National Parks and the Administration

Not being content with laying the rest of the world to waste and giving ourselves the biggest black eye this country has ever known with the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, this Administration thinks it would be a great idea to destroy our National Park System, all in the name of progress of course.

Our local action group, cvhopefuls, received a letter from the Sierra Club today. In some ways, it's a local issue because we are the "Gateway to Yosemite" (just ask the Chamber of Commerce - they'll tell you) but it affects us all. The Administration is trying to rewrite the entire law with respect to our parks, in effect doing away with them.

Teddy Roosevelt was a strange mix and there were many things about him that I didn't appreciate. What I do appreciate was the founding of our National Park System. He must be spinning about now.

I tried several different ways to copy the letter over here. None of them worked so I went to the Sierra Club website and found a synopsis. They have much more detailed information and if you want to see what the local Sierra Club is saying, just let me know. I'll send it.

Here is the synopsis.

The National Park Service (NPS) is proposing a rewrite of the NPS Management Policies that would fundamentally shift in the policies governing the management of all our national parks. The philosophy of management for America's parks would change from one of conservation to that of commercialization.

The draft 2005 draft NPS Management Policies fail to meet the current level of protection afforded our national parks and fall short in providing clarity of guidance to national park managers. Sierra Club opposes the far-reaching changes being proposed in the NPS Management Policies proposal rewrite and urges NPS to abandon the draft and retain the current management polices.

Below is a preliminary analysis of problematic changes in the draft 2005 NPS Management Policies providing a sketch of how the proposal is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed.

Read the entire 23-page Sierra Club preliminary analysis
http://www.sierraclub.org/lands/prelim_analysis.pdf

Congress is planning to act on this tomorrow, I believe so the time for phone calls is now.