We Are Destroying Our National Parks

He would be close to right. But let us not forget the Congress and the people of the United States.

It means little that both Congress and the people think themselves the parks' best friends. Congress has been friendly in principle and stingy with money ever since it established Yellowstone in 1872. The American people love their parks and threaten to trample them to death. The more successful the Park Service is in keeping a park wild and beautiful, the more people it will draw and the more it has to contend with a thundering herd.

Everything in a primeval park ought to be preserved just as God made it: everything except man, who is an intruder and has to be educated. That is the Park Service's job. It is more than a clean-up job, though refuse disposal is a desperate problem in all the popular parks, and a park ranger in summer often finds himself little more than a garbage man working a 15-hour shift. Worse than dirty public habits is the public's failure to understand what a national park is.

MONUMENTAL GRAB BAG

Its failure is understandable, for too many kinds of things are included in the 24 million acres which the Park Service must administer in 38 states, the District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There are 180 parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, memorials, cemeteries, parkways, National Capital Parks and recreational areas.

The Park Service takes care of everything from F.D.R.'s Hyde Park home to the parkways through the Great Smokies and the campgrounds on some reclamation reservoirs. No wonder Joe Smith is confused; no wonder he sometimes falls for the notion that the parks ought to be "developed." There are swimming pools in Yosemite, and a bandstand from which dance music bounces off the cliffs. There are several tows for skiers at Hidden Valley in Rocky Mountain National Park, and Seattle businessmen are asking for more of the same on Mount Rainier.

None of these things ought to be there; they are contrary to the spirit and the letter of the law establishing the National Park Service. A national park is not a playground and not a resort, though it may be ideal for such activities as hiking, riding, climbing, hunting with a camera, fishing and cross-country skiing—sports which demand no installations, attract no spectators and leave no scars. The real purpose of the national parks—to preserve scenery, beauty, geology, archaeology, wildlife, for permanent use in living natural museums—is not affected by these, but it cannot be made compatible with weekend dances, ski tournaments, speedboat races and a million people a year. And if the parks are not protected against people who insist on using them as resorts, they are shortly going to look like Settembrini's Picnic Ground after the annual Lions Outing.

In 1954 Yosemite had 1,008,031 visitors; Rocky Mountain 1,425,635; Great Smoky more than two and a half million, Yellowstone almost a million and a third, Grand Teton more than a million. Nearly 26 million in the national parks and monuments alone, over 54 million in all the Park Service areas. The total has steadily increased by more than a million each year. By 1975, when according to demographers the population of the United States will be 200 million and that of California 20 million, visitors to the national parks may well run to more than 100 million every year.

If Yosemite looks now like the rush hour at Hollywood and Vine, how will it be in 1975? And where shall we go then for our inexpensive and restorative family vacations? Not to Sequoia or Rocky Mountain or Lassen Volcanic. Their beauty will be lost to us, as Yosemite's is already to many because of the crowds. We will have to seek quieter and wilder places where there is rest for soul and eye. Such places are scarce now. They are getting rarer, and there are no more where they came from.

Every one of them is unique and beyond price. We need not fewer such protected areas but more of them. House and Senate have not agreed on the Service's 1956 appropriation as this is written. The approximately $33 million budget for 1955, though supplemented by a little more than $10 million in contract authorization for roads and parkways and by a half million to match the same amount of donated Rockefeller money for land purchases, was only a fraction of what was needed. In presenting his budget for 1954, Director Conrad Wirth noted a long-term trend of slow starvation. What the Bureau of the Budget had allotted him would provide 15% fewer man-years of work than the budget of 1941, yet "in 1953 we have 8% more areas, 10% more acres, 32% more miles of roads, 35% more miles of trails and 100% more visitors than we had in 1941."