I visited National Parks Conservation site today to see if I wanted to download some new wallpaper for my "Baby Dell." The scene I'm currently using is of giant sequoias and every time I turn on my computer I feel like I should walk right into the picture and disappear down the dirt road. NPCA is a great site for exploring and getting information on all our national parks. Of course, it's also full of ecological news, budget cuts and the general disrepair of the parks.
I spent my time today reading an article titled "who's Ruining Our National Parks?" printed in the current on-line issue of Vanity Fair magazine. It's long, but very worthwhile. As usual, the Bush administration's single minded dedication to big business is doing damage that may be irreversible. To paraphrase, "Their system is to starve the beast." By constantly cutting back on parks' budgets, the case is made for getting more "entertainment" value out of them. Enter snow mobile and jet ski companies and the whole idea of a National Park goes down the tubes.
"Almost no one outside of (the) Interior (Department) had heard of Deputy Assistant Secretary Hoffman until last year, when he produced a startling document to further his kinds of fun: a revision of management policies for the 390 units of the U.S. National Park Service, one of the nine public-lands agencies under Interior's aegis. Like so many of the environmental changes wrought by the Bush administration, this sounded bland and unimportant. It wasn't. The management policies are the Park Service's bible," writes Michael Shnayerson.
"What concerns me," says a Park Ranger named Reynolds, "is the idea of changing the Organic Act.Â… It is the law that establishes the Park Service. It is the law that binds all the Park Service areas as units. Congressional intent tells us that 'preserve and protect for future generations' is paramount, and that if we're going to err on any side of protection versus use, we're going to err on the side of resource protection. That's part of one's indoctrination. There are training sessions where the Organic Act is taken apart element by element.
"This is the issue," he says, "that many of us are willing to fall on our swords for."
And it may come to that for Mr. Reynolds. It seems that when employees don't agree with the politicall agenda of bringing in big business, park rangers have found themselves transferred to less visible parks or in some cases fired outright.
http://www.npca.org/ for: National Parks Conservation Association
Vanity Fair>
To learn more about the Bush administration's manipulation of scientific reports see: Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/
My apologies--the Vanity Fair link worked but not the other two. ???
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