Our National Parks have become miserable, PC, bureaucratic disasters! Who Should Pay for America’s Jewels? :: http://ti.org/antiplanner

The Park Service has taken the pleasure out visiting the Parks that have been 'preserve'd for their natural wonders. They fare much better at historic battle grounds, most likely because these parks are allowed to have a balance of commerce and pageantry (with re-enactment) and private tours. Many, I'm happy to say, have tours on horseback.

Park lecture programmes, books, audio-visual, and pamphlets are now strictly politically correct and fanatically 'green.' These programs have now just become PC-'green' proselytizing. I attend one in the Grand Canyon that was pushing the, by then, debunked propaganda thrust on us by Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring." They have introduced no lights at night (so the occasional tourist now walk off the edge on moonless nights), yet all along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. While lights are out, it is paved to the rim with parking lots, dotted with restaurants and hotels. This is the classic asininity of 'eco-planning' that pervades not only the park service, but most of the government bureaucracies by policy and social pressure. These policies, as usual, are based on budgetary increases. [Mooserider]

The Antiplanner :: Who Should Pay for America’s Jewels? :: http://ti.org/antiplanner

March 25, 2011

National parks are one of the most popular programs of the federal government. Yet the National Park Service is also an increasing burden on taxpayers. Appropriations to the agency have doubled since 1991, and even after adjusting for inflation they have grown by a third.

What have taxpayers received for this money? One of the most important outputs of the parks is recreation, but national park recreation use peaked in 1987 and has stagnated or declined since then. Visitors spent 11 percent fewer days in national parks in 2010 than in 1987.

By coincidence, 1987 was also the year Alston Chase released his book, Playing God in Yellowstone, which for many people (including the Antiplanner) was the first signal that all was not well within the National Park System. Ironically, Chase started working on the book at the request of the Yellowstone Park Foundation, which wanted him to write a puff-piece that it could sell in its stores in park visitor centers.

What Chase found was that, judged by the Park Service’s own criteria of managing the parks to be “vignettes of pre-Columbian American,” Yellowstone was being very poorly cared for. Instead of protecting the park in its natural condition, the Park Service had allowed a few “charismatic megafauna”–namely elk and bison–to overrun the park. The elk ate all the willows along park streams, which led the beaver to disappear. Since the beaver weren’t building any dams, wetlands disappeared. Pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bear were only a few of the species that largely disappeared from the park as a result.

[Read the full post at the above antiplanner link.]