At the end of the last century the first wave of the American conservation movement called on the government to set aside vast areas of wilderness, particularly in the West. John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt foresaw the onslaught of urban settlers in the region and moved swiftly to protect lands that remain, even to this day, splendid and unique.
The early conservationists set these lands aside as national parks--a simple idea that is itself as uniquely American as jazz and baseball. These parks were, and are, America's secular cathedrals. Today they present more a continuing challenge than a mere reflection of our rich birthright.
While many of the early conservationists believed they had protected the parks forever, they had in fact taken only the first steps. The national parks are beset by threats from without.
Everglades National Park is dying. The steady sheet flows of water heading south from Lake Okeechobee are now diverted into canals for agricultural and urban use, while much of the water that does reach the Everglades is tainted with phosphorous fertilizer.
A brief flight over Olympic National Park reveals lines as straight as those on a map. The lines reflect clear-cuts abutting the park's borders. Such devastation leads to blowdowns in ancient forest stands and topsoil runoffs that clog essential spawning beds for trout and salmon.
Yosemite National Park is the center of an ecosystem pressed by urban sprawl; 30 million Californians live within a day's drive of the natural world's most spectacular seven square miles--Yosemite Valley. Isolated vacation homes in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada have been replaced by suburbs for Central Valley communities. In another Sierra park--Sequoia--brochures warn hikers to avoid strenuous exercise throughout the summer months because of hazardous air pollution.
To meet these challenges from without, a new wave of conservation must be let loose--one that recognizes that we cannot protect lands merely by setting them aside. The new movement to protect our parks must focus on entire ecosystems.
There is another threat from beyond park boundaries: the alarming lack of financial support. Maintenance continually deferred has created a construction and repair time bomb. Yet small amounts of security can be achieved through new entrepreneurial efforts, such as allowing some of the entrance fees to stay in the parks rather than pass on to the federal treasury. Additional support can be gained through further reform of our concessions policies.
Our national parks are important. They are important not just because they provide good, inexpensive vacation sites for millions of Americans, though that fact alone makes them worthy of protection. Our national parks are important because they are a gateway to the conservation ethic. In these, our most precious sites, we can engage our people in a discussion of natural conditions, and of our place in relation to them. The prospect for a heightened environmental ethic in the United States depends, in large measure, on how we use our national parks. So read on. And then, go visit.
Legacy at Risk
By John G. Mitchell, Senior Assistant Editor
Early one morning in June last year, I went to the top of Acadia National Park, on the rocky coast of Maine, to watch the rising sun put a blush on the face of America. The top of Acadia is held aloft by a mountain called Cadillac. At 1,530 feet, it is said to be the highest promontory on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Summertime, dawn's early light strikes Maine first before moving on to touch any other part of the coast or the country. It is a good place for beginnings, this Acadia. It is where, 40 summers ago, I paid my first visit to a popular showcase unit of the National Park System and thereby began a long and rewarding association with an institution I have come to admire, for all its infirmities, more than any other. So it seemed only right that I should return to these wind-scoured ledges before moving on in a season of journeys to measure the state of our national parks.
The time for assessment seemed right as well, for there had been a turnover in Washington, D.C., a changing of the guard. It was thought that perhaps the change might roll back a certain darkness that had lingered too long over the park system, dimming the morale of its dedicated employees and threatening to degrade the natural and cultural values of its physical resources. And there was this document called the Vail Agenda.
The agenda had come out of a government-sponsored symposium at Vail, Colorado, in October 1991, on the 75th anniversary of the National Park Service. In an unprecedented display of bureaucratic introspection, the Vail report warned against signs of "eroding" professionalism and "politicized" decision-making. It described an agency lacking the capability to pursue and defend its primary mission of resource protection. It lamented the emerging role of the ranger--not in that essential slot as interpreter of the great American story that every park is obliged to tell but as "traffic cop" to an overwhelming stream of "windshield" tourists.
And inevitably, since it was June and vacationing Americans were on the road again, there were press reports that the parks were in peril, pinched between too many visitors and too few dollars to fix what had to be fixed.
Yet as I stood atop Cadillac Mountain last time up, awaiting the dawn, the perils of this or any other park were far from my mind. I was thinking instead of what I had seen of Acadia the day before--the cool, fir-scented Maine woods; the motorless carriage roads and mountain trails, tide pools and beaver ponds, porphyritic headlands bursting the ocean into galaxies of golden spray. I was thinking that the old place still looked pretty good after all these years; after almost double all these years if one takes it back before my time to the park's beginning.
