
The Odd History of Opposition to America's National Parks - prismatic
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/the-odd-history-of-opposition-to-americas-national-parks
======
clumsysmurf
"This story is, admittedly, a relic. But it’s an important one, because it
encapsulates most of the arguments people continue to make against parkland.
Opponents claim the land could be made more economically productive."

Its a corporate effort to privatize public lands and extract wealth. Despite
broad bipartisan support LWCF funding was not renewed, spearheaded by anti-
conservation Congressman Rob Bishop:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/09/land_and_water_conservation_fund_is_out_of_budget_and_will_expire.html)

"Bishop’s attack on LWCF is a part of larger effort, backed by special
interests, to lock up more federal lands and sell them off for mining,
drilling and other development."

Related [http://wilderness.org/blog/bishop-aims-gut-americas-top-
park...](http://wilderness.org/blog/bishop-aims-gut-americas-top-parks-
conservation-program-lwcf)

~~~
smazga
I'm not trying to defend Congressman Bishop here. I certainly didn't vote for
him.

But as a minor counterpoint to those (pretty biased) articles, it's important
to understand who he represents.

The Federal government owns 66% of Utah. That's a lot of land.

Most of that is managed under the BLM, which is very permissive as far as
public use, but every once in a while, someone scores a political hit with "we
made more National Parks" by carving out a chunk of that and severely
restricting access.[1]

I have family that live in south/central Utah and from their point of view the
only thing that changes when a monument/park is created is that local
recreation is limited by people across the country who will likely never even
see what they've done. "The common man being oppressed by the suits in their
downtown DC ivory towers" is the general feeling.

Right or wrong, it's a more complicated matter than simply trying to exploit
the lands for money.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Staircase-
Escalante_Nati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Staircase-
Escalante_National_Monument)

~~~
brwnll
Read the linked Wikipedia article. Not sure what you're using it to reference
"severely restricting access".

Under the "Controversy" section, it seems to be referring to two topics:

1\. Who owns the roads within the protected area.

2\. That a planned Coal mine was prevented from happening in the now protected
area.

Care to elaborate?

~~~
davidw
Small random point: you can take a rifle into a wilderness area. Or a horse.
But not a mountain bike, to say nothing of something like an offroad
motorcycle.

I wouldn't want to see coal mines on land I enjoy using, and I don't ride dirt
bikes, but I do love mountain biking. I can imagine other people have other
recreational priorities.

The US is a bit weird in how NIMBY it can get over stuff - or going overboard
in how much it exploits some natural resources.

~~~
smazga
> But not a mountain bike, to say nothing of something like an offroad
> motorcycle.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.

I visited my farmer family, and of course they have a bunch of 4 wheelers. We
went on some expeditions to see petroglyphs and things miles into BLM land.
Once the park is closed, that's no longer allowed.

The locals often know the cool, secret things far off the beaten path. What
annoyed my family in particular is that now they can't go enjoy those things
in certain areas because someone a thousand miles away decides it should be
so.

~~~
rch
My understanding is that you can't be more than 10 miles from a road
_anywhere_ in the US (other than AK). So what you're complaining about is a
half-day walk that will probably help preserve those petroglyphs for decades.

~~~
greeneggs
That statistic is very wrong. Even in mainland California (no islands!), it's
easy to beat 10 miles from a road. Googling suggests that in the continental
US, the maximum straight-line distance from a road is 28 miles. The distance
on foot could easily be two to four times that. It is hard to find a great
source on this. However, here they list a number of places that are ~20
straight-line miles from the nearest road:
[http://remotefootprints.org/project-remote/expedition-
journa...](http://remotefootprints.org/project-remote/expedition-journals)

~~~
username223
Cool site! To add a bit, straight-line distance is only one factor in
remoteness. There are parts of Washington's Cascades that are only a few miles
from a road, but would take a day or more of agonizing bush-whacking to reach.

------
maxerickson
The place discussed in the article isn't a national park.

The National Park Service manages 84 million acres:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service#Holdings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service#Holdings)

Fish and Wildlife manages 150 million acres:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fish_and_Wildlif...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fish_and_Wildlife_Service)

The Bureau of Land Management, uh, manages 247 million different acres:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Land_Management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Land_Management)

and the United States Forest Service manages yet another category of land, 193
million acres:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forest_Service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forest_Service)

I didn't sort by size there because the USFS is organized under the USDA
instead of the Department of Interior.

(For scale, the United Kingdom is ~60 million acres)

~~~
ska

          The place discussed in the article isn't a national park.
    

