A National Parks Conservation Association campaign launching today is designed to rally public support against threats facing such iconic national parks as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon with hopes the Obama administration will step up and use the tools and authority it has to protect the parks.
"The public knows that there are problems in the parks, but it does take an advocacy group sometimes to elevate the dialogue," said Kristen Brengel, NPCA's senior director of legislation and policy. “Our effort is to make sure we’re amplifying these issues and engaging the public.”
At 9 a.m. EST today the park advocacy group was launching a social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other channels to raise the profile of threats facing parks from coast to coast:
* In Florida the campaign zeroes in on Biscayne National Park and efforts by the National Park Service to create a marine reserve zone in a bid to improve the health of fisheries and the only tropical coral reef system in the continental United States.
* At Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona the group points to the prospect of a mega-development just south of the park's boundary, a development some fear could disrupt the park's groundwater flows.
* In Wyoming, Yellowstone National Park's bison herds need a sound management plan that will "(E)nd the senseless slaughter of bison and provide these living symbols of wild America with more room to roam..."
* In Utah energy development on public lands threatens the viewshed and natural sound at Arches National Park.
There are other parks threatened by development and resource issues, such as Acadia National Park with large crowds brought to the park by cruise ships, Bryce Canyon National Park with a surface coal mine not far from its borders, and national parks and preserves in Alaska where state wildlife regulations often impinge on natural predator populations in those parks.
By focusing this campaign on parks such as Yosemite National Park and its issues with air pollution, Grand Teton National Park with inholding issues, Glacier National Park with nearby energy development, and even Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia confronting the prospect of a massive electrical transmission line strung across the landscape, NPCA hopes to leverage public concern specifically for these places and also raise the national conversation about protection for national parks.
“The reason we think this campaign will strike a cord with the public is these are mostly iconic park units," said Ms. Brengel during a phone call Tuesday.
Interior Department officials have the requisite authority and tools at hand to take steps to protect the parks, the advocacy group maintains:
* At Biscayne they could speed the adoption of regulations for the marine reserve zone;
* at Yellowstone the federal agencies involved in wildlife issues could press for quicker resolution of the bison management conundrum;
* at Grand Teton it could possibly get the National Park Foundation to work to raise private funds, much as it did to finance repairs to the Washington Monument, to close the gap in purchasing private inholdings within the park from the state;
* at Colonial the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could be directed to conduct a full-blown environmental impact statement before deciding on the proposed transmission corridor;
* at the Grand Canyon, the Forest Service doesn't need to issue the permits and rights-of-way to allow a project on the scale of the one now proposed;
* at Mojave National Preserve in California the administration could deny the permit being sought for a 2,000-acre solar farm nearby and require that it be relocated;
* for clean air and vistas at Yosemite and other parks, the Obama administration could "close loopholes and strengthen park clean air protections so polluters aren’t let off the hook," and;
* at Glacier National Park the administration should cancel energy exploration leases for the Badger Two-Medicine area outside the park, rather than allow exploration.
In the case of Glacier, the U.S. Forest Service already is on record opposing the leases.
"This administration can do something to get us closer to protecting these national parks. They don’t need a court, they don’t need Congress, they can do it themselves," Ms. Brengel said.
NPCA officials are counting on the social media campaign will convince the adminstration to do just that.
“If action isn’t taken by the Obama Administration now, park visitors could see a mega-mall outside Grand Canyon and energy development in sensitive wildlife habitat right next to Mojave. Fortunately this administration has the opportunity to make decisions now that will protect and enhance these iconic national parks for future generations," said Mar Wenzler, NPCA's vice president of conservation programs, in a release. "Through our Parks in Peril initiative, National Parks Conservation Association will mobilize our more than one million supporters across the country to encourage the administration to seize its unique opportunity to protect our incredible national parks.”
Comments
" For you and Michael (et al)..." puts you off on a little island separate from et al [sic].
Seperate from your group for sure but squarely in the majority. If I weren't, people would be electing Congressmen that put a far greater priority on the Parks.
And if you were representative of the majority, the Presidential mandate over the past 8 years would be grotesquely different.
We're straying a bit afar from the forum. Again, have yourself a perfectly smurfy day.
We have very different definitions of "mandate". But, nice attempt at shifting the discussion from National Park policy to entitlement policy.
"Seperate from your group for sure but squarely in the majority. If I weren't, people would be electing Congressmen that put a far greater priority on the Parks."
Two obvious problems with that statement:
1) EVERY poll taken shows overwhelming support for national parks by Americans of all kinds.
2) Unfortunately, national parks are not included in any of the sound bites flying around at election time. So certainly a majority of voters are not even thinking of parks when they cast a ballot. Most probably don't even understand the relationship between parks and the candidates for whom they are voting. It's terribly true that the average American voter (on both sides of the aisle) is woefully uninformed because they are depending upon undependable media and too often outright dishonest campaign promises for their information.
