Put a Dollar Value on Our National Parks--and Keep Them Safe : Environment: By promoting tourism and ‘parkitecture,’ the Park Service pities nature, thus losing sight of what it can tell us through biological history.

The National Park Service, at 75 years old, presents a tawdry show that has everything to do with the business of marketing nostalgia and little to do with maintaining biological integrity. Thanks to its appetite for empire, the service runs 350 parks and monuments, including poets’ cottages, mountains, lighthouses and battlefields. It looks after 1,500 historic structures, 425 visitor centers and 8,000 miles of roads.

These numbers tell a tale. What counts in any bureaucracy is the budget. And what counts in budget-making is money spent on bricks and mortar, roads and bridges--those alluring visitors’ centers.

A peek at the Denver Service Center reveals more. There, 150 landscape architects work away at 50 projects, worth $100 million, a year. They share another $60 million in roadwork with federal highway authorities. Get it? Too often, the National Park Service is more concerned with what you do or do not see from your car than it is with the biological sense of its management.

The unfortunate and sometimes tragic result is “parkitecture,” the pseudo-science of manipulating people’s feelings through “design solutions,” such as the Awahanee Hotel in Yosemite or the Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone. These rustic structures are not only tasteless in their settings. They also present irresistible temptations for wrong-headed intervention, such as the millions spent by the National Park Service to save the “historic” buildings around Old Faithful during the 1988 Yellowstone fires.

The parks are our national cathedrals, where we revere dynamic natural history, where we ritually participate in the processes that make natural settings beautiful, terrifying, humbling, profound. More light-handed than the landscape architects, restoration biologists at work in the park service remind us that not all restored nature is faked, merely a myth or ideological. They tell us why our major parks urgently need the restorative roles played by fire and by big, fierce animals. They say: “The more you know about ecology, the more you recognize and appreciate the limits of human knowledge.” They know that natural-resource management is an art, not a science.

Forest ecosystems, for example, are more complex than we ever could imagine. Disturbance, disharmony and chaos may better describe forested landscapes than equilibrium, harmony and order. Too often, the terrible power of our technology can be destructively chaotic, as was the case with the military-style attempt to suppress the Yellowstone fires. In a dry year, dry woods will burn, no matter what we do. In such cases, we should step aside and learn humility. But that doesn’t mean we should leave the woods. We should simply learn to walk more lightly.

The National Park Service’s “let burn” fire policy in Yellowstone was part of a general trend in agency thinking that favors natural processes over human intervention. The cornerstone of such a policy is the recovery of Yellowstone’s grizzly bear and wolf populations. The grizzlies, sadly, are probably part of a relict population. But the situation may be different for wolves, which are coming back, heading south over the Canadian border, into Glacier National Park, down through Montana and over the Wyoming border into Yellowstone.

The founding of the National Park Service came just decades after the founding of the Forest Service. Both are products of Theodore Roosevelt’s time, of Progressive politics. The competition for power and money between the park and forest services has not served conservation well. The Park Service entered the competition for U.S. tax dollars by promising that it would conserve scenery, natural objects and wildlife for public enjoyment in such a way that would leave the parks “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” So it got into the history and religion business.

The National Park Service today represents another span of the psychological bridge America is building from an economy rooted in production to one based on consumption. Such changes challenge us to make sense of the odd feelings and pressures that accompany the transition from orthodox religious belief to our new faith in secular salvation. The miseries of these transitions alert entrepreneurs, who seek a communal means of adapting to such changes. Beginning around 1900, these means were partly expressed in the national obsession with exercise as a way of confronting disease and depression.

Yet another way of dealing with change expressed itself in the rise of the new national religion of nature as articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir. The National Park Service and the Forest Service soon competed in offering salvation, not just for the wealthy few who could afford private dude ranches, but for the consuming masses, for the taxpaying middle class, for people with time on their hands and excess dollars to spend.

And what better thing to spend it on than nature “unimpaired”? “Nature” as presented at bargain-basement rates by the National Park Service? There they were, the uplifting marvels of the parks, something that we Americans, unsure to this day of their national identity, could get our teeth into.

There may be nothing wrong with government agencies doling out salvation. There definitely was something wrong with the Park Service’s predator policy until recently. But if that has changed, and if we let the parks teach the history of biological processes, they may legitimately fulfill a conservation function we may call religious.

We must, however, never fall into the trap of pitying nature as we find it in the parks. Pity, nostalgia and disillusionment are all forms of one of the oldest spiritual vices, the sin of pride. Tourism trades on nostalgia, which is why we should minimize the role the National Park Service plays in promoting tourism. Nostalgia is only superficially loving in its renovation of the past. It treats history, especially biological history, as if the past were powerless. Anyone who believes that will live to regret it.

Speaking of the threats to Yosemite in his time, Muir said, “Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded.” Muir was the right prophet for his times. He is the wrong one for ours. We can and we should put an appropriate dollar value on our parks, where the market should determine recreation fees. The alternatives are too tempting to the guardians themselves, to the empire builders in the National Park Service. When values like those represented by our national parks are subject to the political process, values always suffer.

Religion and biology worth the name challenge complacency and pride, undermine emotional and intellectual security. That is what healthy parks could mean to us, where “health” includes fully functioning predator-prey systems. That is why we need the grizzly and the wolf, just as they need us.