Word: parks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...misguided policy, not guided visitors, constitutes the gravest threat. Owing in part to the oil crisis of the late 1970s, Washington has encouraged strip mining, oil exploration and commercial development on the edges of many parks. Timber cutting next to Olympic National Park in Washington State has reduced the area's forest from 689,871 acres in 1959 to 106,000 acres today. "Trees in the forest are cut down to the edge of the park," says Wilderness Society President George Frampton. The Reagan Administration has authorized very little money for purchases of park land. In 1978 the budget...
Development is dangerous, contends Frampton, because the parks are part of ecological systems extending beyond set boundaries. Animals, Frampton suggests, do not follow dotted lines. "We don't object to logging on the edge of the parks just because we love trees," he says. "We object because it changes the natural conditions within the park...
...Park Service, for its part, maintains that deterioration is a myth. The lands "are in better shape than they were ten years ago," says Director William Penn Mott. The Interior Department, which operates the Park Service, is still motivated by the philosophy of former Interior Secretary James Watt that the parks are for the people -- and if the people want extra bathrooms, fast food and motels, so be it. It is only elitists, Watt used to say, who have the time and money to tiptoe through the tall grass, hearkening to birdcalls. He demonstrated his point by roaring through Yellowstone...
Minnesota Democrat Bruce Vento, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands, contends that the Park Service has been commandeered by the political appointees of Watt and current Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. He has introduced legislation to create a separate and independent National Park Service with a director who would be a presidential appointee, subject to Senate scrutiny and confirmation. The bill, which has 90 co-sponsors, has a good chance of passing...
...will not restore the parks to the purity of Eden, nor halt the waves of people pressing in on them. "Preservation involves two paradoxes," writes Alston Chase, author of Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park. "We can restore and sustain the appearance of undisturbed wilderness only by admitting that undisturbed wilderness no longer exists." Watt was right that the parks cannot be preserved like museum pieces under glass. But without better management, they risk becoming lessons in how quickly man can use up a continent...