ABQjournal: Bush Plundering National Parks

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Bush Plundering National Parks

By Richard B. Smith
Retired Parks Official
    Wildfires get all the television air time and newspaper column inches when it comes to harm done to national parks, but there exists a much greater threat to parks: the Bush administration.
    If that sounds like overheated hype and election-year politics, you can ignore my concerns as an individual, which are based on 31 years of experience as a park ranger or senior manager in various parks and regional offices of the National Park Service.
    Instead, consider the unmistakable message that emerged from an October 2003 survey by the Campaign to Protect America's Lands (CPAL) of nearly 1,400 National Park Service employees.
    Nine out of 10 park rangers and other in-house experts responding to the survey are worried that Bush administration decisions affecting national parks are based more on politics and special-interest deals than on science and what is best for the parks. Park Service employees working in New Mexico are among the solid majority of experts who fear for the future of our delicate network of national parks and public lands.
    We owe a debt of gratitude to previous generations of Americans for a robust national park system, but all that good work can quickly be dismantled. Peter Altman, director of the Campaign to Protect America's Lands, puts it this way: "It is no exaggeration to say that as few as four to eight years of poor stewardship of our unique park resources could leave America's most cherished heritage areas irreversibly altered for the worse."
    It was another Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who earned his place in history as the man who nurtured the national park system into existence. More than any president before or since, Roosevelt understood that the wild and untamed side of America is something that must be preserved. All you have to do is to spend a day or two tramping around in Bandelier to realize that this is national resource that can't be replaced. If Chaco Canyon or El Malpais is lost due to inattention, lack of maintenance, poor science, or as the result of a deliberate campaign to strip it of its riches, it will be gone forever.
    President Bush and Interior Secretary Gale Norton have adopted a relentless approach to undermining our national parks. It began when the president broke a promise to fund needed repairs, improvements and other overdue maintenance. National Park areas in New Mexico are experiencing chronic deferral of maintenance and declining staffing levels.
    Unfortunately, the initial Bush posture of neglect has turned into outright hostility. The pessimistic view taken today by National Park Service employees reflects growing concern about such Bush administration steps as:

Permitting noise and other pollution from snowmobiles at Yellowstone to continue in the face of scientific evidence of serious harm— that misguided policy recently was overturned in U.S. District Court;

Trading away federal water rights essential to the natural flow of all parks on the Colorado River;

Current White House plans to remove special protections for national parks from the pollution created by coal-fired power plants.
    Every month seems to bring a new outrage aimed at decreasing protection for national parks and public lands in a way that means more profit for Bush campaign contributors. With this kind of unprecedented White House assault on national parks and other public lands, the pessimism of those entrusted to safeguard our national parks appears to be well founded.
    The lack of optimism about the future of parks and lands is evident in the survey findings: 79 percent of respondents said that employee morale is lower than it was a couple of years ago. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed expressed a great deal of concern about "special interest influence on park policies/decisions." Eighty-eight percent indicated a great deal of concern that "decisions are being influenced by politics rather than professional experience/science."
    The bottom line: More than four in five of surveyed National Park Service employees expressed a "great deal of concern" about being able to protect park resources.
    The Bush administration's attack on national parks is not front-page news today in the same category as the war in Iraq, fear of terrorist attacks against Americans and the ravages of the jobless economic recovery.
    Unfortunately, that low-profile status for national park issues is exactly what makes it possible for bad science and backroom political deals to go unchecked. The result is something very much like a wildfire, which sneaks up and all of a sudden becomes a catastrophic disaster.
    As a Parks Service employee responding to the survey put it: "Our parks are being threatened by special interest money and politics, which are serving to undermine a lot of our environmental protections. I think that if the American public really understood what was going on they would be outraged, but by the time the damage is realized it may be too late."

Richard B. Smith of Placitas retired in 1994 from his National Parks Service position as an associate regional director for resources management of the Southwest Regional Office. He previously served as superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns.