Recent comments

Thanks. I was just wondering because I'd like to know what the promoters of the bill consider "abusive" and what is deemed reasonable.

Beamis,

I don't have full details on the Baucus bill yet. The "worst fee abuses by public land agencies" is quoted from the WSNFC email notification of Rob's death. I would suspect that it has something to do with fees collected under the FLREA, but don't know for sure.

God forbid, ME a LEFTIST? I proudly state once and for all, the biggest fools in this system are those who claim to be allied solely with either the "Left" or the "Right". PLEASE take your political interpretations elsewhere, as they are not pertinent to this columnist. Independent outlooks are what this country's founding principles were based upon, and ever since that system was corrupted and pared down to the Liberal Left and the Conservative Right, were have reached stalemate in most environmental issues. Leftist indeed.....

Of course, all of this govt. vs. privatization misses the point that the national parks and private businesses have been in partnership since the very beginning and that there probably isn't a piece of the parks that hasn't been contracted out at some point to some private corporation.

It's a false dichotomy; either way, most of us don't have a lot of say about what goes on unless we have the dollars or the political influence (oh, I forgot - they're the same thing).

The railroads wanted the government to set aside national parks because they didn't want anyone to cut in on their action. Of course, some would celebrate this because they ended up kicking out small businessmen who were destroying thermal features (for instance, in Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone) by using them as baths for medicinal purposes. They kicked out hide hunters who were wiping out buffalo, but then they went on to poison all the wolves.

If you look at a lens from the largest actors to the smallest actors on this stage, incompetence and mismanagement abound. You leave it to government, and they rip apart forests, contract out hotels, stores, gas stations, build roads and turn parks into law enforcement zones. You leave it to corporations, and they monopolize interests, do all the same, and have to be accountable only to the segment of society that pays their bills and sustains their business. If you leave it to small businesses and individual entrepreneurs, they only pay attention to the needs of their particular business, and the rest be damned. If they happen to be stupid at what they do, they kill and destroy every last bit of their resource before moving on. No one has a monopoly on destruction. And, for all the good things that have been done, it only takes a few bad apples in any direction for irreparable harm to be done.

It's no small wonder that there's anything left in these places that are worth cherishing; remarkably and miraculously, there are. The places themselves are astounding in their ability to withstand all our management methods.

All this tells me that we aren't going to fix the parks just by seeing this as either government control or private control. A lot of other things are screwed up, too. I'd no sooner trust the corporations, the small entrepreneurs, or the government to best manage Yellowstone or the parks; in all cases, we're bound to make choices on a range of better and worse too narrow to be of any good to any of the parks as a whole.

We're playing with forces bigger than our minds. Tinkering with who gets to make ultimate decisions won't make much difference.

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

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.

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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!

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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.