Nathan C. Martin at The Baffler writes—Where the Wild Things Aren’t: National Parks:
As the National Park Service celebrates its centennial this summer, the compulsory stories and listicles acknowledging the event will lazily trot out the Ken Burns–sanctioned notion that national parks are “America’s Best Idea.” Of course, it was a good idea to protect exceptional places like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite against rapacious use of the land. But does the decision to refrain from destroying places that obviously shouldn’t be destroyed really amount to a stroke of national genius? And, given what we know about ecology a century later, should park-making still serve as a model for conservation?
Preserving nature is not the straightforward proposition it seemed to be back in Theodore Roosevelt’s day. Rough-riding politicos can no longer enshrine wilderness by simply removing indigenous people and cordoning off a few rugged sections of landscape. National parks today face conundrums of which Roosevelt could never have dreamed: climate change melting the glaciers in Glacier National Park; the systemic slaughter of nearly a thousand “excess” Yellowstone bison last winter; and across the country, park infrastructures crumbling beneath record-sized crowds and an $11.9 billion maintenance backlog.
Fiscal neglect is nothing new to the National Park Service—its budget has been a favorite target for congressional cuts since World War II. In 1953, Western historian Bernard DeVoto suggested that the NPS protest its miserly appropriations by closing America’s most iconic parks. “Letters from constituents unable to visit Old Faithful, Half Dome, the Great White Throne, and Bright Angel Trail would bring a nationally disgraceful situation to the really serious attention of the Congress which is responsible for it,” he wrote.
Today, DeVoto’s indignant words seem downright quaint. The selective closure of parklands did stir up some important popular resistance to the Gingrich-engineered government shutdown of 1995. But during the sixteen-day budget stalemate in 2013, when Ted Cruz sought to defund the Affordable Care Act, right-wing lawmakers and activists opportunistically used the sorry spectacle of World War II veterans being denied access to the National Mall to deflect blame from the Tea Party caucus onto the Park Service itself and its White House overlords. Thanks, Obama!
Yet even this Congress is able to recognize that its constituents love a big birthday. So this year, legislators cobbled together $15 million (about one tenth of one percent of the maintenance backlog) for Centennial Challenge Projects. The challenge in question, of course, is part of the pet Republican crusade of creeping privatization of public goods; the money allocated to mark the Park Service’s centennial is intended to match philanthropic gifts set aside for certain tasks. Proud Centennial Challenge donors to the nonprofit Yellowstone Park Foundation, for instance, can watch their contributions at work from the shores of Yellowstone Lake as a cigar-shaped boat gill-nets invasive lake trout and grinds them into chum right there on deck. (The Park Service, for its part, announced in May that it will start to offer naming rights to corporate donors; Bass Pro Shops, we’re looking at you.)
The floating charnel house on Yellowstone Lake is, in its own way, a fitting reminder of how the hundred-year run of the Park Service is also a testament to the particularly American tendency to manufacture and manage nature. “Wilderness,” after all, is a construct borne of European people’s inability to interact symbiotically with the world around them. As author and Lakota chief Luther Standing Bear wrote in Land of the Spotted Eagle, “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild.’ Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness.’ . . . To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.”
The proliferation of national parks—which took place, not coincidentally, at the same time as the widespread establishment of Indian reservations—punctuated the continent’s transition from a place inhabited by people who lived in concert with the land into one increasingly covered by the detritus of industrial and agricultural civilization, save a handful of pretty preserves set aside to visit.
No doubt, national parks provide important habitat for wildlife and other ecological benefits. But as a serious conservation strategy, let’s face it: aesthetic quarantine is a woefully inadequate response to our present ecological mess. In fact, philosopher Timothy Morton argues that the whole notion of capital-N Nature—something pristine and wild that’s “out there,” as opposed to the inescapable ecological medium of our existence—is an anesthetic that allows us to forget about things like global warming, mass extinction, and ocean acidification. Don’t worry about that melting glacier, folks—just concentrate on the picturesque peak beneath it. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—Sludge is now good for fish:
Just when I think the Bush Administration can't shock me anymore, they gleefully prove me wrong. You see, according to an internal EPA report, dumping toxic sludge into the Potomac River is good for fish. The sludge is dumped into the river in violation of the Endangered Species Act and Clear Water Act. The Washington Times notes:
The document says it is not a "ridiculous possibility" that a discharge "actually protects the fish in that they are not inclined to bite (and get eaten by humans) but they go ahead with their upstream movement and egg laying."
The Bush administration is a blatant enemy of environmental regulation, but the extremes they will travel to justify their polluting is bizarre. California Rep. George Radanovich, a Republican, was flabbergasted
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