Recent comments

All this talk about the evils of non-governmental management makes me laugh in light of the long history of DOI and NPS abuses carried out with taxpayer funds.

Golf course in a national park? Yosemite's got one, completed two years after the Organic Act (and while I'm not sure if that part of the park was in Yosemite in 1918, I'm sure that it is now, and the NPS perpetuates this "historic" feature of Yosemite).

Hotels? Please. The NPS surrendered parks to hotels and railroads (and later autos) long, long ago. At Crater Lake, $17 million of taxpayer money funded the complete rebuilding of the Crater Lake Lodge (it's a brand new building; almost nothing original remains) so that wealthy tourists can spend over $200 a night for a lake view.

How 'bout dams? The Bureau of Reclamation (a DOI agency) built the Glen Canyon Dam, which flooded countless archaeological sites far older than anything in DC. Then there's the O'Shaughnessy Dam, which flooded Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite. It was completed in 1923 under the DOI at a cost of $100 million and 68 lives and stole the experience of a second Yosemite Valley from hundreds of millions of people.

Fear mongers never cite hard evidence that introducing non-governmental management and competition to the national park system would result in anything near the magnitude of egregious desecration carried out by the federal government over the last century. It's amazing that, in light of this long history of abuse, anyone continues to support federal mismanagement of our national treasures.

----------------------------------------
Reform the National Park Service!
http://NPS-reform.blogspot.com

Stone Mountain is NOT a state park but is instead a theme park that has not been privatized from governmental status. It has always been a privately held property and has never made a pretense that it is anything other than a popular theme park centered on a sculpted mountain of Confederate heroes.

Get your facts straight Judy.

If you want to see how privitation has destroyed a park look at Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia. All of the natural aspects of the park have been paved over and blocked off in order to make golf courses, hotels and amusement park type areas.

It is the horror that will happen if private firms take over our parks!

Right on, Rachel.
The leftists in this blog don't even deserve our parks! They really need to move to Canada or some third-world hell-hole, and maybe they'll be more grateful.

As I've stated on numerous other topics on multiple websites, if there's a profit to be had, such things as public lands, presevation interests, historical significance, etc. simply do not exist in this political system, which by the way has now evolved well past "democracy" (and was actually founded as a republic, if you read carefully) into a full-blown nightmare of capitalism, where all citizens are made to bow down and pay homage to the Almighty (dollar, that is) at every opportunity lest ye be banished into the fires of nuclear hell for all eternity.

As a new member here I really enjoyed this. It gave me a nice perspective of the mission and goals. I am thrilled to hear separate pages for each park are in the works. I read here daily and am looking forward to the additions mentioned. I love the postings and the exchange as well; it is interesting exploring so many ideas and opinions, even those with which I don't necessarily agree. I had no idea how many issues face our national parks. Thank you for such a wonderful site!

I couldn't agree more; 469 empty buildings seems quite wasteful to me. The best way to preserve historical buildings is to use them. It's recycling at its best!

----------------------------------------
Reform the National Park Service!
http://NPS-reform.blogspot.com

Sounds like a perfect candidate for administration by a private trust or foundation. San Francisco is full of wealthy philanthropists and civic minded tycoons who would be more than willing to take care of such a treasure if given the chance. This would be an appropriate site to transition to local control that could potentially be a template for future such transfers of park areas better suited to that type of administration.

First, does anyone think that Golden Gate or Gateway NRAs are "national treasures" along the lines of Yosemite, Sequoia, Yellowstone, Denali, or Mesa Verde? Please do not infer from this question that I think these places don't deserve protection. I just wonder if they belong in the national park system.

There is a difference between operating self-sufficiently and "managing the park for profit", and the author seems to use the two synonymously. "If it isn't turning a profit by the year 2013, the entire base could be turned over to developers." Is the use of the word profit here the author's or the politicians'? Self-sufficient means able to supply its own needs without external assistance while profit is the monetary surplus left to a producer or employer after deducting wages, rent, cost of raw materials, etc. With a maintenance bill of $42 million a year, I doubt there would be much monetary surplus at the Presidio.

I think we need to be clear in terminology so as not to cloud the issue.

----------------------------------------
Reform the National Park Service!
http://NPS-reform.blogspot.com

And, just like the booze party at the Charlestown Navy Yard, it creates a PRECEDENT, which would make any future handover of parks to private developers much easier to slide through.

Beamis, here is the difference. No other species but humans classifies humans as humans, other animals as other animals, and sets up a value system based on those differences. They simply act; some act in the best interest of their species, some in the best interest of themselves, some to the detriment of themselves. Many animals do think about how best to act in the circumstances they find themselves, but they don't set up a moral universe where those who act as they do deserve certain benefits because of who they are and what rights who they are afford them. The concept of a "right" is absolutely foreign to every other species that we know about in the universe. You don't need to be pro-human (or anti-human) to value yourself and others you love. All you need to do is love and value them.

I am going to eat, live, destroy other things, kill plants to survive, walk on ground, stomp, and change the order. I don't need a moral justification system based on who I am in order to do this. It's that arbitrary line in the sand that leads to the vast environmental destruction and the lack of relationship for which we as humans (as people who can think about "what it means to be human") are capable of - we've set ourselves inside of a box, instead of relate to the world as we would be prone to do otherwise.

But, after so many millennia of raising up civilization as a virtue and centuries of raising up rights (the true capital of the moral universe) as the guarantor of virtue, we are truly stuck with what history has thrust upon us and the consequences of our vanity. It's not hard to understand why some have turned to woe when considering how humans should relate with the environment. It feels like an unfathomably difficult mess. How do we return home so that we can simply enjoy the mist of the falls and not think about the consequences of privatizing Old Faithful? The fact is, we can't be blissfully ignorant. Here we are, humans, a class of kings without a clue. How do we get back home? to Eden, or my preference, the shores of Yellowstone Lake as the sun sets and the moon rises.

Your anti-authoritarian instincts are admirable. I think if you followed your instincts against government and totalitarianism to its core, you would see that your capitalist tendencies are based on the same lies of privilege. But, how do you tear down towers of Babel? I don't think I'd entrust that to Bechtel or to George W. Bush. It might as well start with us, human beings, who still have to figure out how to relate with our environment.

Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World

Snowbird06
Beamis, thanks for your reply...let me ponder over this a bit. But, doesn't Zen Buddhist equate all life equal with humans? I don't think they consider themselves as despoilers of God's creation on earth.