When it comes to wholesome recreational activities — especially for families — the U.S national parks are both popular and affordable. America’s national parks set a new record of 293 million visitors in 2014. By way of comparison, the world’s most-visited theme park, Disney’s Magic Kingdom, had 19 million visitors in 2014. Nine of the 10 most-visited theme parks in the world are Disney properties, and they combined to attracted 148 million visitors in 2014. However, unlike the Disney properties, the national parks are in desperate need of increased maintenance funding.
This year will mark the 100th anniversary of the national park system. To celebrate, the federal government ought to perform much needed maintenance necessary to preserve the crumbling infrastructure of the parks themselves. Neglecting proper upkeep has resulted in roads in the parks that are cracking and full of potholes, an unreliable 83-year-old pipeline in the Grand Canyon that ruptures frequently and leaves visitors without water and, perhaps most troubling, a leaking wastewater system that pumped raw sewage into Yellowstone’s streams. The parks were established to keep these one-of-a-kind resources pristine for future generations to enjoy, yet here we have an instance of the would-be caretakers polluting the environment that they are supposed to protect.
Unfortunately, Congress doesn’t seem to recognize the urgency of the situation. Over the past ten years, lawmakers in Washington have only approved a meager 4 percent of the necessary repair projects, and overall appropriations to maintain the parks has decreased by a staggering 40 percent during the same time frame. This is unacceptable, and it needs to be rectified immediately.
The Property and Environmental Research Center, an advocacy group in Bozeman, Montana, has issued a report titled “Breaking the Backlog” that is gaining national attention. At the top of their report is a plea for the government to stop buying up new land when it can’t take care of the land it already owns.
"By focusing on land acquisition, limited conservation dollars are spent at the expense of properly maintaining existing lands," the report states. "Moreover, adding more public lands can exacerbate the problem because the federal government incurs even more liabilities, often with little or no means of maintaining the additional lands."
Other environmentalist groups insist this is a false choice, and that Congress can continue to purchase new land and take care of existing land at the same time. That’s certainly true, except that Congress’ neglect is what created this problem in the first place. If Washington cannot preserve the land it already has, what is the likelihood that they are going to demonstrate a more responsible stewardship of the land it is actively acquiring?
True, Washington D.C. created the National Park System, which has become phenomenally popular as reflected in the record attendance number. But it sometimes appears as if they forget that they did not create the unparalleled natural beauty of the national parks themselves. Allowing damage to these irreplaceable treasures is unconscionable and, if not hastily corrected, irreversible. That cannot be the legacy we leave our children and our grandchildren in the years ahead.