I’m very sorry to see that Ken Burns’ new film series is to be entitled The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. As I detail extensively in my book The Really Inconvenient Truths, the nationalization of so much wonderful scenery has led to appalling mismanagement and environmental degradation. When the Parks Service and Forest Service spent hours in 1988 debating whether or not a fire counted as “natural” because it started from a lighning bolt striking a telegraph pole, large areas of Yellowstone National Park burned to ashes. Another park service biologist, Don Despain, saw the flames raging towards his research area and urged them on with the words, “Burn, baby, burn.” These are the tales I can’t imagine you’ll see in Burns undoubtedly beautiful film, but they’re as much a part of the National Park story as the scenery.
For more detailed critique of the National Parks idea, see work by RJ Smith, such as this testimony, where he says:
For decades we have known about the deplorable fact that the National Park Service was far more interested in following a path of ever more land acquisition, and that caring for the lands they had was at best an afterthought. The administration of President Ronald Reagan and Interior Secretary James Watt attempted, mainly unsuccessfully, to stop additional land acquisition until the government could demonstrate that it could be a good steward of the lands it already owned.
Despite their beauty, the National Parks have not been an unalloyed good. For the very reason that they explicitly reject private stewardship, they may even count as one of America’s worst ideas.
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If private enterprise was involved Great Smoky Mountains National Park would look like Dollywood and Yosemite would look like Disneyland. Thank God for the foresight of people like Teddy Roosevelt who wanted to protect these magnificent places for our children.
If you want to see the ultimate expression of private and corporate landownership versus public land, just go to northern Maine. Most of the region is a vast, industrial "working forest," with logging, roads, and increasing development. More than 8 million acres of land has been sold in the last ten years, most of it to real-estate speculators, private investment trusts, and transnational corporations. Jobs in the forest industry have dropped 25 percent because of mechanization, failure to reinvest in old mills, and global competition.
Now, large-scale development is coming. Plum Creek, a giant Seattle-based corporation, owns a million acres of Maine. This corporation wants to build a real-estate development with a footprint as large as the city of Portland. More and more tracts are being subdivided for McMansions for wealthy people from away. They're talking about wind power, energy corridors, cell phone towers, gravel pits, etc. They have been fined under state law for clearcutting deer yards and destroying habitat. That's not my idea of "good stewardship."
In contrast, Yellowstone National Park has no logging, no livestock grazing, and no development except for about 2 percent of the land base. Almost the whole park is recommended for wilderness status. Wolves have been reintroduced, making this one of the healthiest, most complete ecosystems in the nation. Lands affected by the so-called devastating fire are rapidly recovering — no surprise, since many species require fire to regenerate.
If you want industrial exploitation and development of the entire landscape, then private and corporate ownership is for you. If you want real protection, national parks and wilderness areas are the best you can get. Most people know this — that's why they continue to support national parks and are working to create new ones.
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