That's why organizations like NPCA and others are necessary. They are needed to try to educate voters.
Because for the majority it is not a priority item. If it were a priority item, you could bet it would be in every sound bite. The "majority" would rather get their handouts than fund the Parks.
And yes, the polls say people support the parks. That is because the question is "do you support the parks". If the question were, "Are you willing to give up your (fill in the blank entitlement) to fund the parks" the answer would be quite different. That is why those polls need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Oh, and by the way, I agree the NPCA fills a purpose. I agree with many (though not all) of their suggestions. It was Michaels suggestions that were way over the top and ecomically unsound.
It's great to see NPCA undertaking this initiative, great to see the Traveler supporting it, and great to see the comments that have been posted. I'm grateful for all that the commenter Michael Kellett does for national parks, and I'm glad to see commenter Lee Dalton say, "The really scary thing is that this list is nowhere near complete."
Indeed it isn't. Mr. Dalton will remember the conversation (http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2013/03/updated-five-national-monum...) that he and I and others had in these online pages two and a half years ago about the fake, split national monument at Fort Monroe, Virginia. It too needs fixing.
The present conversation shouldn't go past without Fort Monroe being mentioned. As national civic memory of the Civil War continues to evolve--with increasing awareness of black people's role not just in benefiting from emancipation, but in actively pressing for it--more and more people are coming to understand why the Civil War historian Edward L. Ayers once referred to Fort Monroe as the site of "the greatest moment in American history."
Links to that and much else are available at http://cfmnp.org/, the original website of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park (which now uses http://fortmonroecitizens.org/). The prominent illustration there shows, in red, the land that Virginia's leaders, acting on behalf of developers and a handful of insiders in the city of Hampton, extracted from what could have been a real national monument. One link leads to an update article from earlier this year in Civil War News. There's a chance that Virginia's present governor will succeed in his surprising, but eminently welcome, determination to overturn the pro-developer Fort Monroe policies of his predecessors of both parties. Fort Monroe might not be lost after all.
It's important to report that NPCA has publicly supported the governor in this eleventh-hour effort, as a link at http://cfmnp.org/ explains. So has the Civil War Trust. Unfortunately, though, the National Trust for Historic Preservation persists in its resolute sympathy for the developers--a policy that NTHP devised right when the Pentagon, in 2005, announced the Army's impending departure from Fort Monroe.
NTHP was already with the developers before the public was even invited to comment. Fort Monroe was already framed as a development issue before the public was invited in. We're still trying to recover from that NTHP-supported misframing. Time is short, and the official plan--unless Gov. McAuliffe can overcome it--is to build condos on the bayfront, completely destroying the Chesapeake Bay spirit of place of this 400-year-old national treasure. (Again, please see the area marked in red at http://cfmnp.org/ .)
NTHP is a great organization, and it has to pick its battles, I guess. But it doesn't have to falsely present all of Fort Monroe as a national monument when in fact Fort Monroe is bifurcated **for** developers' benefit and **against** maintenance of, and respect for, the spirit of place. Even NTHP president Stephanie Meeks participated in this misrepresentation; see for example http://blog.preservationnation.org/?p=21962#.Vjt7xb-2q0M .
Over a year ago, Gov. McAuliffe declared his intentions to fix the fake, split national monument. Then, at a non-Fort Monroe event last December that many of us attended with supportive signs, he reiterated, off the cuff, those intentions. He gave a passionate, extemporized, two-minute declaration that the pro-development local newspaper, the Daily Press, only excerpted, but refused to run in full.
The other local daily, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, is on the side of the angels on this issue. See the editorial and online comment at http://hamptonroads.com/2015/08/preserve-more-fort-monroe .
I'm going to ask some other Fort Monroe stakeholders to submit comments here too, as in 2013 when Mr. Dalton asked great questions and gave good encouragement.
Back then, Mr. Dalton advised that we not give up. We didn't. But we need national help.
Thanks to the perfidy of NTHP, which for absolutely good reasons has great credibility in the national press, this crazy situation gets zero national coverage. America is losing a national treasure that ranks with the Liberty Bell, Elllis Island and Monticello (and someone please challenge me on that), but doesn't even know it.
Hi EC,
I would like to see your documentation showing that reducing livestock grazing on public lands would be a net loss for American taxpayers, that companies doing fracking and mining on public lands are covering all the costs of mitigating the massive damage they are doing to our lands, waters, and air, and that extractive industry provides more economic benefits to local communities than would be provided by the protection of those lands as new or expanded national parks. Regarding climate change, if you still believe that it is "nonsense," there is no use in belaboring that point.