Our national parks: a vision for the second century
February 2010
by John Byrne and Vicky Hoover
In 2016, America’s National Park Service will celebrate its 100th birthday.
The Sierra Club’s National Parks and Monuments Team wants to share with you our exciting vision for the second century of the National Park Service. National parks are America’s marvelous contribution to the world.
Our vision focuses on three major concerns that people didn’t have 100 years ago, but that today are prevalent in our society: natural areas disappearing, people separated from nature, and the onset of global climate change.
Disappearance of our natural areas
It used to be that development occurred as islands in a sea of nature, but today national parks are natural islands in a sea of development. We see that national parks are needed to preserve important representative places of our natural environment. We envision a significant expansion of our National Park system, so that every major natural eco-region in our country will be represented by at least one national park or equivalent reserve.
A preliminary gap analysis shows that we must create 38 new national parks or similar areas, and expand or change designation in 28 others. This will protect habitat for the biodiversity of our flora and fauna that make up our natural world as ecosystems evolve and adapt to global climate change. By protecting natural areas that represent all parts of our natural world, we cannot only better enjoy nature, we can also learn what we must do to protect the world in which we and our fellow species live.
An expanded network of parks is also needed to provide nearby places for more people to visit—both to lessen generation of greenhouse gases from flying and driving to parks and to provide convenient close-to-home places for people to appreciate their natural and cultural heritage.
Connecting people with nature
We envision national parks able to coax people, especially young people, out into nature. Our heavily urbanized society is losing its connections to nature. A generation of children is growing up mostly indoors and often glued to the Internet. Childhood obesity is more of a problem.
We need to expand education programs in national parks to help all visitors learn about our natural world. These programs should be connected to the Internet so national parks can be learned about and appreciated by everybody, all the time. On-site programs should attract teachers and students. Classrooms should be linked to parks though the internet throughout the academic year.
We should consider reducing park entrance fees, not raising them. Entrance fees discourage use, aggravating an already significant decline in visitation. Fees disproportionately affect people with lower incomes and contribute but a nickel to the National Park Service budget dollar.
Fighting global climate change
Parks should educate visitors on climate change and how they can help out in their daily lives. We should use national parks as study sites to learn about and mitigate the effects of climate change. We must assure that the wild areas in parks stay wild through wilderness designation, so that national parks can form the core of broad protected areas to enable animal migration and adaptations essential for species survival.
We see all our national parks vigorously promoting public transportation so that people will be able to go to national parks on trains or other public transit and, once there, able to appreciate our natural world without a car. Parks can be a model of zero emissions.
The United States invented the National Park, but today we lag behind other countries in using national parks to learn about, protect, and perpetuate our natural world. Expanding our system of National Parks should be the prime goal of the Second Century of our National Park System.
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