That was in 1916, the year President Woodrow Wilson established the National Park Service, and for a while Acadia would be known as Sieur de Monts National Monument. Then, there were 20 other national monuments, 14 national parks, and one reserve. But that was hardly enough to satisfy America. By the time I started checking them off, the Park Service had some 200 units in its portfolio. And today, spread across 80 million acres of the federal domain, there are 367 in categories undreamed of hardly a generation ago: 51 national parks, 102 national monuments and memorials, 108 national historic sites and historical parks, 24 national battlefields and military parks, 18 national recreation areas, 14 national seashores and lakeshores, plus a full roster of national rivers, parkways, trails, and preserves. The numbers keep growing.
Daybreak, Cadillac Mountain. The sun rises out of the Atlantic into a sky filled with lavender clouds. How many other sunups or sundowns have measured my time in the national parks? And how many parks? A hundred, maybe more. The windshield tourist in me has lost count, but the notebook reporter can surely scroll out a few unforgettable ones:
Yosemite in the amber light of an October afternoon, aspen leaves like spilt butter against the glistening rock. The Everglades at dusk, a flicker of lightning at the far edge of the Shark River Slough.
Moose in a bend of the Yellowstone River. Wood storks over the Big Cypress.
Moonstruck at Pictured Rocks, star-spangled in the Kobuk Valley. The cliff house at Canyon de Chelly, the cannon at Gettysburg, the covered wagons at Scotts Bluff. The icy ramparts of Denali presiding over six million acres of Alaska wilderness. The granite facade of No. 26 Wall Street, presiding over the half acre of New York City where the Bill of Rights was born.
To be sure, there was no way I could now return to these parklands expecting to experience each one as I had the first time around. Over the years so many external threats and internal problems throughout the system have grown progressively worse--abrading the quality of air and water, usurping the pursuit of solitude, gridlocking the gateways with traffic and commercial glitz.
Still, to take the proper pulse of the parks, I would have to go back to a few of those places I'd been before, whatever the changes, and to some of the places I'd not yet seen. From Acadia I'd follow the sun west-by-southwest across America to the Golden Gate. And along the way, or by the end of it, I'd hope to discover a park system not merely holding up to the years Acadia style but one that might soon be made strong enough to endure the unimaginable tests of the century to come.
THE GREAT OUTSIDE
Thanks to interstate highways and the growth of the sunny South, a huge number of Americans live within a day's drive of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, athwart the Appalachian backbone of North Carolina and Tennessee; and enough of them turn out annually to keep the place at the top of the list of the nation's most visited national parks (not counting parkways and urban recreation areas). More than nine million people were on top of Old Smoky in 1993. I was one of them.
What draws visitors here in such numbers isn't just motorcar convenience or the anticipated skytop view. What pulls the crowd--what provided the rationale for creating a national park here in the first place--is Great Smoky's magnificent half-million-acre forest, the most diverse in all North America and likely the nation's last large reservoir of old-growth broadleaf stands. No fewer than five overlapping but distinct forest habitats clothe the mountain coves and slopes as they rise from barely 900 feet to more than 6,500, from pine and oak to spruce and fir. To experience a similar range of life zones closer to sea level, you'd have to back off these mountains and drive all the way from southern Georgia to northern Maine. In Great Smoky, in appropriate site or season, are all the autumnal forest colors of deciduous New England, the feathery evergreen winterscape of the North Woods, the showiest spring displays of wild rhododendron and laurel, 2,000 varieties of mushrooms, 1,600 kinds of flowering plants, more than 500 species of lichen and moss.
But there was something else that drew me here, a rumor that this forest was in danger of dying--not from an excess of visitors trampling the terrain inside the park but from an excess of plagues drifting into the treetops from the Great Outside.
At park headquarters, a few miles into the forest above Gatlinburg, Tennessee, I called on then Superintendent Randall Pope and put to him the question I had been asking, and would continue to ask, of his peers across the country. What are your toughest problems? Where are the gravest threats?
"Air quality," said Pope. "That's number one. And number two's the invasive pest."
I'd already had a preview of the pest problem, driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway that links Great Smoky with Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Nearing the parkway's North Carolina terminus, but still high on the ridge, one is suddenly confronted with the spectacle of an entire mountaintop sheathed in a forest of sun-bleached snags, a deadening of Fraser firs, defoliated, white skeletons stabbing the sky.
The Fraser fir occurs only in the southern Appalachians. According to Superintendent Pope, two stands of mature firs remain in the park, each under attack by the same pest that has laid waste the firs of the Blue Ridge--the balsam woolly adelgid, an exotic insect that probably invaded the U.S. years ago, riding piggyback on imported European conifers. The balsam woolly adelgid should not be confused with the hemlock woolly adelgid, an Asian invader that feeds on the eastern hemlock. The hemlock woolly has already decimated virgin stands in Shenandoah Park and is now traveling south, windborne, to place Great Smoky's old-growth hemlocks at risk.
The park's pest problems don't begin and end with adelgids but march right on through the alphabet. Pope presented me with a list: anthracnose, a fungus of unknown origin, attacking the flowering dogwood; stem canker, another alien, fatal to butternuts; the European sawfly, defoliator of mountain ash; and coming soon (there have been infestations all around the park), the dreaded gypsy moth, another European, with a voracious appetite for oak.
