This is the NY Times editorial on the National Parks in it's entirety
so you can see the full context.

Cheers!
Dave

David Harvey
Conservator,
Los Angeles, California, USA

____________________________
October 21, 2005

Editorial



The National Parks Under Siege



Year after year, Americans express greater satisfaction with the
National Park Service than with almost any other aspect of the federal
government. From the point of view of most visitors, there is no
incentive to revise the basic management policy that guides park
superintendents, a policy that was last revised in 2001 and is usually
re-examined only every 10 or 15 years. Longtime park service employees
feel much the same way. Yet in the past two months we have seen two
proposed revisions. The first, written by Paul Hoffman, a deputy
assistant secretary in the Interior Department, was a genuinely
scandalous rewriting that would have destroyed the national park
system.


On Tuesday, the Interior Department released a new draft. The question
isn't whether this revision is better than Mr. Hoffman's drastic
rewrite. Almost anything would be better than his version, a glaring
example of the zeal to dilute conservation with commercialism among
political appointees in the Interior Department. But the new draft
would still undermine the national parks.


This entire exercise is unnecessary, driven by politics and ideology.
The only reason for revisiting and revising the 2001 management policy
was Mr. Hoffman's belief, expressed during a press conference earlier
this week, that the 2001 policy is "anti-enjoyment." This will surely
come as news to the 96 percent of park visitors who year after year
express approval of their experiences. The kind of enjoyment Mr.
Hoffman has in mind - as clearly evidenced by his draft and by remarks
from Interior Secretary Gale Norton - is opening up the parks to
off-road vehicles, including snowmobiles. The ongoing effort to revise
the 2001 policy betrays a powerful sense, shared by many top interior
officials, that the national parks are resources not to be protected
but to be exploited.


This new policy document doesn't go as far as the earlier version. But
it would eliminate the requirement that only motorized equipment with
the least impact should be used in national parks. It would lower
air-quality standards and strip away language about preserving the
parks' natural soundscape - language that currently makes it hard, for
instance, to justify allowing snowmobiles into Yellowstone. It would
also refer park superintendents to other management documents that
have been revised to weaken fundamental standards and protections for
the parks.


Mr. Hoffman and National Park Service officials have tried to argue
that this new policy revision offers greater clarity. What it really
offers is greater flexibility to interpret the rules the way they want
to. The thrust of these changes is to diminish the historical, and
legally upheld, premise that preservation is the central mission of
the park system.


Here, for instance, is what this proposed policy revision would remove
from the very heart of the park system's mission statement: "Congress,
recognizing that the enjoyment by future generations of the national
parks can be ensured only if the superb quality of park resources and
values is left unimpaired, has provided that when there is a conflict
between conserving resources and values and providing for enjoyment of
them, conservation is to be predominant."


These unambiguous words contain the legal and legislative history that
has protected the parks over the years from exactly the kind of change
Mr. Hoffman has in mind, allowing all the rest of us to enjoy the
national parks in ways that are more respectful of the future and of
the parks themselves.


One of the most troubling aspects of this revised policy is how it was
produced. Instead of being shaped by park service professionals
thinking in a timely way about how to do their jobs better, this is a
defensive document that was rushed forward to head off the more
sweeping damage that Mr. Hoffman's first draft threatened to do. It is
a tribute to the National Park Service veterans who worked on it that
they were able to mitigate so much of the harm, even though they, too,
were working directly under Mr. Hoffman's eye. They risked their jobs
to protect the parks from political appointees in the Interior
Department. This is a measure of how distorted the department's
policies have become.


There is more potential damage on the way. At least two deeply
worrying new directives have been handed down. One allows the National
Park Service to solicit contributions from individuals and
corporations instead of merely accepting them when they're offered.
This is another way to further the privatization of the national parks
and edge toward their commercialization. Privatizing the government's
core responsibilities - like the national parks - is unacceptable, and
so is the prospect of any greater commercial presence in the parks.


More alarming still is a directive released last week that would
require park personnel who hope to advance above the middle-manager
level to go through what is essentially a political screening. What we
are witnessing, in essence, is an effort to politicize the National
Park Service - to steer it away from its long-term mission of
preserving much-loved national treasures and make it echo the same
political mind-set that turned Mr. Hoffman, a former Congressional
aide to Dick Cheney and a former head of the Cody, Wyo., chamber of
commerce, into an architect of national park policy.




Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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