Park Budgets

Today is the Summer Solstice and the official beginning of summer. Yes the "summer season" began for many a month ago with the observance of Memorial Day, but now there is no denying it. The arrival of summer means many things: barbecues, long days, gardens and fresh produce. It is also a time when many people leave the cities for the "natural" world, visiting state and national parks in great numbers. Yet this year, many people will find these trips either more difficult or impossible. Here in Minnesota we are only ten days away from a potential shutdown of the state government due to inability to pass a budget. This would force all parks to close as there would be no money for rangers, maintenance workers, or any of the other state funded workers necessary to make them work. While many parks do charge fees for admission, campsites, firewood, and other amenities, these are generally not enough to be self-sustaining (especially since the greater the attendance, the higher the costs of maintaining and patrolling the park).

Even states where there is no looming shutdown are cutting park services, raising fees, or even eliminating parks from their systems. While it is understandable in some respects, state budgets are tight and politicians are loath to do responsible things like raise taxes or cut wasteful spending (e.g. prisons, death penalty, foreign wars, agribusiness subsidies), it is still tragic that parks (and the environment generally) are among the first "luxury" items sacrificed in the name of austerity. It is incredibly shortsighted to shortchange protection given the massive value from environmental and ecosystem services. It is also a good way to permanently undermine support for parks and other environmental protection.

We did not always have public parks in this country. Indeed, many parks, going back to the European tradition, were private estates for landed gentry, royalty, and other wealthy and powerful elites. Places they could escape to, especially in the summer, to avoid the crowds, smells, and diseases of summer cities (remember, this was before modern plumbing). It wasn't until the late Nineteenth Century and conservationists like John Muir that the idea of parks for the sake of protecting something special and wild arose. Yet it would be a huge mistake to romanticize this view. Many people know that Muir was deeply involved in the protection granted to Yosemite Valley and that Yellowstone was the first national park in the history of the world. What many don't realize is that they were not established out of some noble or enlightened concern for nature and conservation. Yes, there were conservationists then (both in the modern sense and in the "Wise Use" vein), but there were also monopolists, railroads, and promoters that all saw parks as their next meal ticket. In fact, many parks were established largely to satisfy different railroad interests. The Great Northern had Glacier. The Southern Pacific had the Grand Canyon. Prior to the official formation of the National Park Service, many parks were de facto private entities, monopolized and run by a handful of concessionaires and railroads. Many were concerned that they would be turned into something as tacky and commodified as Niagara Falls.*

This changed with the establishment of the NPS, but ever since that day it has struggled with a dual mandate: to provide access for the public but also to preserve the natural, biological, and historical features that make parks special. In recent years the NPS has erred (rightly) more on the side of preservation for future generations, which increases the recreational burden on state park systems, many of which do not carry such mandates.This increase in traffic has often been met not with increased funding but with slashed budgets. It is not only the NPS that has a massive project backlog.

There is also a new trend toward treating park visitors and the public as "customers" and "consumers" of nature rather than as owners and stewards with a vested interest. This shift is easily seen in the New York Times article linked above on budget cuts. The state of Washington is about to shift to a subscription/membership based funding mechanism that completely eliminates all independent state revenue. While it remains to be seen if this is a viable strategy economically, it is quite dangerous from a policy and perception stand point. I don't want to get into the intricacies of wilderness theory and nature as inherently valuable or only as socially constructed but it is important to understand and emphasize that support for the idea of parks and nature is strongly correlated with the idea that there are a personal interest in and benefit from them. If parks are only supported by those who choose to support them, or are only accessible to those willing and able to pay ever rising admission fees, they will no longer belong to the people but will be more akin to the Gilded Age public in name only parks. As a planner for the Idaho Parks Department was quoted, after all of these shifts in funding, admission fees, and aggressive marketing to middle and upper class park "consumers," "In what way are they state parks anymore?" While I wish the article did more to develop the idea, it's a very good question, and an important one to think about, especially with the summer park season starting up. Are these for everyone or just a select few? Do we all own them and benefit from them or are they the exclusive escape of the privileged? No matter how you choose to use parks (camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, biking, canoeing, skiing, day tripping), you have an interest in the answer to these questions and it's worth thinking about the next time you hear about taxes, budgets, or new fees.