Periodic infestations of one kind or another are, of course, part of the way nature works in checks and balances. But the variety and volume of these Appalachian pests have resource managers concerned that human interference--as in the introduction of alien plants--may be tipping whatever balance mother nature intended. Some of the pests are not easily or affordably battled or may require control measures that, if used, would be harmful to other life-forms in a particular ecosystem. And managers such as Pope are further frustrated by the fact that arboreal species might be less vulnerable to insect and fungus infestations if they weren't already so weakened by that other parkland intruder, dirty air.
Molly Ross, a special assistant in the U.S. Department of the Interior, was serving as assistant chief of the Park Service's air quality division when I spoke with her earlier at Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. Ross referred me to a number of sources and reports clearly indicating that the adverse impact of dirty air was affecting the visitor's experience as well as the integrity of natural resources throughout the entire park system. But what rang in my ears was Ross's observation that the system's highest levels of two top pollutants--sulfur and nitrogen--were being regularly recorded at monitoring stations in Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks.
Sulfur dioxide, a contributor to acid rain, has long been implicated in massive diebacks of red spruce at the higher elevations of the southern Appalachians. The heaviest emissions of sulfur dioxide can usually be traced to fossil fuel power plants, of which there are more than a score, upwind, in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. Nitrogen oxide is a product of combustion from all kinds of sources, particularly power plants and motor vehicles. It is also an ingredient of ground-level ozone, not to be confused with that beneficial layer of ultraviolet-screening ozone in the stratosphere. Ross told me that nearly a hundred species of plants and trees at Great Smoky Park have begun showing signs of foliar injury--leaf damage and, in some cases, growth suppression--from ozone. The reports she referred me to tell of similar ozone impact at almost all the parks near urban areas, in the mountain parks of California, including Yosemite, and even at the seemingly resilient Acadia in Maine, which regularly posts warnings that ozone levels are nearing or exceeding safe health standards.
And at Great Smoky dirty air adds insult to injury and taints the name itself. The Cherokee used to call these uplands the Place of Blue Smoke. The "smoke" was actually a haze of natural hydrocarbons and water vapors interacting with sunlight above the humid forest. But now you throw pollutants into the bargain, and the Place of Blue Smoke becomes Smog Alley. "We're losing our views," said Molly Ross. "Visibility is down by as much as 60 percent in the summer. We lose the color, the detail, the sight of the ridgelines, one after another. Going, going, gone."
THE NEIGHBORS
Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, in Virginia, commemorates four major engagements of the Civil War, including the action at Chancellorsville and the Battle of the Wilderness. Since it is only a few hundred cannon shots down the pike from Washington, I poked by there one morning to talk with then Superintendent Maria Burks about the problems that might be plaguing her stewardship of these hallowed grounds. Burks explained that while the park contains fewer than 8,500 acres, its discrete battlefields and sites trace 120 miles of boundary in a region rapidly given over to suburban development.
"And what that means," said Burks, "is that we now have hundreds and hundreds of neighbors."
Unfortunately, not all the neighbors understand that the purpose of "Fred-Spots" park is to preserve the landscape, structures, and relics of a pivotal chapter of the American story, rather than render recreational open space. Off Fredericksburg's Lee Drive, not far from where the eponymous Robert E. pushed Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside back across the Rappahannock River in 1862, a cluster of high-density town houses has become a thorn in Fred-Spots' side. The project, smack-dab against the park boundary, was built primarily for young families with children but designed with no outdoor spaces in which the children might play.
"Families come and stay a couple of years and then move on," Burks said. "You can't build a constituency with that kind of turnover, and you've got all these children with no place to play. Well, the park becomes their playground. It's heartbreaking. We have earthworks out there that are destroyed, holes in the ground. There are tree houses. Dirt bikes. It was bad planning. We've lost that part of the resource."
Residential and commercial developments are butting up against park resources at several other national battlefields in Virginia and down along the Blue Ridge Parkway toward Great Smoky. "The tip of that berg is just now coming out of the ground," said one parkway official. He was telling me about one huge ridgetop subdivision planned for development so close to the parkway "you'll be able to look through their kitchen windows and see what they're having for dinner."
Peripheral pressures on the parks, however, are not limited to suburban town houses and pseudo-wilderness ranchettes. As I would soon discover, the borders of our national parks can also be threatened by highway construction (as at Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico), proposed dams (on Utah's Virgin River, upstream from Zion National Park), and gravel mining (at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan), among other troublesome enterprises. Not the least troubling of which is the gateway community--the town or village that rises at the gate of a national park to provide the visitor with amusements as well as essential services and to stake its claim in that increasingly lucrative goldfield called industrial tourism.
