I propose to close Yellowstone National Park for five years to automobile traffic.
Let visitors enter on foot or shuttle bus-maybe not even shuttle bus. Use that period to develop a whole new system of circulation, and to decide how the park should be used, based on veneration of Yellowstone as a sacred place. But that`s only the first step in regreening the national parks.
I propose to eliminate half the overnight facilities in Yosemite Valley and all the cars.
That`s for John Muir, who lamented allowing those ”blunt-nosed mechanical beetles” to puff their way into the valley and mingle their gas breath with the breath of pines and waterfalls.
I propose to close the trans-mountain road across the Great Smoky Mountains and by so doing make the wonderful wilderness of southern Appalachia whole again.
In the regreening process the administration of every park will focus on the mountains, canyons, glaciers, forests, prairies, songful rivers and the natural life systems they support. Their welfare will come first, before commerce and crowds. The same principle will apply to the national historic and prehistoric sites; Americans will learn at last to walk lightly over the dead and to treat the ancient battlefields and structures of mud, brick and stone as documents in trust.
Regreening won`t be easy. The most devastating disruptions of park values, whether from within or externally, are commercial in nature. They manifest themselves in politics, but politicians generally are limited to short-term vision, extending to the next election rather than the next century. They ask: How many visitors did the park attract last year? How much money did they spend with the businesses in my communities? Why does the superintendent consider wilderness instead of facilities and access?
Years ago the National Park Service built a reputation as a bureau powered by professional ethics, free of political pressures. This is no longer the case. Democratic and Republican administrations alike and congressional power brokers have politicized the agency, influencing personnel selection and treating the parks like political pork. The National Park Service has caved in and lost its sense of mission, its commitment to protect national parks in perpetuity.
Compromise of principle with expediency is no way to run national parks. Regreening will bring a catharsis to the bureau, transforming it from a part of the problem to a leader in effecting the solution. It will refocus the entire organization, top to bottom, in a way that re-establishes
professionalism, justifies public trust, and ensures the highest level of stewardship.
Regreening is demanding and unending, for one challenge leads to another. The future of the national parks will never be established, the parks will never be secure, until the country recognizes and corrects the wrongness of its old national agenda. Experts may argue the need of a better park science program or a better fire policy or better elk management or emphasis on interpretation or more funding for more parks, but those are surface concerns. America needs to dig deeper to re-examine goals and institutions. America needs to reclaim its wholeness in order to save its best parts.
Eddie Sue Judy, a prize student in my History 404 class at the University of Idaho, made that point clear to me. I tried to interest her in national parks history, but she had her mind set on Native Americans. We agreed, at least, that for her term paper she would discuss the question, ”Why don`t Indians go to national parks?” But that wasn`t the focus of her paper at all. It was only the title and opening line, a starting point to consider a larger issue about America and Americans that she insisted we both face.
Yellowstone in 1877, wrote Judy, was five years old as a national park, but already well traversed by tourists. They were not the only ones in the park. Their pleasures in the ”pleasuring ground” were disrupted by hundreds of Nez Perce Indians, followers of Chief Joseph, on the prowl. The Indians had been dispossessed from their ancient homeland along the Idaho-Oregon border. They had come from the fierce two-day battle in Big Hole Valley in
southwestern Montana, where many of them and their children were slain, and they were in Yellowstone on their epic attempt to reach freedom in Canada.
In the first flush of white settlement, the Nez Perce, like other native people, living as God made them, had wished for peaceful coexistence. But they stood in the way of the brave new world, in which everything, even the Earth, became a commodity.
The government`s solution to the ”Indian problem” was the reservation system, which provided places where aborigines could be Christianized, civilized and eventually merged into the American melting pot. The Nez Perce in the process were denied much of their homeland.
President Ulysses Grant in 1873 had designated a portion of the Wallowa Valley as a reservation, but Gov. L.F. Grover of Oregon forced a reversal with a tough letter of protest: ”If the (white) families should be removed to make roaming ground for nomadic savages, a very serious check will be given to the growth of our frontier settlements, and to the spirit of our frontier people in their efforts to redeem the wilderness and make it fruitful for civilized life.”`
Those who lived on reservations found themselves impoverished and their lifeways drastically changed, yet reservations became islands in the white tide where Indians could remember they were Indians. In that way, wrote Judy, they were similar to the parks, refuges where wild things could still live wild. And then to her main point regarding the 1870s: ”It signified a juncture of two important themes: removal of Indians to reservations and withdrawal of parcels from the public domain for `pleasuring grounds` and protection of natural wonders. Dispossessing native peoples and preserving native splendors might seem contradictory, but both policies had roots in a common national agenda and produced a common effect. They isolated tiny islands in a country created whole, and rendered the vast majority of remaining land fair game for pell-mell exploitation.”
