We Are Destroying Our National Parks

LESS THAN ENOUGH

The 1955 budget, though better than 1954, provided for less than 5% of the backlog of construction that every year is more frantically needed as the visitor load increases. For our National Park System we dedicate only seven-tenths of one percent of our land area, and then we refuse to provide even 5% of what is needed to develop it. Many nations, all of whom learned the national park idea from us, do better by it than we do. Even Japan, overpopulated and land-starved, has set aside 4% of its territory.

Our parks are like a child whose teeth have been neglected. Look at that smile, we say. See how white and pretty? Hardly any decay showing. But keep her away from the dentist another few years. Let maintenance and construction be postponed as they have been ever since the stand-by years of World War II. Put off renovating the museums, do without the extra rangers and naturalists. Don't bother moving the campgrounds, though they ought to be moved about as often as a turkey run, and for similar reasons. Let it all go, and pretty soon we will not ask the child to smile.

The service which Congress established in 1916 to care for its national parks has been, in spite of starvation budgets, a destructive public and persistent outside enemies, one of the best agencies of public service that any people ever had. Today there are more trees, flowers and wildlife in Yosemite, in spite of the thundering herd, than there were a generation ago. They are there because the Park Service takes its job seriously. Park Service employees have a resilient morale, a morale that is always threatened but never caves, despite meager pay, high rent for park housing and unpaid overtime. They are men of high ability who have sacrificed better pay and ambition to do a job they like.

FREEDOM FROM FREEDOM

Joe Smith is going to have to get used to some restrictions, even if Congress should decide in the future to deal kindly with the parks. Already most campgrounds have a 15- or 30-day limit; already concessionaires may restrict the stay of their lodge and motel guests. Admission cards to pitch a tent in campgrounds, good for the whole season, will probably have to go. And the recreation activities, spectator sports, concerts and swimming pools and organizational picnics, maybe even ski lifts, will have to be left to the resort areas where there is little of the real wilderness left to spoil.

We can't, as has been bitterly proposed, close our national parks and thus force Congress to put up money for their proper operation. We can't close up something that 54 million people want. But we can destroy their beauty, and hence their reason for being, and perhaps we will. It would take a 10-year construction and rehabilitation program of $60 million a year to bring the parks back to what they should be, and an annual operating budget at least twice that of 1955 to keep them there.

That sounds like a lot of money, and is. But the money will produce returns of another kind: health and sanity and the profound and personal sense of belonging to something good and beautiful that cannot be measured in dollars. A primeval park offers values that are close to the values of religion.

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]