There really has been much public whining and gnashing of teeth by
the GOP because the National Parks are closed as a result of the GOP
shutdown. The GOP would have Americans believe that they value our
National Parks and are outraged - outraged! - that the parks are closed.
Oh really?
A powerful Republican chairman in the House of
Representatives just shared with his constituents his desire to begin
selling our national parks. Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida
was caught on video in a local town meeting. Here is what he said:"I
got attacked in a previous town meeting for not supporting another
national park in this country, a 200-mile trailway. And I told the man
that we don't need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks."
continued....
...
Unfortunately, Rep. Stearns isn't the only prominent politician who
thinks of the conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt as just so much
surplus property. Some of the current candidates for leader of the free
world have also mused about putting America's national heritage on the
chopping block, and the House of Representatives has actually
passed or considered favorably a series of radical bills in this
Congress that amount to an all-out war on the concept of holding public
lands in trust for future generations.
There is a video of Rep. Stearns at
Think Progress. And more from that link:
This is not the first time Republican members of Congress
have advocated selling off Americans’ public lands without clarifying
how taxpayers would get a fair return for them. Last fall, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) proposed selling off 3.3 million acres of the public lands that belong to all of us. And former Rep. Richard Pombo proposed selling national parks to mining companies in 2005.
Republican presidential candidates have also recently been confused
about the tangible and intangible values of our national parks and
public lands. Mitt Romney told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he
doesn’t know “what the purpose is” of public lands, Rick Santorum told
Idahoans that public lands should go “back to the hands” of the private
sector, and Ron Paul advocated for public lands to be turned over to the states.
See also this excellent article from
Salon:
Our national parks have been underfunded for years,
not days, and the damage this has caused will last far longer than the
shutdown. Inadequate resources have debilitated our parks for decades.
In 1998, for example, a Government Accounting Office study concluded
that the dwindling funds were not a short-term problem. “Because of
advanced, continuing deterioration, some of these assets may be lost
permanently,” it said. Ten years later, USA Today ran a story with the
headline, “National program for ruins in ruins,” about the inadequately
funded Vanishing Treasures program, tasked with protecting the country’s
archaeological sites. The aughts have not been kinder. According to
the Center for American Progress, since 2010, Congress has cut
the parks budget by 13%, leading to the seasonal closure of national
parks including the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon.
Most recently, the National Parks Group accused the
Appropriations Committee-approved budget, which among other travesties
completely removed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, of
having its “roots in fantasy rather than reality” and putting “national
parks, historic places and cultural treasures… at ever-increasing risk.”
As Nicholas Kristof wrote in August, “[O]ld bridges have
collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not been rebuilt, and
signs are missing.” According to the National Forest Service, Kristof
reported, only an estimated one-quarter of the country’s 158,000 miles
of trails meet internal standards. The Sierra Club told Salon
that the national parks need $11.5 billion worth of maintenance. Half of
this is reportedly needed for roads and bridges, whose disrepair poses
serious public safety threats. The amount allocated in the 2012 budget?
$2.2 billion.
For Congress, though, it’s not enough just to defund our
parks so they slowly fall into total, unusable ruin. In this country,
it’s also important that we “Drill, baby, drill,” not to mention, “Log,
baby, log” and “Mine, baby, mine.” All of these efforts create
serious threats to our parks. In September 2012, the National Park
Service identified forty-two park units where non-federal oil and gas
drilling is or could be happening in the future. At the time, twelve
had active oil and gas operations. Yet for plenty of politicians, this
is still not enough. In the 2011 primaries, Michele Bachmann
proposed drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades, one of the
country’s most endangered ecosystems. Joe Miller, the Tea Party
candidate for Senate in Alaska, has run on a platform that includes
turning the pristine Denali National Park and Preserve, the home to
Mount McKinley, the U.S.’s highest peak, into an oil well. And GOP
thought leader Grover Norquist says to hell with all of it, let’s just
turn them over to the states, or better yet, sell them to the private
sector.
The GOP would love nothing better than to sell off (give away) our
National Parks to their cronies and campaign contributors for drilling,
condos, clear cutting, strip mining, whatever.
As usual, Republican mendacity knows no bounds. No surprise there.
#NationalParksHypocrisy
Please share the Salon article by tweeting!
Ted Cruz, Theodore Roosevelt National Park (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com/AP/Valerie J. Naylor)
Call
me crazy, but I think the National Parks are having their Best Week
Ever. Thanks to the government shutdown, they’re getting more attention
in a few days than they normally get all year. Even more than when
Yosemite was burning last month, when
it was filled with hantavirus-carrying mice last year, or when, in 1993, the constant stream of visitors were, as one official put it, “
loving the park to death.”
Suddenly,
reopening National Parks like Yosemite has become one of the country’s
top priorities. The Republicans are especially concerned, with Arizona
State Representative Brenda Barton using the closure to
call Obama “De Fuhrer” on Facebook,
and to try to strip park rangers of their authority to do their jobs —
which right now, sadly, include keeping the parks closed. Just to show
how committed they are to the country’s parks, the Republicans are even
including
the National Park Service in their piecemeal funding plan, making opening the parks more important than providing Americans with affordable health insurance.
