Loved To Death

"Money, too, remains a problem. The parks have endured a history marked more by congressional indifference and occasional hostility than by generosity. A $12 billion backlog for maintenance and improvements awaits funding. Fewer permanent employees now work for the park service than in 2002, even as it administers more parks and deals with record numbers of visitors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/are-we-loving-our-national-parks-to-death.html

This article was written two years ago and has facts about the park system and the issues I witnessed firsthand during my recent visit to Grand Teton National Park. 

We got up at 5 am with an hour’s drive from our overnight stay to the camp site we were hoping to get. We hit a traffic jam at the park entrance and I became apprehensive about a crush at the “first come first served” campground. Are all these people going for the "tents only" site we wanted? Should we have spent the night in the parking lot? My nervousness alternated with my awe at seeing the mountains towering above us lit by the sunrise.

    At our campground/trailhead, Jenny Lake, which is the most popular spot for camping and sightseeing, the parking lot held about 50 cars. By 9 am every day the lot filled and spilled out onto the highway entrance, with cars and RVs coming and going all day. Work was being done on the facility, which I assume was to enlarge it.

    

We went to the park to hike, and once one got past the trailheads the crowds did lessen, because the trails are steep and rocky. Even so there was a steady stream of people, speed hikers charging up the hill, families with small children, couples chattering in a variety of languages, and guided groups of teenagers. A short distance up the trail, usually past the first overlook, it thinned out and by the time we got up to a lake three miles in we were virtually alone. Along the way we passed side trails that were closed so they could recover, blocked with large rocks and tree branches and posted with “loved to death” signs.

My personal peeve: the bathroom at our campsite was gross. It’s managed by a private company and to their credit it was evident that staff was doing their best to keep it reasonably clean, but it was in disrepair with broken doors and a bare concrete floor. The fee was $30/night so the 50 sites at this campground generate about $50,000 a month. I wondered what impression international visitors were getting. It was amusing to see a sign in one restroom that showed an awareness that it’s just not U.S. citizens coming to see our natural wonders. 

At the heart of all this is a consideration of infrastructure politics.The current administration is cutting the budget when most agree that the funding is insufficient to maintain and upgrade the system as it exists. Moreover, allowing even more people into these fragile ecosystems increases the cost to keep them healthy. Personally, I would like to see “tent only” camping and a reduction of traffic by using shuttles for day visitors. RVs are another problem. How anyone can call it “camping” when they are pulling a house behind them is a mystery to me, but they now compromise the majority of those in the campgrounds and are a constant presence on the roads.

Publicly held natural resources are vulnerable to mismanagement and exploitation for personal and political gain. By all accounts this is what we are facing now. Officials from the cabinet on down and some legislators are of the mindset that “too much” is being withheld from development. At best they may hold the mistaken belief that making these lands available to drillers, loggers and miners will add needed revenue to the treasury. At worst we may be the victims of backroom dealing and corruption; it is difficult to know the facts, but the risk of permanent damage from overuse and uncontrolled development is a real and present danger.

So let’s take a moment to look at the current Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke.

(Note: The following is cut and paste from Wikipedia, New York Magazine, ThinkProgress and Vanity Fair articles)

He’s an ex-Navy Seal, from Montana, has businesses and property worth over a million dollars, impoverished by Trump cabinet standards, and has been a politician since 2009.

In 2013, Zinke hosted a radio show in which he engaged with and promoted fringe conspiratorial views, including birtherism (the myth that Barack Obama was not born in the United States). Zinke said on the radio show that he was not sure whether Obama was a foreign citizen and called on Obama to release his college transcripts. Later, in 2016, as a congressman, Zinke appeared on the radio show “Where's Obama's Birth Certificate”, known for its promotion of birther conspiracy theories

During his Senate confirmation hearing he stated:

“Climate is changing; man has had influence,” Zinke said, differing himself from Trump's position on climate change. “I don’t believe it’s a hoax…I believe we must be prudent.”

The former Montana congressman said he was "absolutely against the transfer or sale of public land."

He also said he would be open to reviewing and expanding oil drilling, stating:

“The president-elect has said, we want to be energy independent. As a former Navy SEAL, I think I have been to 63 countries in my lifetime. I can guarantee you it is better to produce energy domestically under reasonable regulation, than watch it be produced overseas with no regulation."

One of Zinke’s first acts after confirmation was to overturn a moratorium on new leases for coal mines on public land. He subsequently recommended slashing the size of several national monuments, including Bears Ears, in Utah, and Gold Butte, in Nevada, and lifting restrictions at others to allow more development. (In December, acting on these recommendations, President Donald Trump announced that he was cutting the area of the Bears Ears monument by more than three-quarters and shrinking the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument, also in Utah, by almost half.) Zinke has also proposed gutting a plan, years in the making, to save the endangered sage grouse; instead of protecting ten million acres in the West that had been set aside for the bird’s preservation, he’d like to see them given over to mining. And he’s moved to scrap Obama-era regulations that would have set more stringent standards for fracking on federal property.

Perhaps the most cynical thing they are doing is in regards to the National Parks Funding Bill (S.751 - National Park Service Legacy Act of 2017) which Zinke came out and supported after it was introduced in March of 2017 but has been sitting in committee since. All while the president’s budget proposes a drastic 16% to the Department of the Interior, which houses the National Park Service, and a cut of 7% to the park service itself. It’s been reported they are also proposing a hefty increase to admission fees.

“They’re determined to lease and develop every acre they possibly can, which will minimize the potential for conserving these landscapes in the future,” Jim Lyons, who was a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Interior Department during the Obama Administration, told the Washington Post. “They’re quite efficient, and they know exactly what they want to do.”

Despite the crush, our trip was great. We just had to look past the crowds the same way you do at a theme park, concert or mall and make the effort to go farther in where most of them feared to tread, bear spray at the ready. It's my hope that this one part of our shared experience was geared more towards a concern for long term conservation rather than unfettered use and development and I wonder if those farsighted patriots who first aspired to set aside these unique treasures would be approving of what has transpired.