Jim:

Thank you for your level response; it is very much appreciated.

Over the last few years, I have forced myself to become more moderate on my outlook on roads and vehicles in parks. (I think it moderate, for instance, to close East Rim Drive at Crater Lake to auto traffic. Or Zion's east side for that matter. There are still plenty of opportunities for motoring remaining. These measures would not create a situation where someone would have to undertake "50 mile hike into the wilderness", as some have absurdly proposed.) However, I think it is important to point out the double standard among environmentalists and park enthusiasts when it comes to CO2 production, mining, and other activities that impact parks and the environment.

The political realities of the current situation are clear to me, but with a paradigm shift, parks can be insulated from politics. Our treasures deserve better than the self-serving politicians and parasitic lobbyists currently in control.

I'm glad you quoted Crater Lake's administrative history; I read it as a seasonal, and the admin history lists Joaquin Miller's article "Sea of Silence" in its bibliography. (Although the administrative history seems not to include Miller's original 1904 article from "Sunset". Maybe because it shows an early opposition to government "progress" at Crater Lake?)

Miller pleaded, "No hotel or house or road of any sort should ever be built near this Sea of Silence. All our other parks have been surrendered to hotels and railroads. Let us keep this last and best sacred to silence and nature."

Miller--and successive generations--lost out to the growing federal leviathan, "progress", and interest groups of the time.

But we've come a long way. We know better now. We can pry loose the corporatist stranglehold on our parks. Sacrificing silence and solitude to the industrial machine so that people will support parks is an unnecessary compromise forced upon us by corporatist America. NPT has taken a stance against snowmobiles and OHVs, claiming there is plenty of other space in the country for those activities; the same is true for cars in parks.

Whether or not parks would have been established without industrial access is a moot point. We have these parks NOW and we have the choice NOW to begin restoring them--and the Organic Act--to their original intent: unimpaired preserves and refuges from the modern world.