National Parks at a Crossroad: From Playgrounds to Preserves : Parks: Dozens of natural areas are being proposed as additions to the federal system. Opponents say such plans could wreck local economies.

Allow the hermit this much: the Siskiyou Mountains are lovely. The rounded summits bristle with fir trees. Deep valleys shelter wild, sparkling rivers.

Is this southwestern corner of Oregon worthy of national park status? The hermit thinks so, but others have doubts. Where, they ask, are the geysers or snowcapped volcanoes, the jaw-dropping scenic wonders?

The hermit is Lou Gold, self-appointed guardian of the Siskiyous. He answers by snatching a tattered scrap of vegetation from under a tree.

“Lichen,” Gold said, a triumphant smile gleaming through his tangled beard. “This may be 100 years old. It grows in the tree canopy and takes nutrients out of the air. When it falls, it gives those nutrients to the soil, and they get taken up by the roots of trees. . . .”

After a 10-minute lecture on forest ecology, he gets to his point:

“Let’s get away from the idea that a park requires a big canyon or waterfall or geyser. Let’s move to the idea of bio-diversity, or the range of life, as the attraction. You’re protecting the ecosystem, not scenery for human enjoyment.”

A revisionist view, to be sure. Recreational use has been a big part of the national parks since Yellowstone was set aside in 1872 as a “pleasuring ground.” The mission of the National Park Service, observing its 75th anniversary today, was spelled out by Congress then: to manage the parks “for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Gold is not alone in his views, however. Environmental activists nationwide are rallying under the banner of ecosystem protection and proposing dozens of huge new parks, from the Mojave Desert to Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp to the dark woods of northern New England.

They say the older national parks have done well at setting aside magnificent chunks of rock, but not so well at preserving the health and diversity of living landscapes. The parks, they say, have become islands in a sea of pollution and development.

Their answer: more parks, larger parks, new kinds of parks, and old parks expanded to follow ecological rather than political boundaries.

All of which worries people trying to make a living in areas proposed for parks. Ranchers, farmers, miners and loggers--fearing for their own health and diversity--say it’s not practical or desirable to lock up large tracts of potentially productive land.

Americans have come to cherish their established national parks as places of refuge and solace, but, as is evident from the debate over these gentle Oregon mountains, setting aside a new park can be anything but peaceful.

“Practical?” Lou Gold sat on a log near the top of Bald Mountain and pondered the word. “This is the genetic library. How could we think it practical to throw the library away?”

Gold, 53, came to Bald Mountain from a world of libraries. He taught political science for six years at the University of Illinois in the 1970s. Finding neither fulfillment nor tenure there, he became a cabinetmaker, only to conclude that was not his destiny, either.

In 1982, he moved to southwestern Oregon. The next spring found him in the forest near Bald Mountain, sitting with other protesters to block bulldozers clearing a logging road through the Siskiyou National Forest.

After his arrest, Gold hiked up Bald Mountain, hoping to learn more about the place he had risked his neck for. He intended to camp out for a few days. He stayed 56 days, and in the process fell in love with the land. He has maintained his mountaintop hermitage every summer since, hiking down only to pick up supplies.

Gold can talk for hours about the Siskiyous’ history, both natural and political. This is the most botanically diverse region in the West, he says, with more than 1,400 plant species.

Here also lies the largest remaining stretch of unprotected wild land on the Pacific Coast. Environmental activists consider it a last stand in their fight to block the march of roads and loggers’ clear-cuts across the Northwest’s old-growth forests.

In this battle, Bald Mountain is ground zero: it lies half in a national forest managed primarily for timber-cutting, half in the protected 180,000-acre Kalmiopsis Wilderness. Environmental groups want the wilderness enlarged to form the core of a national park of at least 750,000 acres.

Gold began his vigil quietly and mostly alone, by entertaining the occasional hiker who looked him up. After a few years, the teacher in him resurfaced. He came down from the mountain, put some photographic slides in his pack, and hit the road.

An energetic speaker, he quickly built a reputation as an ecological guru. Today, he darts around the country speaking at college campuses, Rotary luncheons and even a hairdressers’ convention.

“My role is to put this area on the map of national awareness,” he said. “To put it glibly, I have a mouth big enough for the mountain to come out.”

Two miles away on the northeast shoulder of Bald Mountain, logger Malcolm Robertson stands in a clear-cut--on part of the land Gold wants preserved--and shakes his head.

“I’ve been to Yellowstone. Now that’s something special to see, geysers and such,” Robertson said. He looks out over acres of stumps and the forested ridges beyond. “I wouldn’t bring my family to see this,” he said.