The mother of all gateways is Gatlinburg, Tennessee. While I had heard much about it over the years, usually under a wrinkling of the raconteur's nose, I was not quite prepared for the scene that awaited me as I drove north out of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, rounded a bend in the road under an over-arching canopy of green, and suddenly squirted out of the forest down the main street of an ersatz Alpine hamlet crowded with more than a hundred motels, nearly 800 rentable chalets, condos, and cabins, 75 restaurants, 400 gift and specialty shops, one space needle, and an aerial tramway said to be the largest in the United States.
To be sure, Smoky needs some kind of gateway community on its Tennessee edge. Unlike many of the other big parks, bristling with concessioned resorts, Smoky contains within its boundaries no overnight accommodations beyond the standard complement of campgrounds, some remote backcountry shelters, and one hike-in lodge hours from the nearest pavement. But does the park need this much gateway, especially when Pigeon Forge is just a few miles up the road? Pigeon Forge with its bungee jump, speedway, helicopter rides, factory-outlet malls, and Dollywood (as in Dolly Parton)--the "entertainment capital of the Smokies" and a destination in its own right. Last year Dollywood's turnstiles admitted more than two million paying customers.
With Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge as role models, gateway communities throughout the park system seem to be moving beyond the basic services to egregious entertainments. At West Yellowstone, for example, an entrepreneur has opened an ursine theme park, featuring grizzly bears imported from out of state. And near Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia, the Disney people last year began pushing an ambitious plan to build the kind of theme park that supposedly would allow visitors to experience American history as if they were there when it really happened. (More than one critic immediately wondered if anyone in his right mind would want to experience what happened to 28,000 Americans, in gray and in blue, more than 130 years ago at Manassas.)
Apart from the smoke and mirrors of entertainment, gateways providing bed and board outside the parks can reduce pressures for a clutter of services inside. As a partial solution to weekend gridlock, for example, the general management plan for Yosemite Valley places great emphasis on developing more accommodations in adjacent communities, with leave-the-driving-to-us shuttle service into the park. But holding the line at bed, board, and buses may be too much to expect in most emerging gateway situations. In which case the question becomes, in the words of one senior Park Service official, "How much more tarnish can the system withstand?"
THE VISITORS
For an individual whose landscape druthers tend to run toward blue-watered boreal places, I am somewhat at a loss to explain a shameless passion for slickrock mesas and sun-puckered prickly pear. An acquired taste, no doubt; a hangover from earlier days and nights of canyon hopping in the parks and wildlands of southeast Utah. And that passion is what brings me now back to Arches National Park. That and a prickly question that continues to confound and divide the public, if not some elements within the Park Service as well. The question: In a crunch, which squeaky wheel gets the grease--the visitor or the resource?
Arches is a salubrious place to explore any question, or none at all. Located outside Moab, in the red rocks of the Colorado Plateau, the park is a geologic crown jewel, a storybook of erosional history, a striking display of sandstone spires and fins and pinnacles, and likely the grandest repository of natural arches in the world. By western standards it is not a large park (some 73,000 acres), but it is an accessible one, with a visitor center right off a major highway and a fine road bearing the visitor lickety-split to such eye-filling landmarks as the Three Gossips, the Parade of Elephants, and the Fiery Furnace. And if one is willing to press on without benefit of pavement, there is Delicate Arch, the park's signature feature, perched like a giant, salmon red wedding ring at the brink of a sandstone bowl. Through the ring, one can see the La Sal Mountains, snowcapped much of the year, pasted against a bluebonnet sky.
Given its user-friendly accessibility, Arches is precisely the sort of unit that the Park Service might select as a proving ground if it wanted to develop a process for protecting a park's resources from visitor impact without unduly restricting the visitor's opportunity to enjoy them. Or, how to grease two squeaky wheels at the same time.
Those wheels had been bumping down an uneven road almost since America's--and the world's--first national park was anointed at Yellowstone in 1872. Being remote, like Yellowstone, the earliest parks didn't attract any visitors to speak of. The U.S. Army was effectively in charge, and the charge was protection. When the National Park Service took over in 1916, Congress ordered it by law to "promote and regulate the use" of the parks in conformity with their fundamental purpose, that purpose being: "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
But before long the idea of promoting use and providing enjoyment began to outrun that other idea of regulating use so as to leave the resource unimpaired for future generations. The immediate challenge was to build a constituency for expansion of the system, and the only way to do that was to pipe the people into the parks. From time to time over the years the preservation ethic might briefly gain some ascendancy (as it did during World War II, when lean times and gasoline rationing restricted travel), only to be overwhelmed by pressures to accommodate an ever increasing number of visitors and motor vehicles (as in the period of postwar park construction).
