Endangering Our National Parks: An Editorial

White House policy threatens the environmental standards, fire safety, and very existence of our National Parks and the local economies they support
By Reid Bramblett  

(Originally published Nov. 20, 2003 on MSNBC.com. Reprinted with permission. This article won a Lowell Thomas award for travel journalism.)

What if you were the boss, and you discovered that nine out of ten of your employees thought you were making decisions detrimental to the company but darn helpful to some of your close friends? That's how 84 percent of National Park Service employees feel, according to a survey commissioned by the Rockefeller Family Fund's Campaign to Protect America's Lands (CPAL). They are concerned that "Decisions are being influenced by politics rather than professional experiences/science."

Former Shenandoah National Park Superintendent Bill Wade sounds the alarm that, "the national park system is under attack." What is it that's threatening everything from the Grand Canyon to the Great Smoky Mountains? Is it the California wildfires, law-breaking logging companies, or some supernova form of Dutch Elm Disease? Nope. It's a man who, ironically, is named after a plant himself: George W. Bush. CPAL Director Peter Altman says "All of America's public lands are under assault by an administration that favors corporations over conservation."

THESE ARE NOT HAPPY CAMPERS

The CPAL survey showed that 84 percent of National Park Service employees have expressed "a great deal of concern" about whether or not they will be able to protect park resources.

Possibly in part because they might not be working there much longer.

The Bush Administration has targeted the Department of the Interior-which oversees the National Parks and Forest services-to be analyzed for the first round of "Competitive Sourcing." That is another term for privatizing, turning over to outside contractors what are currently government payroll jobs—1,700 of them, in the case of the National Park Service. The Administration has claimed this will produce a savings of 20 percent for taxpayers.

Since when was adding a layer of middlemen a way to save money?

The idea is that government will pay private companies to manage park resources, and those companies will in turn hire and pay workers to do it. Think about that. If the government wants to lop 20 percent off the budget for parks, that means these outside companies will have to try and take the jobs currently being done by professional, trained park employees, and do them on 80 percent of the current budget.

And, since these outside companies are, unlike the government, profit-making enterprises, some of that 80 percent will have to be set aside for their profits, which means less than 80 percent of the money will go into maintaining our parks.

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Copyright © 2003 by Newsweek Budget Travel, Inc.