Many local residents agree. Loggers, already cramped by restrictions protecting the habitat of the spotted owl, vigorously oppose a national park. The visitor’s bureau in nearby Medford came out against it, saying it wouldn’t draw enough tourists to offset the loss of timber dollars.

Robertson, a logger for 41 years with several chain-saw gashes in his legs to prove it, would rather let the debate rage on without him. But the conflict caught up with him, anyway. Monkey-wrenching protesters poured sand into the crankcase of his log loader, and the engine cost $3,000 to replace.

His sun-beaten face gives him a fierce look, an image heightened by the “Spotted Owl Hunter’s Association” cap he wears. But Robertson is soft-spoken, his manner as gentle as the deer that he shares his lunch with each day. He seems surprised that someone has hiked into a clear-cut to seek his opinion. The pilgrims never stop here.

“I don’t think much of the park idea,” he said. “It would take away a lot of jobs. It would do this area in. Lumber’s going to go sky high, and people won’t be able to afford houses.”

He complains about outsiders deciding the fate of his back yard: “Some of these folks back East, they don’t even know where Oregon is.”

But at age 61, the years of hard work and hard times have drained much of the fight out of him. More parks and less logging seem inevitable, he said: “It’s all a matter of who hollers the loudest.”

America’s national parks, copied worldwide as models for preserving natural areas, now offer evidence that even our most cherished landscapes cannot escape global environmental problems.

Smog drifts into the Grand Canyon from Los Angeles and a coal-fired power plant in Arizona. Acid rain is killing trees in Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain national parks. Pollution and swamp-draining outside Everglades National Park have left waterfowl in the “river of grass” gasping for life.

Given such threats, the idea of ecosystem protection--managing the parks as parts of larger living communities, not as isolated shrines surrounded by development--appeals to park managers. But they are bound by political realities, and resource users outside the parks strongly oppose government interference.

For example, early drafts of a recent management plan for the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem gave higher priority to preservation in national forests around Yellowstone Park. But the final plan was weakened considerably last winter after ranchers and loggers lobbied against it.

“For the most part, ecosystem management--even in a showplace like Yellowstone--is more rhetoric than reality,” said David Simon, lobbyist for the National Parks and Conservation Assn.

By proposing new parks with ecosystem boundaries in mind at the outset, environmentalists hope to head off some of the problems in existing parks, and, at the least, extend protection to a wider selection of ecosystems.

Two such park bills are before Congress. One would create a 1.5-million-acre national park in California’s Mojave Desert. Another would designate an 11,000-acre ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas a tall grass prairie monument.

Many other park proposals are in the works. In 1988, Simon’s group published a wish list of 99 new proposed national parks, from the Florida Keys to the Great Divide of Idaho and Montana, from 17 miles of wild Maine coastline to a 97,000-acre chunk of Kauai, a Hawaiian island.

In May, the Wilderness Society proposed four new national parks, including one in the Siskiyous.

The lists make Bill Grannell cringe. He is executive director of the Western States Public Lands Coalition, a group of resource-users. He says that such grand preservation schemes may appeal to urbanites who have no direct links to the land, but his rural constituents need to make a living.

“If you could have played philosopher-king back in the days of Thomas Jefferson and said, ‘We just bought all this land and don’t want to develop it,’ you might have been able to score out large parcels of land and say it’s off limits,” Grannell said. “But now, to do it after the fact is terribly unfair.”

Come quitting time each day, Malcolm Robertson drives his battered pickup down the dusty logging road and locks the gate behind him to keep out monkey-wrenchers.

Logging is all he knows, so he’ll stick it out, but he tells younger men to stay away from timber work. No future in it, he said.

Shortly before sunset each day, Lou Gold hikes from his camp up to the summit of Bald Mountain, where he has built an American Indian-style medicine wheel honoring the four winds of the Earth.

The wheel, a 30-foot circle of rocks and sticks, is a good place, he said, to peer into the uncertain future of the forest.

“We’re not talking about destroying the economy,” Gold said. “We’re talking about changing it.” Stop exporting logs to Japan, he said. Practice more environmentally sensitive logging methods. Give aid to timber towns caught in the change.

With every solution, he moves further from present reality, higher up his mountain of idealism. He dreams of a less consumptive society, of a time when people will treat the natural world as a family to which they belong, not as a slave to be mastered.

While he believes the Siskiyou Mountains should become a national park, he admits that he is not an impartial judge.

“My true answer,” he said, “is this: All our places are important.”