In 1954, when I first added my heft to the numbers, the National Park System counted 50 million visitors. Forty years later the count is at 270 million, and while there are many more parks now that receive these visitors, use is not spread uniformly throughout the system. Some of the most popular parks, such as Grand Canyon, are experiencing visitor increases ranging as high as 25 percent in a single year. At the millennium, park planners are predicting, the total system-wide count could reach 340 million; by the year 2010, a half billion. The concept of instituting a peak-season reservation system for the big-draw parks--not just for admission to campgrounds but to the parks themselves--has been bruited about the Park Service for years, invariably without effect. Senior officials have told me privately that while the agency possesses the technical ability to set some necessary limits, it has repeatedly balked at imposing them for fear of offending congressional guardians of public convenience.
Short of putting the biggest parks on a reservation-only basis, however, the Park Service is implementing some curbs on what the visitor is permitted to do. Here in southeast Utah, for example, in the backcountry of Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks, there are places where--quite legitimately--I once traveled by four-wheel drive, scrounged juniper branches for firewood, and unrolled a sleeping bag without so much as a ranger's by-your-leave. But those freewheeling days and nights are gone forever. Now, in much of the slickrock backcountry, it's travel by foot and supper by stove light.
Sundown. The Moab Community Center. I have come here to hear how the public feels about Arches National Park, and how the Park Service aims to protect the park's resources without spoiling the visitor's experience. Listening to comments from the floor, I get the impression that opinions are more or less split between people who want more resource protection by restricting use and those who believe there is too much restriction already and maybe not enough use. Consider, for example, the conflicting perspectives of Ken Sleight and Harvey Wickware.
Ken Sleight is a laconic, river-running, packhorse-tripping outfitter with a ranch doubling as country inn up in the nearby La Sal Mountains. Though he is personally engaged in the tourism industry, Sleight believes that unrestrained tourism will ultimately be the undoing of the region's wildlands in general, and Arches National Park in particular. "That roaded corridor up in Arches is a sacrifice area," he says. "What we have to do now is hold the line. We've already compromised so much away; why pretty soon there won't be anything left."
The more voluble Harvey Wickware is a 34-year veteran of the Park Service now retired to Moab after his last post as superintendent of nearby Canyonlands National Park. So there will be no confusion as to where he is coming from, Wickware proudly tells me that the Reagan Administration dispatched him to Canyonlands in 1987 "to take the park back from the environmentalists." He says, "The citizens of this country have a right to use their parks." He says, "If Canyonlands would just be properly developed, 400,000 visitors a year--that's current use--could be increased to four million without in any way hurting the resource. Sometimes the best way to protect a resource is to develop it. A popular place like The Windows, in Arches, needs to be heavily structured--up to the point of providing concrete walkways with handrails, so the visitors don't wander off."
High noon. Arches National Park. I am with park Superintendent Noel Poe at a place called Park Avenue (supposedly because the fins and spires here inspire some people--present company excepted--to think of city skylines). Poe is explaining to me that while his park shares many of the problems affecting other parks, Arches bears the additional burden of being lavishly attractive as a backdrop for television commercials and feature films, such that this Park Avenue might just as well be renamed Madison Avenue or Hollywood and Vine. Poe says the park issues about 25 commercial filming permits a year. (Among the more famous shoots: "Thelma & Louise," "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.") But Poe is getting particular about how much Hollywood the park can sustain. He says, "Columbia Pictures was in Moab shooting 'Geronimo.' They approached us about staging a battle in the park--250 Indians on horseback against 250 cavalrymen. We said, 'No way!'"
From Park Avenue we proceed to The Windows, four large arches accessible via short trails. This is where Noel Poe explains why it is not such a good idea to let 500 Hollywood horses loose in the park, and why he is also obliged to say 'No way!' when visitors--there were 775,000 of them last year--want to wander away from the designated trails.
"Cryptobiotic soil," says Poe, pointing to a dark-colored crust that appears to cover much of the ground that hasn't already been trampled by off-trail trekkers. "It's composed of microscopic organisms--bacteria, fungi. It's about the only thing out here that fixes nitrogen. All our plant life--the rabbitbrush there, the sage--needs nitrogen. But when you walk on that crust, even one footprint, you kill it. Eventually, if you kill enough of it, you're going to have a Sahara desert."
At certain places along the natural-surface Landscape Arch trail, I see that Poe's maintenance people have strung lengths of rope, thigh high, to discourage bushwhacking. This is low-profile resource protection, causing hardly a ripple in the visitor's experience. Yet in my mind's eye, I suddenly see beyond the rope to a future Arches made of Harvey Wickware's concrete walkways, complete with handrails. Of course, that kind of development already exists, not only in the heavy-use sections of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon National Parks, but in some of the less visited units too.
