This August, the National Park Service will welcome visitors to celebrate its birthday during “National Park Week.” With special events and guided tours, the celebrations will uplift the nation’s 250th and share the stories of how parks came to be, free of charge.
Despite the festivities and fanfare, the terrible irony is that parks—America’s so-called best idea—have never been treated worse or respected less by those responsible for their care.
Shortly before July 4th, the Trump administration launched a volley of assaults on bedrock protections, rolling back policies that have long protected wildlife in parks.
Of these, President Trump rescinded orders issued by Presidents Nixon and Carter that guided off-road vehicle use. These led to regulations that limited where and when off road vehicle use could occur in the park system, protecting natural resources and the visitor experience.
These sensible protections are now in peril.
In the past year, NPS also gave itself the authority to carve roads, log trees and install communication towers in parks without notifying the public. Remarkably, Department of Interior leaders — those responsible for stewarding public lands — have brazenly called for parks to be transferred to the states. Meanwhile, roughly 25% of the NPS workforce has been driven out, hollowing the agency from within. Even timed entry and reservation systems were terminated, the premise being that parks only have value insofar as they are highly visited and serve as economic engines.
Yet, if the value of parks is judged by dollars and cents, by unencumbered access at all times and in all places, we have failed.
Take Yosemite National Park. Hordes of people, with little to no staffing supervision, have swarmed the park and overwhelmed wildlife, turning a cathedral into a carnival.
This is not the way we should treat our most hallowed spaces — nor is it what Congress demanded of the NPS.
Anticipating visitation to continue to increase, Congress enacted the National Parks and Recreation Act in 1978, which instructed NPS to identify and implement visitor carrying capacities for all areas of the national park system. By demanding a hard cap on the number of visitors that a park could accommodate at any given time, Congress wanted to prevent the very situation we see unfolding in parks today.
In practice, this mandate has been all but ignored across the country, with only a handful of parks having previously implemented the law. The result speaks for itself, with parks suffering from unsustainable visitation, increased management conflicts and inadequate budgets to keep up with the strain. Wildlife and natural resources have in turn received less attention in their time of need.
In the short term, we need to defend what remains, then rebuild the policies lost in the wake of the Trump administration.
More fundamentally, we must acknowledge that recreation is no substitute for conservation. Parks are for people, to be sure. But the law makes clear they are also for wildlife.
Indeed, the NPS Organic Act, the park system’s foundational law, directs the agency to “conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects and wildlife” of the parks in a way that will “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
That balance is now terribly askew.
There can be perhaps no greater gift to future generations than inheriting parks in a better condition than we found them.
We have a long way to go. Let’s get started today.
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