When it comes to national parks, politics are not always in the public's best interests are not always the same/NPS

Somewhere along the handful of decades that I've spent visiting national parks, I came upon this crazy, obviously misguided, notion that the National Park Service worked to protect these incredible places for the American people. At the same time, it also was my assumption that the parks were to be held in trust by Congress for society. 

It all made sense under the Public Trust Doctrine, a nearly 1,500-year-old concept built around the premise that there are resources -- initially, the doctrine was built around water, but it has evolved in thinking over the centuries to apply to other natural resources -- that should be held in trust for the public good. As Mark Dowie, the former publisher and editor of Mother Jones put it in an essay for Orion Magazine, 

It’s a critical time for the concept of the public trust, because the commons is being enclosed in ways that were never before possible. These enclosures are crossing new boundaries, invading areas so intangible that they are rarely even recognized as part of the commons — from gene pools to the farthest reaches of outer space. The expansion of intellectual property rights into the rainforest, the patenting of life forms, the placement of weapons in space, the giveaway of broadcast spectra, the commodification of news and information, the commercial invasion of childhood, and the temptation to privatize almost anything are just a few of the many new threats to the commons.

But I was, obviously, naive. For while the National Park Service Organic Act directs the National Park Service to be a guardian of the parks and the flora and fauna within them, politics these days don't always make that easy. Proof of that can be seen in Alaska, where the agency has done a complete reversal in trying to protect wolves, bears, coyotes and other predators from rampant hunting and trapping.

Politics also were at play in the removal of Dan Wenk as Yellowstone National Park's superintendent, the retreat on a marine reserve at Biscayne National Park, efforts to drive a sweetheart deal for the Caneel Bay Resort through Congress, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's order to have national parks defer to states on wildlife and fisheries issues, and maybe in the decision by Yellowstone's new superintendent that he won't consider visitor caps despite impacts to both resources and visitor enjoyment.

Then, too, there is the legal battle over whether President Trump has the authority to break up and shrink the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and nearby Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. The U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management are moving ahead with crafting management plans for these places, even as the question of the president's authority to shrink the monuments remains unanswered. What can we expect from those plans? Well, if the Park Service's reversed position on hunting predators in Alaska is a guide, the greatly reduced monuments will be managed more for multiple use than preservation. Already there have been complaints that the draft plan for Bears Ears doesn't offer enough protection for cultural resources.

In the Park Service case in Alaska, the agency's position on liberalized hunting regulations in national preserves is a wholesale reversal from where it stood in 2015 when it pushed back against the state's requests to allow for the killing of more wolves and bears and refused to back down. As a Park Service spokesman recently told me when asked about the reversal, "the Department of Interior has taken a new direction."

Indeed it has, and it's not in the direction of preservation. In Florida, a plan that under the Obama adminstration was so close to designating a protected, 10,502-acre marine reserve centered around the only tropical coral reef system in the continental United States, has stalled, if not died completely.

“Establishing the preserve is not a priority of this administration," Caroline McLaughlin, associate director of the Sun Coast Region for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me.

Managing Yellowstone's bison herd for what the park's landscape can carry apparently is not a priority, either, if you sift the tea leaves that sent Wenk, who envisioned a herd larger than the one wanted by Secretary Zinke, a Montanan who might one day come back home to run for governor, into retirement.

Wenk also was grappling with the park's carrying capacity, worried about the impacts the increasing hordes of visitors were inflicting on the world's first national park.

“During the busiest times of the year, visitation levels in the park have led to long lines, traffic congestion, diminishing visitor experiences, and impacts on park resources,” he said in the first weeks of 2017. “It’s our job to recognize the trend, how it’s affecting this magnificent park, understand our visitors, and what we may need to do to protect Yellowstone for future generations. All options are on the table.”

In March of that year Ryan Atwell, a social scientist Wenk hired to monitor increasing visitation at the iconic park and to help develop methods for dealing with those crowds, said, "Our current systems are already beginning to break down" because of the crowds.

Many visitors are hoping for a solution. Some have given up waiting.

"This family doesn't even bother going any longer. The national parks are a trampled mess that seem to get worse every year," Michael Heliobastin wrote on Traveler's Facebook page. He made that comment in 2015, after the National Park Service predicted that 2015 visitation was expected to go higher than the record 293 million visitors counted in 2014. 

Of course, last year the tally jumped to 331 million across the entire system, and just recently Yellowstone reported that September visitation this year climbed 13 percent over September 2017. That prompted park staff to warn visitors that they should expect delays and limited parking in some areas.

Cam Sholly, who replaced Wenk after serving as Midwest Region director for the Park Service, doesn't consider a cap on visitation as an option for dealing with overcrowding and its impacts.

"Any thoughts on a visitation cap in Yellowstone is not occurring," Sholly told Montana Gov. Steve Bullock when they met last week. "That would not be something that I would entertain."

Is that really something Sholly would not like to consider, or is that something Secretary Zinke told him not to consider? And if it was the latter, what did the secretary tell Sholly about bison numbers in the park?

No doubt, these are tough days to work in the National Park Service, particularly under an administration that is all in on energy development, on cutting the size of federal agencies, of giving states more leverage over how national park resources are managed, over believing Park Service employees can clean campground restrooms but not manage them.

As one ranger put it to me, "the American people need to be the Park Service that we can’t be right now."

As Zach Ragbourn, who manages NPCA's online advocacy program put it, "In the current political climate, park advocates can show America that there are some issues that bring us all together. The more we speak out and make noise on behalf of the things that we all love, the more our friends and neighbors will see that America’s national parks are too precious to fall victim to partisanship and cynicism."