In my sweep across the country I had stopped at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, near Traverse City, Michigan. Touring the dunes with Ray Kimpel, the park's senior management assistant, I was impressed by the Park Service's effort to concentrate the visitor's off-trail dune scrambling in one well-worn area while confining use to boardwalks and viewing platforms in more fragile locations. But at the Platte River Campground, whose rehabilitation at a cost of some five million dollars would soon be completed, I was stunned. Here, in the shade of towering red pines, beside the murmur of this beautiful river, the visitor would picnic not on a bed of pine needles but on a poured concrete slab. I told Kimpel that while I could understand the need for concrete in this day and age, I'd personally prefer a picnic with duff underfoot. Kimpel said he agreed. "But you know," he added, "nowadays structures have to be built to last. Because we're just not getting the maintenance money to keep things up."
So now, in Utah, I stand beneath a towering red-rock arch, beside fragile cryptobiotic soil, and wonder: Will this be the price we must pay for our increasing numbers? Are handrails and hardtop the legacy we want to leave "for the enjoyment of future generations?"
THE BUDGET
It has been said that the Grand Canyon is the eighth wonder of the world. Evidently a lot of people around the world would rank it closer to first, because the national park that embraces the canyon's most awesome declivities is possibly the foreign tourist's single most popular U.S. destination, apart from specific cities. Last year nearly five million people visited Grand Canyon National Park, and three out of every ten were citizens of foreign countries. The presence of such a high proportion of folks from abroad struck me one morning as I moseyed along a trail on the South Rim. So, wondering what the alien perception might be of this place and its problems, I sought out a small number of English-speaking Asians and Europeans and put a few queries to them. And this is what I discovered, along with an almost uniform response that the canyon was beautiful yet frightening and that one and all were having a very good time.
I learned that these visitors were not aware of many of the problems affecting the national park. Perhaps because Americans measure elbowroom a bit differently than Asians and Europeans, the park did not seem crowded to them. (It did to me.) No, they had not noticed an impairment of visibility caused by air pollution; the view seemed fine. Nor were they aware that the noise pollution from helicopter and light-aircraft overflights elsewhere in the park was spoiling the fun for seekers of backcountry solitude. (In addition to the nearly five million ground visitors, another 800,000 see the canyon from the air.) Nor had they heard that fluctuating releases of water from Glen Canyon Dam, upstream on the Colorado River, were eroding the floor of this canyon.
Well, then, had they noticed anything at all out of order? Yes, several of the visitors told me. They had noticed that the roads seemed to be falling apart.
From Grand Canyon to Acadia and back across the country to the parks of the sundown sea, infrastructure decay--accelerated by deferred maintenance--is clearly punishing not only the park system's roads but its trails, septic systems, employee housing, and visitor facilities as well. "We're getting old and tired," Superintendent Randall Pope had said of Great Smoky Park's 800 miles of erodible backcountry trails, "and we can't keep up with it." And at Sleeping Bear Dunes, Superintendent Ivan Miller told me: "We have scores of historic 19th-century buildings here, and they're all just moldering into the ground."
In round numbers the Park Service is custodian of a physical plant the real value of which may well exceed 40 billion dollars. To keep that plant functioning in fiscal year 1994, the service and its congressional overseers have earmarked almost 40 percent of the billion-dollar operating budget for maintenance. But that's for Band-Aids: paint, nails, and lawn mowers. To fix up the big items, to rehabilitate or replace the system's roads, buildings, and campgrounds, you have to turn to the construction budget, which stands this year at about 200 million dollars spread over 80 separate projects. Yet even 200 million dollars hardly begins to take care of the big rehab and replacement needs, for there is already an accumulated list of more than 220 separate construction projects, with a price tag approaching three billion dollars. Grand Canyon National Park, for example, appears high on the list as being in need of some 19 million dollars to resurface its South Rim roads and about 24 million dollars to construct adequate employee housing. Yet the federal treasury this year has yielded to the park only a bit over six million dollars for the housing and nothing for the roads.
If the construction backlog sometimes seems to mimic the national debt--that three billion dollars is expected to approach six billion dollars by 1996--then part of the problem must be traced to Congress and its proclivity for substituting its own political priorities for decisions made by professionals in the Park Service. When it comes to budgets, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have the largest say.
In the 1994 budget Congress heavily trimmed or jettisoned many of the Park Service requests that had worked their way into the top tier of the agency's priority list, then put in 45 projects of its own, as it had done to varying degrees in previous years. These substitutions generally come off the bottom of the service's priority list or have no priority whatsoever among service professionals. To Washington insiders, such projects are known officially as congressional add-ons. Outsiders speak a different language. They call it park barrel politics.
THE AGENDA
Roger Kennedy, the National Park Service director, was speaking of priorities, and getting construction projects in the right order was only a part of one of them. I had doubled back from my westering tour to talk with the director just 120 days into his new job. I wanted to discover, if I could, where this former boss of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History might be planning to take the Park Service and the system, before taking myself on one last sortie to California, where Kennedy's agency would soon be facing one of its toughest tests at the edge of the Golden Gate. We sat in high-back rocking chairs in his office in Washington. His priorities, he said, were people, places, and partnering--the latter being Park Service jargon for its increasing dependence on partnerships with state, municipal, and private entities to help preserve significant resources.
