NY Times op/ed on secret Bush plan: “DESTROYING THE NATIONAL PARKS” [View All]

[Nothing Without Hope]

NOTHING is safe from the greed of the Bush administration’s continuing program of getting all the cash and political capital out of every aspect of OUR country. Now a secret draft revision of the basic rules for managing our country’s national parks – previously kept secret not only from the public but also from Park Service employees – has revealed the scope of destruction and commercialization that the Administration plans for OUR national parks. Note too the explicit allowance of religious merchandise and the exclusion of all mention of evolution. Needless to say, this draft management plan was written (by a political appointee with no Park Service experience, a former congressional aide of Dick Cheney) without any consultation of scientists or experts in park management, and it was carefully kept secret from Park Service employees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29mon1.html
New York Times oo/ed

Destroying the National Parks

Published: August 29, 2005
Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.

(snip)

Mr. Hoffman's rewrite would open up nearly every park in the nation to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and Jet Skis. According to his revision, the use of such vehicles would become one of the parks' purposes. To accommodate such activities, he redefines impairment to mean an irreversible impact. To prove that an activity is impairing the parks, under Mr. Hoffman's rules, you would have to prove that it is doing so irreversibly - a very high standard of proof. This would have a genuinely erosive effect on the standards used to protect the national parks.

The pattern prevails throughout this 194-page document - easing the rules that limit how visitors use the parks and toughening the standard of proof needed to block those uses. Behind this pattern, too, there is a fundamental shift in how the parks are regarded. If the laws establishing the national park system were fundamentally forward-looking - if their mission, first and foremost, was protecting the parks for the future - Mr. Hoffman's revisions place a new, unwelcome and unnecessary emphasis on the present, on what he calls "opportunities for visitors to use and enjoy their parks."

(snip)

There are other issues too. Mr. Hoffman would explicitly allow the sale of religious merchandise, and he removes from the policy document any reference to evolution or evolutionary processes. He does everything possible to strip away a scientific basis for park management. His rules would essentially require park superintendents to subordinate the management of their parks to local and state agendas. He also envisions a much wider range of commercial activity within the parks.

(snip)

As the author points out, many things, like the Bush administration’s efforts to force snowmobiles into Yellowstone, become easier to understand because they fit within a comprehensive plan to change from a policy of protection of the national parks to a short-sighted policy focused only on commercialization, subordination to local and stage agendas, and “full use.”

As the author says, “this is not a policy for protecting the parks. It is a policy for destroying them.”

According to this op/ed, the Department of the Interior “has begun to distance itself” from this draft, which was written by a political appointee, a former congressional aide to Dick Cheney, with no park experience. The plan was clearly to change all these rules as secretly as possible. But now we know about their plans, and we know they are lying when they deny them. This must be publicized and fought, or the preserved natural beauty of our country will be gone forever, sacrificed to short-sighted greed.