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As President Trump tries to trash America’s best idea, China is creating its own National Park Service and creating immense national parks to conserve tigers, pandas and other wildlife. Part of this effort will now include the largest national park anywhere on earth, at 2.5 million kilometers (or 1.55 million sq miles, or about 1 billion acres) , you could fit two Alaskas inside of it, with another 200000 miles to spare. The current largest national park is Northeast Greenland national park which covers 375000 sq miles (972000 kilometers) of the Greenland Ice cap. this park will be 4 times as big as that park, and 250 times bigger than Yellowstone. The new park, called the Third Pole National Park, will cover all of the Tibetan Plateau as well as the mountains surrounding it. China’s three largest rivers, Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, all originate in the area, along with major Asian rivers such as the Indus and Salween.
Now, unlike with Yellowstone or Northeast Greenland, people do live in the area , the Tibetan population is estimated at 7.8 million people. How China balances conserving the area with accommodating the residents, remains to be seen. Something similar to Adirondack Park in New York, or national parks in England, where development zones for cities are permitted, would be preferable. This project is being pushed by President Xi jinping, and as anyone who has done business in China can attest, if the President and the party want to do something (such as the Three Gorges Dam), it gets done. i think that protecting large areas for future generations is a good thing, and I applaud the Chinese government for setting aside a large portion of its territory (1.553M out of 3. 705M is around 40%) for conservation.