"Doing right by the people in the Park Service--that's the first job," he said. "Do it, and other good things will flow from that."
In my peregrinations around the park system, I had encountered rangers, naturalists, cultural specialists, and resource managers totally dedicated to their individual tasks and collective mission, yet they were acutely uneasy, if not downright unhappy, about their working and living conditions. Almost half the full-time rangers, for example, have to make do on salaries under $27,000 a year, and even that comes only after five years' service. "It is now no secret," complains the nonprofit National Parks and Conservation Association, "that most rangers cannot afford to 'take their pay in sunsets.' Instead they are taking their leave. There is an exodus of experienced park rangers to...the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service." BLM and the Forest Service offer higher starting salaries and faster career tracks. Grand Canyon Chief Ranger Ken Miller told me: "We've become a training ground for other agencies--and it's costing us."
Kennedy said he wants to upgrade the rangers' housing as well as the pay scale. "We have some of our people living in shacks and tents--the kind of conditions lawmakers would legislate migrant farmworkers right out of. It's a national disgrace, and it's been a national disgrace for a long time."
Turning to the sorry physical condition of so many of the national parks, Kennedy told me: "We've got to catch up with the rot. The irony is that as the nation focuses on paying down the mortgage, the walls are falling in and there are holes in the roof. And it isn't a matter of just doing it next year. We've been 'just doing it next year' for too many years."
Beyond fixing up the old places, Kennedy is afraid that the Park Service is not adequately conveying to the public the meaning of national parks, and how each one has a story to tell about the American land and the national experience. Perhaps more than any of the system's deficiencies, the failure of effective interpretation had struck me powerfully in my travels across the country. Sure, I'd encountered some excellent interpretive exhibits in a handful of visitor centers: Sugarlands at Great Smoky Mountains, Fossil Butte National Monument (Wyoming), Point Reyes National Seashore (California). But more often than not, in large parks as well as small, it seemed to me the exhibits exuded a kind of antiquarian mustiness, and visitor centers appeared more functional as comfort stations than as informal classrooms where people might rediscover a part of America by understanding a sense of the place.
Director Kennedy's third priority, partnering, is nothing less than an exercise in institutional survival--the idea being that as the system takes on new units and added responsibilities, but with little real growth in available manpower or federal money, the Park Service must find new ways to share the burdens of stewardship. In short, go-it-alone gives way to going-for-partners. The book on partnering was written at Boston National Historical Park, a complex of sites and structures associated with the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. The park is unusual in that only three of its sites are owned by the Park Service. Five others are owned and managed by private or municipal entities, including the City of Boston's Faneuil Hall (the "Cradle of Liberty"), Old South Association's Old South Meeting House (where the Boston Tea Party was hatched), and the Bostonian Society's Old State House (site of the Boston Massacre in 1770). And just a few blocks from the Freedom Trail that threads these partners together is the Boston African American National Historic Site, where the privately owned African Meeting House stands as the oldest black church building in the United States. Of his partners and cooperators, park Superintendent John Burchill says: "They bring the kind of political and financial support you need to survive."
THE GOLDEN GATE
Nearing sundown. Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is October. The wind is brisk and the great blue bay at San Francisco is speckled with sailcloth. I have come to the top of Battery Spencer, a tumbledown installation left over from the days when coastal artillery held the latchkeys to Fortress America. This is not the very highest spot in the Marin Headlands, but it is high enough to give you a view you will never forget: Far left, in the bay, that skullcap island called Alcatraz; then, clockwise, the skyline of the alabaster city, seen through the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge; next, the wooded Presidio, far end of the bridge; then the Pacific Ocean where the sun will soon set; and finally, behind us, the scrub-covered ridges of Marin County rolling north to the wilder shanks of Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods.
And all of this save the sea, the cityscape, and the bridge is Golden Gate National Recreation Area. All of it and lots more that we cannot see, 114 square miles of it; urban beaches and forest canyons and pastoral grasslands; threads of history running back through truculent times from the Nike missile to the bow and arrow; memories of Miwok Indians, Spanish friars, gold-fingered argonauts; encounters at reedy lagoons steeped in the life-affirming stink of the littoral. Half again as many visitors come here as pass through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which makes the Gate second only to Blue Ridge Parkway as the most heavily used of all the units of the National Park System.
Actually, I am almost jumping the gun on the Presidio. The Army's 1,500-acre post across the Golden Gate, a casualty of base closure, won't officially be transferred to the Park Service until this fall. At the time of my visit the service was unveiling its draft plan to make the Presidio a part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The fallout from that will be drifting in the wind for a long time.
