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By PAT WILLIAMS
Senior fellow and regional policy associate
O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West
Our national parks, often called the best idea America ever had, are in
real trouble.
Park budgets are being slashed, user fees increased, visitor
hours reduced, repairs postponed, trail
maintenance and historic preservation pushed aside, and the National Park
Service itself slowly
dismantled. Now, as a topper, legislation has been drafted in the U.S.
Congress to sell 15 units
of the national parks system.
We Americans, we Westerners, are enriched by our 388 park units, which
range from
designated trails, battlefields and recreation areas to preserves, monuments,
seashores, historic
parks and the flagships of the fleet such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Bryce
Canyon and the other
great parks, 18 of which are here in the states of the Rocky Mountain
West.
The threat against our parks comes almost exclusively from the U.S. Congress
and the
White House. Political tinkering is not new but the current threats have
reached condition red
under the Bush administration and an increasingly conservative Congress.
With benign names such as "competitive outsourcing" and "park
partners," our national parks are being starved on one hand and increasingly
privatized on the other.
The Bush administration has plans to take $3 million from the already
thin park service budget to replace park employees with even more for
profit private contractors.
Beginning in 1981 with the coming of the Reagan White House and its Department
of
Interior's Secretary Jim Watt, serious efforts were made to slash funding
for our national parks.
I was a member of the Budget Committee of the U.S. House during those
years and remember
well our hard-won victories to push off the Reagan budgets and provide
our parks with at least
yearly cost-of-living increases. However, in the almost twenty years since
then, and most
notably during the past five years, our parks have increasingly turned
to private corporations for
the dollars necessary to make up for budget shortfalls.
Not long ago, Yellowstone Park managers realized that they had only 20
percent of the money
necessary to conduct education and interpretive programs and thus turned
to corporate
contributions.
A look at Yellowstone's website webcam found this advertisement: "Learn
How
Your Company Can Sponsor Old Faithful's webcam — click here."
Is that what park funding
has come to — the hope that some company will "click here"
and make money by sponsoring
Old Faithful?
A few weeks ago a group of retired park service employees uncovered an
effort by the
Bush Administration to quietly rewrite what is known internally as the
National Park System
"rule book." The rewrite, done without engagement, oversight,
or advice from career park
service professionals, would permit enormous increases in noisy, disruptive
over-flights by
helicopter and fixed wing private tour operators, the construction of
unsightly private viewing
towers, the severe reduction of the scientific underpinnings of park management,
and, incredibly,
selectively open our national parks to mining and oil drilling.
Our parks are caught between two schemes: Disneyfication or being sold!
The chairman
of the congressional committee that has legislative jurisdiction over
our national parks,
Republican Rep. Richard Pombo of California, has circulated a draft of
his legislation to sell 15 units
and 23 percent of the total park system acreage. The message of that proposal,
in this time of
mountainous and unnecessary federal deficits is: Don't eliminate pork,
sell national parks
instead.
That a virtual handful of elected and politically appointed ideologues
on the Far Right are
upsetting the parks' mandates for preservation and public stewardship
is, frankly, scary.
Not satisfied with their past assaults, these ideologues are now using
the parks to promote their
religious opinions about creationism by requiring that park gift shops
carry a book with claims
that the Grand Canyon was not created over the past 6 million years but
rather is only 4000 years
old and was created by Noah's Flood.
Enough, already!
Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative
from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching
at The University of Montana where he also serves as a Senior Fellow at
the Center for the Rocky Mountain West.
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