Are you making that distinction because it is managed by Fish and Wildlife as
a "National Wildlife Reserve" ? That doesn't seem particularly useful.

    
    
       For scale, the United Kingdom is ~60 million acres
    

How is that a relevant scale? The ratio of parkland/total area compared across
countries I could see, but what relevance does the total size of the UK have?

~~~
maxerickson
People don't know what 10 million acres is. So my meaning was that each unit
is managing a medium sized country worth of land, that's all.

As far as the park thing, yeah, I was just pointing out that it isn't a
national park. It matters a little bit, a refuge might be significantly
modified to make it a better habitat and will probably have less public
accommodations.

~~~
ska
Makes sense. I think the overall size isn't that interesting though, without
scaling by what you are actually doing with it.

------
jimrandomh
There is a problem with having huge national parks that no one's mentioned.

The SF Bay Area is plagued by a severe housing shortage, resulting in very
very high rents. One reason is because local governments block new
construction in the existing city and town areas, but there's another reason
why housing is scarce, which becomes immediately apparent if you look at a map
(eg
[https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4359471,-122.1895837,60360m/...](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4359471,-122.1895837,60360m/data=!3m1!1e3)
).

The Bay area is surrounded on all sides by national parks, filling several
times as much area as the actual inhabited places. These are places where
people could be living, which would make housing more affordable for the
entire area.

~~~
AndyMcConachie
Or people could stop expecting to live in ranch homes and move into
apartments.

There's plenty of land in the bay area, but bay area communities don't want
residents. They want businesses because residents don't produce any taxable
income for the municipality.

~~~
jimrandomh
I think you might have an unrealistic view of the housing situation there. If
your complaint about expectations were calibrated to reality on the ground, it
would be "people could stop expecting to live in apartments and move into
closets".

~~~
erikpukinskis
No, their view is entirely realistic. San Frqncisco zoning laws are controlled
by property owners who have every reason to prevent high density housing
because they're all getting rich off their tenants.

As for your comments about closets... The only reason people are even
considering living in closets is because property owners are preventing new
units from being built all over the city.

------
alejohausner
This is an interesting story, but misses a much more important aspect of the
creation of national parks: the expulsion of native Americans who lived on
those lands. You see, america was never an empty wilderness. It was always
full of people. The idea of unspoiled nature is an idealistic dream, like the
myth of Paradise.

What's worse, the myth of an empty wilderness provides a convenient excuse for
white settlement into Indian lands: we never had to steal the land from the
Indians, because the land was empty.

It wasn't empty.

See a review of a relevant
book:[https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4418](https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4418)

------
davidw
I highly recommend a visit to Steens mountain if you ever get a chance. OTOH,
I flagged this article, as it's basically about US politics.

~~~
kbenson
It straddles the line for me. It's generally about politics in the US, but it
can and has spurred some interesting conversation about parks and their
benefits and use in a fairly non-political way. That said, most or all of that
conversation was after your comment.

------
iza
This reminds me of the humorous "One-Star Reviews of National Parks"
[http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/i-cant-
stop-r...](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/i-cant-stop-reading-
these-one-star-yelp-reviews-national-parks)

------
codingdave
These issues are not relics of the past. This was passed this year in Utah:
[http://le.utah.gov/~2015/bills/static/SCR004.html](http://le.utah.gov/~2015/bills/static/SCR004.html)

------
vezzy-fnord
See also the odd history of national parks and eugenics:
[http://www.jonathanspiro.com/defending-the-master-
race.html](http://www.jonathanspiro.com/defending-the-master-race.html)

------
hannob
In south-western Germany the first national park in that area (Baden-
Württemberg) was created 2014. There was quite some resistance. Not ancient
history, this was just a year ago.

------
wahsd
It's about resource exploitation and the opportunity to grab a piece of land
that was given away far too fast and far too permanently far too long ago. I
for one wish my relatives had been one of the lucky ones to grab country sized
swaths of land back then so that I could sit fat and happy on undeserved and
unearned lands too. But, alas, it was not to be and I really don't feel like
buying it now.