The plan proposes taking the Presidio, including most of its more than 500 historic-landmark buildings, and beating the swords of its military past into plowshares to help secure the future of the world's human and natural resources. While there'd be intensive efforts to restore the post's woodlands, develop new hiking and biking trails, and construct a shoreline park on the site of a 1920s airfield, the plan's major thrust would be along less traditional lines. In the interest of preserving the Presidio's historic structures and finding appropriate uses for them, Congress would be called upon to create a public-benefit corporation--a super-partner that would fill the buildings with rent-paying tenants in the business of improving environmental, cultural, and social conditions at home and abroad. There was speculation that the Letterman Army Medical Complex, stateside way station for the wounded from our wars in the Pacific, might be adapted as a center to explore the interdependence of health and environment. All good and lofty goals. But very expensive.
According to official accounts, it is going to cost 490 million dollars just to implement the plan, and 25 million dollars a year in operating funds through the year 2000. Of the 490 million dollars, the public-benefit corporation will have to raise 332 million dollars, over time, through leasing to tenants; the rest of the bill would be picked up by Uncle Sam and private donors. As for the 25 million dollars a year for operations, Golden Gate Superintendent Brian O'Neill suggested that the figure should be counted as an overall federal savings, inasmuch as it has been costing the Army 45 million dollars annually to operate the Presidio as a military base.
Still, numbers like these have raised anew a contentious question: What rightful business does the Park Service have messing around in the streets of San Francisco or of any big city for that matter? Especially when, for lack of funds, staffs are stunted, programs shelved, roads unrepaired, and resources unprotected in the older, more traditional parks out there in the boondocks. I can hear the critics saying: Why, you could take that 25 million dollars a year projected for running a 1,500-acre urban park at the Presidio and, at current spending levels, operate all the parks in wild Alaska, totaling 55 million acres.
The Presidio raises other questions. No one seriously doubts the national significance of saving this 218-year-old military post from the auction block, but is salvage to be the wave of the park system's future? The nation is accumulating a growing inventory not only of obsolete defense installations but also of economically depressed communities and regions. Some of these communities and regions, through their congressional delegations, are beginning to clamor for a piece of the park-making action. Suddenly parks are seen as cash-register successors of dead or dying industries. When a Steamtown National Historic Site was established at Scranton, Pennsylvania, a few years back to interpret the story of steam railroading in America, purists in and out of the service wondered, why there? And why include rolling stock from Canada? For the park system, the purists warned, this was only the beginning of a "thinning of the blood."
Park making can be a trendy process. It is possible that so long as the nation's economy remains sluggish, the creation of new parks to help jump-start depressed communities may briefly gain favor, much as the establishment of urban recreation areas suddenly surged, then faded in the 1970s.
But it is unlikely that any trend will long preempt the unfinished agendas of traditional park makers in Congress and the private nonprofit conservation community. There is still much support for creation of a tallgrass prairie park somewhere in the eastern precincts of the Great Plains. Conservation groups are determined to have a California desert national park south of Death Valley. Other voices can be heard demanding park status for the Maine woods, the Escalante canyons of Utah, the Sand Hills of Nebraska, the Altamaha River of Georgia. And even if there could be an eventual end to the making of natural parks, where does one draw the line on historic and cultural ones? The story of America is an unfinished book. Who among the straw-hatted, hoop-skirted visitors at Yosemite's Bridalveil Fall a century ago could ever have guessed that some day there would be a park system with one unit, in upstate New York, honoring women's struggle for equal rights and another called Manzanar, in California, to keep us mindful of the nation's shameful internment of Japanese Americans during World War II?
There are no straw hats today at Battery Spencer. But there are hatless Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans, and Hispanic Americans, and Italian Americans, and--who can tell just from black hair and cheekbones?--American Americans. And seeing them all here, separately and together attending sundown, I recall what Golden Gate Superintendent Brian O'Neill was telling me just yesterday--that the Park Service's fundamental challenge will be to make every single individual in an increasingly diverse population "a real stakeholder, emotionally and intellectually, in the National Park System."
I see stakeholders here at Battery Spencer. That young woman, for instance, the one who handed me her camera and asked if I'd take a picture of her and two friends, with the bridge in the background. After the picture we talked. This was her first visit to a national park, and she found it quite wonderful. Just being here, she said, made her proud to be an American. Tomorrow she would be going to Point Reyes; the day after, to Yosemite. I told her Yosemite was so wonderful, seeing it for the first time was enough to make some people cry.
"I don't cry easy," she said, "but I hope I'll be one of them."
Now the orange sun is down. Soon it will pass westward over the Pacific, touching parks I have never known and may never see, Hawaii Volcanoes and Haleakala, and the Pearl Harbor grave of the battleship "Arizona," crossing time zones and continents to post one more dawn on that ledge at Acadia.
Copyright 1994 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.
