to come experience the simple pleasures of the outdoors. Yet, according to surveys done by the NPS, fewer and fewer people are taking advantage of the system; since 1995, the number of visitors has fallen each year, while tent camping and backcountry camping are down 20%.
For some parks – Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Great Smokey Mountains – a drop in visitors may relieve some of the environmental pressure caused by overcrowding, allowing rangers to focus more on conservation and less on keeping tourists from falling in geysers. Congress, especially this one, could cover the budget shortfall in the short term.
Yet this short-term problem for the Park Service could become a long-term problem for environmentalists. It’s said interaction breeds awareness; if fewer young people see and appreciate nature today, who knows how they will vote when they grow up to be the citizens of tomorrow.
Link (via LA Times)
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November 29th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Most of the parks systems have gone over to a reservation system. Reserve America has all but taken over the state and national parks system. Almost everytime I’ve tried to get reservations here in California I have found the campsites to be already reserved. But when I go there in person I find the campgrounds to be empty. Reserve America is hurting all of our parks by keeping the sites empty. Lets go back to the old system. Sign in and pay at the gate. You made more money before the reservation system started. It seems like the only time the government fixes things, is when they are running fine. If they are broken they leave them alone.
November 29th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
I’m not sure this is really a big disaster for environmental appreciation and education. In fact it might even be good news.
There are significant issues with national parks as vehicles for teaching people about the environment. The first is that equating parks with environment tends to imply that everywhere else is NOT environment, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. For example the world couldn’t solve its environmental problems by creating more parks. A field trip to the schoolyard to count all the insects in it, or better a garden plot in the schoolyard where kids can see a seed become a plant that’s pollinated by a bee and then produces something you can eat—- that’s real environmental education.
Parks are (or are supposed to be) wilderness… nature as it is without the presence of humans. Of course anyone who’s stayed in one of those packed campgrounds would laugh at that notion! But even in the backcountry there really is no such thing as a place no man has touched. People have been altering the landscape for millenia (and not just Europeans, either). This became such an issue in the US Forest Service many staff there have stopped referring to goals of restoring “pristine” or “untouched” places.. they know there aren’t any. Instead the goal is a return to “pre-European conditions.”
Anyway, I’m not say to eliminate parks. They’re good habitat for animals. But they’re not so good for people. Majestic parks encourage people to idealize and fetishize nature, make it into porn of a kind, instead of seeing it as the world they interact with every day. And that’s a danger.
Cheers!