*This isn't filled with hyperlink citations at present, I might be able to set that up at some point, but many are to articles you can only access through an academic subscription. However, if you really care I can provide interested parties with a copy of a seminar paper I wrote a few years ago on the subject that is richly sourced.

Babbitt Speaks

This is not directly park related but it is interesting. Bruce Babbitt was Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton and has impeccable environmental credentials. He is most famous for his roles as the named government defendant in the Sweet Home case that upheld the Endangered Species Act and one of the most important players in the establishment of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Now he is in the news criticizing President Obama's environmental policies, particularly in the areas of land and water protection/conservation and failure to push back aggressively on disingenuous and dangerous Republican attacks (usually based on lies and other forms of disinformation) on a wide range of environmental issues from oil leases to mountain top removal to fracking to greenhouse gas emissions.

That such a high profile former official would criticize a president of his own party in this direct a manner, even in such a gentle way, is certainly notable. It isn't often (though it is healthy and necessary) that you see this kind of behavior. (Indeed, our discourse on the environment as well as all other issues would be healthier, more productive, and more intellectually consistent and honest if we did have more intraparty criticism based on facts and well-reasoned arguments, but that's a side issue). The main point is that while Obama has done a handful of good things on environmental, natural resources, and public lands issues, on the whole there has been a lot of stalling and evasion, not to mention areas (particularly when it comes to oil drilling) where he is actively damaging the future for negligible short term gain. This should be a wake up call to Obama that the environmental community is not happy with him and will not automatically rise to his aid in 2012. It is likely that some will respond to the "better than the alternative" fear-based argument, but that won't raise nearly as much money or inspire nearly as many door knockers or phone bankers. We'll see what he does (but I don't expect him to change his moderately anti-green behavior any time soon).

Update (June 11): The Los Angeles Times agrees and uses pretty strong language and lots of examples. Unfortunately it is buried in the Saturday paper, but it's still the strongest newspaper castigation I've seen of Obama's weak and cowardly environmental record.

Update II (June 13): The New York Times also agrees though its language is much  more conciliatory to the administration (however, it appears on a Monday so it will get more views). In a related development, the power plant rules that the Op-Ed cites have been delayed again (announced after publication).

Point Reyes

First off, apologies to anyone who is reading for not posting in a long time. I've been busy with a number of personal projects and other issues. It's summer now and I'm going to be making a concerted effort to do more posting more regularly.

One of the things I've been working on is some pro bono work for an environmental non profit called the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin on the Point Reyes National Seashore potential wilderness issue. Essentially the issue is this: when the park was created there was an oyster farm operating in Drake's Bay, within the boundary of the park with a lease set to expire in 2012. The enabling legislation for the National Seashore was accompanied by a committee report indicating that all commercial activity in the bay should eventually come to an end. The owners of the reservation for use and occupancy (RUO) sold their lease to the Drake's Bay Oyster Company (which knew full well of the limitations and timeline for termination). Upon the cessation of oyster farming and removal of commercial equipment, this part of the park would become officially designated wilderness (as legislatively determined). However, the DBOC successfully lobbied Sen. Diane Feinstein ("D"-CA and friend to corporate interests of all types) to insert a rider into an appropriations bill granting the Secretary of the Interior the discretion to issue a ten year extension (called a special use permit) of the lease. For more detail on the history of this issue, see the NPS' background page or the EACMarin website.

Under federal law, whenever an agency takes an action that might have environmental effects, it must complete an environmental impact statement (EAS) in fulfillment of its duties under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).* NEPA, however, is merely a procedural statute; it does not determine outcome. The important thing is that the process is done properly and with a full review of relevant facts and meaningful input and feedback from the public. Once the EIS is complete, the Secretary can issue a decision.

What I have been doing is providing background and assistance on NEPA and challenges to a decision made under NEPA as well as providing my opinion on various aspects of the public comment process that goes into developing the EIS. The comment period has closed, now is the time to wait for the agency's decision, continue to pressure it in appropriate ways, and prepare for potential legal challenges to the outcome (there will certainly be a legal challenge either way but because of the deference courts generally give to agencies, especially regarding scientific findings in areas of agency expertise, the agency action will likely be upheld). Still, I will update once there is a resolution.


*This is, of course, an oversimplification. There are different levels of review and different types of findings, but the need for an EIS is the only relevant issue here.