ABQjournal: Bush Plundering National ParksBy Richard B. Smith
Retired Parks Official
Wildfires get all the television air time and newspaper column inches when it comes to harm done to national parks, but there exists a much greater threat to parks: the Bush administration.
If that sounds like overheated hype and election-year politics, you can ignore my concerns as an individual, which are based on 31 years of experience as a park ranger or senior manager in various parks and regional offices of the National Park Service.
Instead, consider the unmistakable message that emerged from an October 2003 survey by the Campaign to Protect America’s Lands (CPAL) of nearly 1,400 National Park Service employees.
Nine out of 10 park rangers and other in-house experts responding to the survey are worried that Bush administration decisions affecting national parks are based more on politics and special-interest deals than on science and what is best for the parks. …
Every month seems to bring a new outrage aimed at decreasing protection for national parks and public lands in a way that means more profit for Bush campaign contributors. With this kind of unprecedented White House assault on national parks and other public lands, the pessimism of those entrusted to safeguard our national parks appears to be well founded.
The lack of optimism about the future of parks and lands is evident in the survey findings: 79 percent of respondents said that employee morale is lower than it was a couple of years ago. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed expressed a great deal of concern about “special interest influence on park policies/decisions.” Eighty-eight percent indicated a great deal of concern that “decisions are being influenced by politics rather than professional experience/science.”
The bottom line: More than four in five of surveyed National Park Service employees expressed a “great deal of concern” about being able to protect park resources. …
As a Parks Service employee responding to the survey put it: “Our parks are being threatened by special interest money and politics, which are serving to undermine a lot of our environmental protections. I think that if the American public really understood what was going on they would be outraged, but by the time the damage is realized it may be too late.”
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Richard B. Smith of Placitas retired in 1994 from his National Parks Service position as an associate regional director for resources management of the Southwest Regional Office. He previously served as superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns.
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Related, but a different group:
mjh’s Dump Bush weBlog: American Taliban
More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.