America needs more 'crown jewels'
Creating national parks should be as much a part of our future as of our past.

By Erica Rosenberg, Los Angeles Times | September 27, 2009

The 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch, between Los Angeles and Bakersfield in the Tehachapis, features extraordinary ecological resources: ancient oak groves, Joshua tree and pinyon pine forests, and 80 imperiled species, including the California condor. Its owners and some environmentalists have cut a deal to put 90% of the ranchland into a private conservancy in exchange for allowing intense development on the other 10%. But here's what hasn't been seriously considered: Protecting this precious area as a national park for the benefit of creatures and people in one of the nation's most densely populated regions.

National parks have been deemed "America's best idea," in writer Wallace Stegner's phrase, and they are justly celebrated as that in a Ken Burns' documentary series that starts tonight on PBS. Yet, oddly, America's national park system is largely perceived as a fait accompli, like the great Gothic cathedrals in Europe. But national parks should be as much a part of our future as they are of our past.

Americans invented the national park well over a century ago, with Yellowstone, Yosemite and other outstanding natural areas protected as America's "crown jewels." The 1916 act establishing the National Park Service summed up its mission: "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same ... as will leave them unimpaired for future generations." No other federal land management agency has such populist, preservationist and visionary goals; for example, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management allow recreation on the lands they oversee, but they also allow activities generally prohibited in parks -- logging, mining, grazing and drilling.

The nearly 400 park system "units," including 58 national parks as well as national monuments, preserves, battlefields, recreation areas, historic sites and seashores, cover 84 million acres of land, or about 3.5% of America's land mass. Every citizen holds title to them. Their success has inspired nearly 100 other countries to designate 1,200 national parks of their own.

Despite their universal popularity, Congress, the Park Service and park advocates working at the national level focus almost exclusively on existing parks. New park designation has stalled. Since 1980, only 35 new park units of any kind have been created, fewer than one a year on average, with the overwhelming majority of those being small historic sites as opposed to expansive natural areas. Between 1929 and 1980, in contrast, about 230 units, or on average almost four a year, were added to the system.

Hostility to federal land ownership and spending on the part of conservative Congresses account for some of the stagnation. As significant, environmentalists for the last few decades have directed their energies not to preserving natural areas by adding parks to the system, but to battling federal agencies beholden to extractive industries and to expanding the federal wilderness system.

Wilderness -- which, like national parks, only Congress can designate -- offers a protective overlay for federal land regardless of the agency managing it (be it the BLM, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service or the Park Service). It's the most restrictive designation, keeping out most activities and people, except for rugged individuals hiking in the backcountry. Parks, on the other hand, encourage people to come in, and so they accommodate (to varying degrees) the need for parking lots and visitor centers, and for a wide range of recreational opportunities, from mountain biking to ranger talks to car camping.

Despite these accommodations, parks protect vast swaths of wild lands. They also confer enormous public health, educational and scientific benefits. They afford outstanding and varied outdoor activities for an increasingly urbanized and unfit population. They present and explain natural phenomena and U.S. history, from the geology of the Grand Canyon to military tactics at the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. Because they represent relatively intact ecosystems, parks enable scientific research -- and species -- to flourish; Yellowstone, for example, has been the "lab" for the study of wildfire recovery and for the restoration of the wolf and grizzly bear in the Lower 48.

What's more, parks serve as engines for nearby, often rural, economies. National parks provide stable, diverse and safe jobs -- with fewer environmental impacts than resource extraction, like mining or logging. One study found that for every dollar invested in national parks, four are returned to the surrounding communities. A 2003 study of California's 23 national park sites found that they generated $1.18 billion in total spending, 30,000 jobs and $514 million in personal income.

Nothing beats national parks for affordable, family-friendly vacations. Despite the recession -- or more likely because of it -- visitation at parks is rising. One survey found that 73% of Americans will vacation in a national park this year, up from 62% in 2008, when 275 million people visited national parks. Campground bookings are also up at many parks -- in some cases by as much as 30%.

All of this means that adding to the system -- especially in the form of natural heritage parks -- would be nothing but a boon to the nation. And there are plenty of extraordinary places that merit national park designation. Awe-inspiring, park-quality lands abound. My organization, the New National Parks Project, counts about 500 potential new "units" and expanded parks.

Often threatened with development or managed by federal or state agencies with less preservation-oriented missions and less funding, the list of potential major parks includes Washington's Mount St. Helens, West Virginia's Blackwater Canyon and the Maine woods. The addition of worthy areas to the park system could double the amount of land in our current system and go a long way toward putting parks within a day's travel of most Americans. With park lands making up only 14% of all federal lands, it would also put more land into the hands of proven stewards.

Far from being obsolete, park designation is an effective strategy for land protection that also benefits huge segments of the public. And with a more receptive administration and Congress in place, now is the time to act.

As we approach the national park system centennial in 2016, Congress should launch an expansion effort by authorizing and funding the study of 100 potential new parks. What better way to celebrate the centennial than with a new generation of national parks? "America's best idea" can get even better.

Erica Rosenberg is director of the New National Parks Project (www.newnationalparks.org) and a former staffer on House and Senate natural resources committees.