Bush Is Trashing Our National Parks

It seems to me that George W. missed his true calling. I think he has long harbored a secret desire to be a thespian, for he's a man who clearly loves to dress up in costumes.

There's his famous Top Gun outfit, for example, which he strapped on back in 2003, strutting around vampishly to declare "mission accomplished" in Iraq. Also, every few weeks, George likes to reprise his abolish this magnificent system, and failing our children and all future generations who should receive America's public-park heritage in even better shape than it came to us. They diminish our country by shortchanging the rich culture, history, science, and natural life that spring from these unique places. For a nation of incredible wealth, this political failure is a damning stain on our professed ideals of the common goodand of good stewardship.

The politicos don't seem to get it that parks are beloved, even by people who don't like much of anything else that government does. In a Harris Poll last December, people ranked the Park Service as the most popular government program of all. With 85% support (including 83% of Republicans!), parks even outpaced such programs as crime fighting, Medicare and Social Security.

There are 388 of these public spaces, and they are widely used, especially by middle-class and lower-income families who count on them for recreation, vacation, education, and more. An astonishing 280 million visitors a year find their way to these forests, scenic rivers, historic sites, mountains, seashores, canyons, volcanos, monuments, islands, artifacts, glaciers, and other wonders -- more people than attend all football, baseball, and other professional sports events combined. For these millions, the park system is a tangible and highly valued benefit, firsthand evidence of what government is doing for ordinary folks.

The problem for park whackers is that this is one place where their whacks show. The years of budget shortfalls have taken an obvious toll on a park system that the general public considers its own. Visitors arrive to find such unpleasant surprises as reduced hours, discontinued tours andtalks, closed trails, unrepaired storm damage, boarded-up historic structures, leaky lodges, shuttered visitor centers, curtailed education programs, crumbling boardwalks, neglected campgrounds, dilapidated bridges, eroded roads -- and, of course, ever-rising fees. Here is a sampling of the deterioration, as documented in reports by such watchdog groups as The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees (motto: "Green Blood Still Runs Deep"), National Parks Conservation Association, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

• When Bush held his 2000 photo op to castigate Clinton for the system's maintenance backlog, he singled out a leaky roof at Gettysburg National Military Park. Six years later, that roof still leaked.
• The visitor center at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in Hawaii is sinking.
• Bridges in Mount Rainier National Park are in such disrepair that they are unsafe, so hikers cannot get to the park's backcountry cabins.
• Traffic jams are notorious in many parks because there has been inadequate expansion of roads and parking lots to keep up with the increase in visitors. For example, an 11 mile ride on the single-lane road to the peaks of Great Smoky Mountains National Park takes up to four hours in the summer and fall leaf season, and an average of 6,000 cars a day try to enter the main visitors' area of the Grand Canyon, which has only 2,400 parking spaces.
• Staff cuts at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore mean that a fourth of the school kids who want to participate in the park's education program must be turned away.
• The 3.4 million acre Death Valley National Park has 15 rangers to watch visitors where temperatures can exceed 120 degrees -- it says it needs 45. Of course, there's no unpleasant reality that the Bushites won't try to deny or paper over. During the 2004 election battle, for example, each of the park superintendents received an internal memo dictated by Bush political appointees. It instructed these civil servants to teach their park rangers and other staffers to use politically correct language for the '04 season. Employees were forbidden to use the term "budget cuts" to explain to visitors why the parks were in such bad shape -- instead, they were to refer gaily to "service level adjustments." In addition, they were told to assure all visitors,"This administration is very committed to preserving the resources of the national parks."