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"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...
"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...
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...
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?
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.
> 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.
<em>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. </em>
Actually they can, just not on the 4WD Vehicles. They can, say: walk.
The Antiquities Act was originally made to protect such things. So, job done, I guess.
> Actually they can, just not on the 4WD Vehicles. They can, say: walk.
There are some pretty big distances in many places in the west. That's why people here rode horses rather than, say, walking, once upon a time.
In the grand scheme of things, a few off road vehicles are probably not that bad. Something like a coal mine, OTOH, is going to permanently alter the landscape.
I wish more policy were aimed at reasonable compromises rather than "no, everything must be absolutely pristine!" on one hand and "let's exploit the crap out of it!" on the other.
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.
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...
Rather than making someone walk 20 miles (out and back!) across mostly boring, scrubby sagebrush under the hot sun, or through bitter cold, perhaps you route the ATV trails to within, say, 1km of the site. That's what I'm talking about WRT compromises...
The common man being oppressed by the suits...
What can I say, other than I wish they didn't see it like that... The limitations can benefit everyone. Rocky Mountain NP (nearest NPS to me) is phenomenal, beautiful, and draws tourism from around the globe. There is also still tons of BLM and USFS land for more permissive recreation. At least in the Moab area, I suspect Utah is not all that different- Canyonlands & the surrounding areas is a crown jewel that draws desert recreators from hundreds of miles away.
I'm an ardent supporter of the NPS though, so I'm biased.
Right, but would you not be annoyed if land near you was swallowed up in the name of an expanded national park, and then your ability to use and enjoy the land was severely limited?
The person in question might enjoy the National Park AND the BLM land and think both have their place.. but not want one swallowed by the other.
Well, my town has been reliably voting to do just that sort of thing, absorbing public & private land in and around the town into "open spaces" that do put limits on recreation. I'm wholly in favor.
At only 30% of the land area vs the BLM, the NPS is hardly about to swallow the BLM whole.
a more complicated matter than simply trying to exploit the lands for money.
Every rule change has winners and losers.
In this case, ecotourism over mining, ranching, etc.
On behalf of all conservationists everywhere, I apologize to the citizens of the proud state of Utah for protecting their long-term tourism revenue at the expense of political campaign contributions from a few of cronies looting the public trust.
Anyone who is against this "privatization of public lands to extract wealth" can you explain what is different about this than, say, Tesla's gigafactory or your family home, or Giant Stadium, or literally every other piece of property in the world?
I don't understand how someone could be against this kind of thing and yet feel that they are entitled to their quarter acre lot just because they were able to make a deal with someone who made a deal with someone who murdered the native people who are arguably the only legitimate inheritors of the land.
The conclusion I've come to is that no land deed has any moral claim, and they should all be invalidated. Other people who are open proponents of manifest destiny and acknowledge that it's essentially just a violent power struggle and you protect your land with whatever means you have... these days being in good standing with the police force and other people with weapons... That also seems like an internally consistent position.
But people who think one piece of land can be owned by a person but another one can't... I just don't get it. How does that make sense in your head? Is it just a statute of limitations thing?
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
Fish and Wildlife manages 150 million acres:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fish_and_Wildlif...
The Bureau of Land Management, uh, manages 247 million different acres:
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
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)
The place discussed in the article isn't a national park.
For scale, the United Kingdom is ~60 million acres
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.
Makes sense. I think the overall size isn't that interesting though, without scaling by what you are actually doing with it.
Actually the point the poster is making is a good one:
National Forest is not the same as a National Park is not the same as Wilderness is not the same as BLM. Some of them can contain another, and then again: maybe not.
Getting all that straight makes talking about this all the more useful.
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/... ).
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.
Which national parks do you mean? Sure, there's the Golden Gate National Recreational Area, Point Reyes, San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, the smelly salt flats down by Fremont, and there's the California Coastal National Monument.
Surely you don't mean that developing the Presidio, an extremely small hilly portion of Marin, distant areas of the North and South bay, and literally the ocean would solve the Bay Area's housing problems?
The nearest national parks to the Bay are Pinnacles NP (130 miles from Civic Center), Yosemite (160 miles) Lassen Volcanic NP (250 miles).
Admittedly, there are a ton of regional and state parks.
And that would kill the golden goose.
That public land in proximity to the city is pretty much the exact reason people enjoy living in the Bay Area in the first place. Were they to pave the Marin Headlands, and put condos on Skyline Boulevard, and apartments at the Presidio and Lands End, you would destroy the motivation for many people to live in the region. No one can afford a yard, but everyone collectively owns significant yardland within walking and biking distance of each of their house.
No one's mentioned it because those aren't national parks, and the large national parks are quite far from densely populated areas like the bay area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_the_...
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.
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".
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.
The SF bay area is plagued by a severe housing shortage, but building up is the solution, not building out. The bay area is not dense at all.
They could allow higher-density housing. People wouldn't have to commute as far as if they were building houses up in the mountains.
Yes, they could, but that's a separate political battle against different politicians. Developing one of those parks would be an alternative solution.
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
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.
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.
This reminds me of the humorous "One-Star Reviews of National Parks" http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/i-cant-stop-r...
These issues are not relics of the past. This was passed this year in Utah:
http://le.utah.gov/~2015/bills/static/SCR004.html
See also the odd history of national parks and eugenics: http://www.jonathanspiro.com/defending-the-master-race.html
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.
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.