Recent comments

Thanks for letting us know what the bill will entail. It was a noble effort waged by Mr. Funkhouser and we all do appreciate his hard work. My most heartfelt condolences go out to his family.

He will be hard to replace.

One more story lagged in on this today. As a grassroots organizer, 200 is no insignificant number for an impromptu protest; we would be very happy with that number for a local protest here (even though more people live inside just the city of Washington than in all of Wyoming); given the summer population of Jackson, this represents about 1 in a 100 people there; in DC, that translates to about 6,000 people (and actually more than twice that given the metro area and visitation - which I took into the Jackson figures). Only once did we as local anti-war organizers (as opposed to national organizers) get that kind of percentage, and that was at the counter-inaugural in 2005. This is something else altogether. There are a lot of advantages organizing outside of Washington - too many to go into right now - but on Cheney's home turf in front of his home, that's not an insignificant barometer of how upset people are in the Jackson area.

It's interesting that there was an anti-war theme to this as well; you don't see an environmentalist theme. One of the problems in the various movements opposed to the Administration is an inability to communicate and organize across issues. Even so, if I were on the ground, I bet I would have seen an interesting cross-section of interests. Yet, at the organizing level, something else is at work. Whoever these organizers are, they have money we never had to be able to put full page ads in two Jackson newspapers.

There are a lot of interesting subtexts; I wish I could have been on the ground to experience the ins and outs of it because it's a whole world of intrigue and politics unto itself. One paper said that one of the co-organizers is in fact a Republican. But, you can get little sense of the organizing process from a newspaper and whoever served as group spokesperson. These groups can have all kinds of organizing means and ways of dealing with the media. Given the speakers and the march process, it seems like it lended itself to a more mainstream approach (an effigy of Cheney may seem radical, but the same event had Democratic office holders speaking) - anyhow, I could speculate and comment on and on. It makes me excited to get involved at some level either with a group like this (if it is viable and open) or with a different affinity group working in solidarity.

8/14/07 Protesters show up in force near Cheney home (by Whitney Royster Casper Star-Tribune)

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

I think he comes into the administration at a good time -- a time when the president is attempting to polish up his legacy and Kempthorne is there to wave the flag on his behalf. There's only so much the head of the Interior can do... he or she is basically a puppet of the president with some limited ability to package and present it with his or her personality. That being said, I was present last December when he addressed the crowd at Antietam on a very cold evening during the battlefield illumination. The power went out on the loudspeaker system and he kept on going without hitch. Turns out he had a great-great-grand-somebody who fought on that battlefield and it was a rather moving speech especially with no amplification. Kinda made me feel like I had stepped back in time to the Civil War days when someone of importance stepped up on the soapbox and gave a speech there on hallowed ground, with all the onlookers inching closer trying to hear what he had to say. I enjoyed his speech very much.

-- Jon

That is a very good question, Kurt, as are all of your questions, and I must admit to not having all the answers. As far as federal law goes (i.e., endangered species), state, regional, and city parks must abide by these statues. If scientific management in national parks could be decentralized, it would come with long-term benefits. For instance, some have noted the current administration's propensity to censor and suppress science, and with land management and funding depoliticized, those practices would be effectively ended.

Another good question. In urban parks or parks close enough to urban centers, local authorities could assume many responsibilities. Large, remote parks would present different challenges. One possible answer is for each park to hire and/or train their own protection rangers.

I assume there are experts with more concrete answers and plans, and I shall continue to research various views and ideas.

Thank you for your questions; they merit serious consideration.

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

I used to think of this website as being similar to "my house", and that you all as readers and commenters are guests at a giant party I've assembled to talk about parks. As host of this party, if I didn't think you were being fair to another party-goer, regardless of your political stance, I had deleted your comment. This didn't happen often. In the last month, other than spam (comments advertising porn, etc), I have deleted no more than 5 comments total. These were comments, that in my opinion, were designed with the single intent to illicit angry retaliatory comments -- flame bait. I don't want that at my party, and as host, I didn't think other guests wanted that either.

But this weekend, it dawned on me, this isn't MY house! As Kurt and I have said from day one, this site was built to promote community, to be a virtual commons for folks to read and share with others on somewhat neutral turf. It wasn't until this weekend that the mind caught up to what my fingers were typing, which is, it isn't up to ME to decide what is appropriate speech in these commons, it is the responsibility of the community itself. As Smokey Bear might say, only YOU can prevent flame wars. If someone lobs flame bait in your direction, do everything you can to ignore it, or respond in such a way as to remove the targeted anger from your reply.

This weekend, I logged in and was prepared to delete comments with speech like "you leftists are disgusting", "the VEEP can hold target practice [on you leftists]", "[the leftists] need to move to ... some third-world hell-hole", and suggesting that the "Islamofascists" should burn in the "fires of nuclear hell". The political stance doesn't offend me. I would have had the same desire to delete these comments if they had been targeted at "right-wing nut jobs". What seemed clear to me, is that these comments were coming from a very angry place. Why so angry? Was it at the remarks made earlier in the thread which ended with "Shame on you, Dick Cheney. Stay in your cave and leave the parks alone"? It was a comment that perhaps I would not have made, but one which I didn't find so offensive, but clearly others did.

So, that's when it hit me, that the comments left on this site are not about what I find acceptable or unacceptable, it's about you. Perhaps someday I can build a way for members of the NPT community to vote on the value of comments, similar in fashion to reviews left on Amazon or comments on Slashdot. It would be a way for the community to put its weight behind the opinions of particular comments that matched its own.

This means, as editors, Kurt and I are going to use a lot of care before hitting the delete button from here on out. We may contact individuals "off-site" if we feel a flame-war is in the works, and, for the sake of the site, we feel it needs to be brought under control. But, otherwise, we would ask simply that you consider the views of others, and that you treat them with same respect you would like to see in return. It may be just a pipe dream, but that is the type of community in which I'd love to participate.

In Zion they had a similar situation several years ago when the contract for the Zion Lodge (also held by Xantera) came up for renewal. There were many in the local community and in the NPS that were suggesting that the Lodge should be closed and the buildings converted to another use, possibly into a training center or used as housing and office space for employees and volunteers or maybe all of the above.

The original reason that the Zion Lodge had been built by the Union Pacific (talk about your benevolent corporation) in the 1920's was that there was no lodging or food service available in the nearby pioneer village of Springdale. Today the situation is far different with the town having a wide range of lodging and restaurant options which rank it right up there with Salt Lake and Park City in the quality of both in the state of Utah. It was felt, by many, that the original reason for the Lodge had ceased to exist and that it was now unfairly competing with local businesses with a big helping hand from the federal government.

The Lodge was also known as a place that was notorious for its criminal activity and the shady character of many of its employees. These concerns were pushed aside as Xantera was able to appeal directly to the Utah congressional delegation for the needed political muscle to continue to operate their low quality business in the heart of Zion Canyon.

Locally the Lodge is a joke and no one in Springdale would ever steer a visitor that way when they know that they could sleep or eat at other, much better, venues in town. It does, on the other hand, keep the green & gray police officers busy busting Lodge employees for meth sales, assaults and larceny. One particular year in the late 90's it accounted for over 40% of the felony arrests in the park. It's certainly been good for justifying an increase in law enforcement spending at Zion, but really not much else.

"As long as politicians control park regulations and funding, certain groups (including corporations) will pressure the government for preferential treatment and our parks will suffer." I agree Frank.

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.