The words “heavy artillery”
and “national park” aren’t usually uttered in the same sentence.
Get used to it. National parks are under fire —
both literally and metaphorically. First, let’s talk about the
literal blasting. It’s proposed in one of America’s grand old
parks, Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana.
The
Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad skirts the southern boundary
of this million-acre wilderness. It’s one of the busiest rail
routes across North America, train after train hauling grain and
consumer goods back and forth over the Continental Divide. A
symbiosis between the railroad and the park dates back nearly 100
years, to when tourists first rode to visit Glacier and railroad
tycoons were the parks’ biggest boosters.
Recently,
though, the railroad is pushing for permission to blast the
mountains with howitzers to control avalanches that might hit
trains. Certainly, stopping avalanches from derailing and burying
trains is a praiseworthy goal. Trouble is, the railroad simply
wants to do it the cheapest possible way: firing cannons into the
unstable snowpack. It is easy to propose a better, literally less
explosive, way to solve this problem. That is, expanding the
network of snowsheds that already cover the most avalanche-prone
segments of the rails. If designed creatively, additional snowsheds
have the side benefit of keeping animals such as the threatened
grizzly bear from getting run over by the trains, as happens
several times a year.
Snowsheds are more expensive than
lobbing mortars. Ordinarily, one might hope that the National Park
Service and the railroad would get together and find a solution
that incorporates permanence rather than a yearly fix. But odds are
slimmer than usual these days. Creative solutions don’t come cheap.
And while business is brisk for the railroad, money is tight for
the Park Service.
It’s a dirty secret that, behind the
screen of trees, our national parks are increasingly threadbare.
Uncompleted projects pile up like junk behind a shed. Some
estimates put the maintenance backlog at $9 billion. Old septic
systems leak into otherwise pristine waters. Scenic roadways
crumble off the sides of mountains. The rare wildlife that folks
come to enjoy are rarely surveyed and studied, let alone actively
managed.
When then-candidate George W. Bush campaigned
back in 2000, he praised the national park system and pledged a
healthy investment. Specifically he pledged to eliminate the
maintenance backlog, which was then pegged at $5 billion. But that
turned out to be campaign hype. This year, President Bush has
proposed to slash national park funding by $100 million.
In my local park, Glacier park managers will no longer provide
clean drinking water at three campgrounds due to budget cuts that
will only get worse under the president’s budget. I fear that park
managers will be so busy scrambling to make ends meet that they
will fail to provide an alternative to the bottom-line attitude of
the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe railroad. The cheapest option will
be the path of least resistance.
In my more cynical
moments, I think that may be part of the plan. There is a certain
faction with significant influence in Washington, D.C. these days
that simply believes that government is bad and “private
enterprise” is good. These folks are galled by the idea of a
popular government program that, while imperfect, functions fairly
well. Social Security, is one. National parks are another.
If they lack the political support to kill a popular
program outright, they?ll starve it gradually. They will cut its
budget until it falters, then: Abracadabra; getting rid of it or
“privatizing” it is no great loss anymore. Or, as in the case with
our national forests and other public lands, they’ll keep trying to
sell it off piecemeal. To these zealots, the 100-year legacy of
public lands set aside by Theodore Roosevelt was a big mistake they
are hell-bent to correct.
Americans who love their Great
Outdoors — and isn’t that most all of us? — stand to
lose much by this steady erosion of responsible management backed
up by responsible funding. Americans enjoy world-class national
parks, and it’s time the American people woke up to radical
ideologues who merely talk about the good they’re doing on the
ground. Those of us who live in the West get to see the damage
close up, whether it’s from blasting by a howitzer or another year
of neglect.
Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a reporter in Kalispell, Montana.
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