Each little bit of preserved nature serves its purpose. Nature belongs where people live, as part of life. The more of it in city, county and state parks, the better the quality of community life. Nonetheless, a national park is a different kind of park. National parks approach the last representation of primeval life-to the degree possible within the artificial boundaries by which most park units were established. In a setting free of human
intervention, the visitor absorbs the ”feel” of nature and the ”weathering of the land” by winds, rivers and other geological forces.
Regreening the national parks begins with regreening the National Park Service. That is where I list it in the 10-point program that follows.
1. Encourage all employees of the National Park Service to contribute consciously and conscientiously to making parks into genuine demonstration models of ecological harmony. Open channels to better internal communication, free of intimidation and risk. All organizations, once they become large and self-perpetuating, repress independent expression, but diversity of opinion and even dissent should be allowed to circulate, like a danger signal. Insistence on respect for ecological values, no less than disclosure of waste and abuse, should be welcomed as a commitment to make government more responsive, more worthy of trust.
2. Take the message from the setting to the people where they live. Russell Dickenson, while he was director (from 1980 to 1985), warned, ”If we fail to make Americans aware of problems facing the national parks, and to involve them in choosing the right solutions to these problems, then we are failing in our responsibility as stewards of these public resources.” But the public has largely been ignored, and well-meant criticism has been stifled rather than heeded, contributing to the agency`s difficulties. Make ”shared vision, shared responsibilities” the goal and process in public involvement. 3. Set standards for entry into the big parks and standards for length of stay. Visiting a national park has been assumed as a right, but a sense of privilege and purpose must go with it. Americans should expect to leave the baggage of urban living at home and arrive with a recognition of park values and their responsibility to protect them.
4. Reduce car access in some places and eliminate it altogether in others. Downgrade park highways to simpler, slower roads. Substitute shuttle buses where feasible. Encourage train travel to the parks.
5. Determine the human carrying capacity of each park, then limit numbers of visitors to provide optimum enjoyment rather than maximum use. Get over the idea that national parks are outdoor amusement centers meant for tourism. Business may benefit, but protection of park values must come first. History demonstrates that whenever a park is treated like a commodity rather than a sanctuary, degradation of the park always follows.
6. Utilize each national park as an outdoor museum of natural history, a field classroom of human history, a laboratory of science, a source of art, literature and spiritual inspiration. Pay particular attention to school classes and to the underprivileged, based on the premise that conservation is a point of view involved with freedom and human dignity.
7. Establish vast quiet zones, free of cars, snowmobiles, dune buggies, motor-powered boats and low-flying airplanes and helicopters to ensure preservation of a peaceful environment. Apply this rule to low-level military training flights on the principle that true national defense embraces defense of the natural heritage.
8. Re-evaluate the place of each concessionaire. De-emphasize resort hotels and motels in favor of simple low-cost hotels. If the service can be provided just as easily in a nearby community, close the concession. Clean out the souvenir shops.
9. Protect the integrity of national park water, air and scenic and cultural resources and expand protection for lands surrounding parks through more effective coordination with bordering national forests and communities. Restrain the Forest Service from its damaging commodity-first programs of logging, grazing and oil and gas exploration.
10. Reconstitute the National Park Service as an independent bureau, distinctly separate from the Department of the Interior and free of that department`s propensity for partisan politics and resource exploitation. Give it authority to challenge other federal agencies, like the Bureau of Reclamation and Federal Highway Authority, when their activities affect the parks.
Regreening the parks is more than institutional; it is personal and individual. It begins with thee and me. In 1985 I climbed Mauna Loa, the world`s largest volcano, a formidable challenge. I ascended to more than 13,000 feet. At times I thought I would never make it, but I kept putting one foot in front of another. I felt empowered, realizing anew that the greatest reward comes from doing something on one`s own that demands an expenditure of personal energy, that yields the feeling of self-sufficiency away from a supercivilized world. I reflected on the early Hawaiians making their way to the top without benefit of shoes, backpacks or freeze-dried food, living close to nature as God made them.
Native Hawaiians speak of `Aina, the traditional love of land, or reverence for life. Their poetic oli, or chants, and the hula recount stories and traditions of humankind woven in the natural universe. Indigenous peoples the world over express their kinship with stars, sun, moon, forests, water and wildlife through similar rituals. The Navajo and Hopi in the Southwest have their sacred mountains, to which they turn for naturalness, healing, growth and self-realization.
Each person needs his own sacred mountain. I visualize a national park as my sacred mountain even when, as in the Everglades, there is no mountain at all. It speaks to me as a place of spirit. It tells me that transforming society begins with the person. Stealth bombers and nuclear weapons never will force nations to join in recognizing the limitations of a fragile Earth, but if I pledge allegiance to a green and peaceful planet, and if others do likewise and we believe strongly, we will make it happen.