Let’s
be honest here for a second, though, guys. Reopening the parks is not
going to solve their problems. Sure, it will allow the return of the
more than 282 million people that visit them, not to mention the
$76 million per day
that the local communities earn from those visitors, but the obstacles
faced by the parks — which include some actual, physical, roadblocks —
run much higher than a few days of closure.
Our national parks
have been underfunded for years, not days, and the damage this has
caused will last far longer than the shutdown. Inadequate resources have
debilitated our parks for decades. In 1998, for example, a Government
Accounting Office study concluded that the dwindling funds were not a
short-term problem. “
Because of advanced, continuing deterioration, some of these assets may be lost permanently,” it said. Ten years later, USA Today ran a story with the headline, “
National program for ruins in ruins,”
about the inadequately funded Vanishing Treasures program, tasked with
protecting the country’s archaeological sites. The aughts have not been
kinder. According to the Center for American Progress, since 2010,
Congress has cut the parks budget by 13%, leading to the seasonal
closure of national parks including the Great Smoky Mountains and the
Grand Canyon.
Most recently, the
National Parks Group accused the Appropriations Committee-approved budget, which among other travesties completely removed
funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund,
of having its “roots in fantasy rather than reality” and putting
“national parks, historic places and cultural treasures… at
ever-increasing risk.” As
Nicholas Kristof wrote in August,
“[O]ld bridges have collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not
been rebuilt, and signs are missing.” According to the National Forest
Service, Kristof reported, only an estimated one-quarter of the
country’s 158,000 miles of trails meet internal standards. The Sierra
Club told Salon that the national parks need $11.5 billion worth of
maintenance. Half of this is reportedly needed for roads and bridges,
whose disrepair poses serious public safety threats. The amount
allocated in the 2012 budget? $2.2 billion.
For Congress, though,
it’s not enough just to defund our parks so they slowly fall into total,
unusable ruin. In this country, it’s also important that we “Drill,
baby, drill,” not to mention, “Log, baby, log” and “Mine, baby, mine.”
All
of these efforts create
serious threats to
our parks. In September 2012,
the National Park Service identified forty-two park units
where non-federal oil and gas drilling is or could be happening in the
future. At the time, twelve had active oil and gas operations. Yet for
plenty of politicians, this is still not enough. In the 2011
primaries,
Michele Bachmann proposed drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades,
one of the country’s most endangered ecosystems. Joe Miller, the Tea
Party candidate for Senate in Alaska, has run on a platform that
includes turning the pristine Denali National Park and Preserve, the home to Mount McKinley, the U.S.’s highest peak, into an oil well. And GOP thought leader Grover Norquist
says to hell with all of it, let’s just turn them over to the states, or better yet, sell them to the private sector.
If
there’s any rallying call that gets the conservative base more excited
than “Down with Obamacare” it’s “Up with the Keystone Pipeline.” Though
it’s not getting the same kind of coverage as the healthcare bill,
that
1,700-mile pipeline is also a pawn in this shutdown game. Its
wide swath of supporters – which includes Republican leaders
John Boehner,
Ted Cruz,
Michele Bachmann, and
Steve King – must not have seen the letter from the
U.S. Department of the Interior that listed
potential negative environmental impacts on seven national parks, five
trails, two rivers, a wildlife refuge, and a national historic landmark.
And we can’t forget about our old friend climate change, which is having its own fun with the parks. The
National Parks Conservation Association lists disappearing
glaciers and Joshua trees, thriving insect pests, wildfires, flash
floods, and rising sea levels as just some of the negative impacts parks
are enduring as a result of climate change. A
2011 Reuters article reported on impacts in Alaskan parks
specifically, ranging from “thawing permafrost triggering mudslides
onto a key road” to “glaciers receding from convenient viewing areas,
while their rapid summer melt poses new flood risks.” But shutdown
leaders like
Boehner,
Cruz,
Bachmann and
King
don’t waste their time worrying about pesky problems like melting
glaciers, and certainly not the impact that they can have on our
national parks. They’re too busy blaming Democrats for shutting down the
government.
There’s a reason our parks are falling apart: Nobody
cares. The number of people visiting parks has dropped precipitously.
According to
a 2011 Kristof column,
the National Park Service says there were “35 percent more backcountry
campers in the national parks in 1979 than in 2010.” If Americans
aren’t taking the time to explore our national parks, why should
Congress spend the time (and money) to keep them in good condition?
So
if we want to support our parks, we need to do more than demand they
reopen. First, we need to visit them — and not just for them, but for
us.
Research has shown that spending time outdoors is
50 percent more effective than indoor exercise when it comes to
improving mental health.. Then we need to fight for their conservation,
adequate funding, and the recognition that they belong to all of us –
whether the government is running or not.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “There is nothing so American as our national parks… The parks stand as the outward symbol of the great human principle.”
The
tragedy is not that the shutdown has closed our national parks. The
tragedy, rather, is that our national parks have been slowly shutting
down for a long, long time and nobody is paying attention.
