Quote:

Can nation's parks survive the pressure?Inside and just outside, they are increasingly being squeezed
By Frank Bass and Rita Beamish

Updated: 9:17 a.m. ET June 20, 2006
This two-part Associated Press series found that the national parks are facing unprecedented pressures inside and outside their borders from population growth, homeland security concerns and Americans’ desires for conveniences such as hotels, restaurants, stores, cell phones and vacation homes.

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. - The ice-covered mountaintops are shrouded by fog. A stream gushes against the rocks on a headlong rush to the lake. High above the deserted visitors’ parking lot, an elk stares at a lone hiker.

Glacier National Park is an island, a sanctuary from the outside world.

For how long?

To the west, subdivisions, vacation homes and large chain stores march toward its borders. To the north, bulldozers pause for the winter before pushing deeper through the forests to a planned coal mine in the Canadian Flathead River Valley.

To the south, an emotional debate rages over whether to allow oil and gas interests to explore a sacred Blackfoot Indian plot. From above, gradual warming continues to nibble away at the park’s famed glaciers. Once as many as 150, they barely number 35 today.

“If this keeps up, we may be looking at the National Park Formerly Known as Glacier,” said Steve Thompson, a Montana program manager for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association.

Glacier is not alone.

Cell phone towers appropriate?
Within their boundaries, the parks are generally calm, placid and among the world’s most beautiful places. The National Park Service said 95 percent of visitors rate their experience as good or excellent.

Nonetheless, 30 cellular phone towers have been erected inside parks; one is in view of Yellowstone’s famed Old Faithful geyser. At Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain, an emergency radio communications tower has been constructed above Civil War cannons.

At Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, officials have built an $18 million, 30-mile steel-and-concrete vehicle barrier to slow illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Fifteen sea and lake parks have acquiesced to recreational enthusiasts and are allowing Jet Skis and other personal watercraft, or are expected to do so.

At the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the clatter of tourist helicopters and whine of planes compete with the rush of the river, the warbling of birds and the whispers of the breeze.

Outside pressures
Just outside park borders, the pressures are more dramatic from construction, population explosions, pollution, exotic species — even illegal aliens.

An AP analysis of census data shows that more than 1.3 million people since 1990 have moved into counties surrounding six of the best-loved parks: Gettysburg, Everglades, Glacier, Yellowstone, Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains.

The average number of people per square mile in those counties has grown by one-third. The four urban counties around the Florida Everglades show the most dramatic gains. But even in the remote areas of Glacier, the number of people per square mile has risen from eight in 1990 to 11 in 2005.

Likewise, park visitation has soared from 79 million in 1960 to 273 million today.

Pollution that has drifted scores of miles into parks is affecting visitors, plant life and wildlife.

Last year, the air breathed by park visitors exceeded eight-hour safe levels of ozone 150 times in 13 parks, from California to Virginia. Overall, air at one-third of parks monitored by the Park Service continues to worsen even as the government puts in place pollution controls aimed at clearing the air by 2064.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, the most frequently visited park, has air quality similar to that of Los Angeles.

Many others, including Shenandoah in Virginia, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Sequoia and Kings Canyon in California and Acadia in Maine also suffer reduced views and damage to natural resources, mostly from pollutants from coal-fired power plants.

Foreign species of plants, animals, bugs and worms that travel via vehicles and visitors now invade 2.6 million acres of national parkland and are destroying natural resources.

Trails for illegal immigrants
The Mexican border and homeland security demands pose their own pressure. As many as 1,000 aliens and drug smugglers pour into Arizona’s Organ Pipe daily, diverting 75 percent of rangers’ time to the problem, superintendent Kathy Billings said.

The crush of human traffic has driven the endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelope and threatened pygmy owl from their habitats, while leaving a trail of ravaged vegetation and human excrement.

“Some areas, the smell of the human waste just hits you,” Billings said recently. “It’s overwhelming right now and it’s not safe for our staff to go out and start a cleanup.”

Massive new water demand from explosive population growth is draining water aquifers that affect parks.

In Florida, the fast-draining Everglades are affected by an average of 900 new Florida residents a day who create a daily new demand for 200,000 gallons of water, the park service said.

The Devil’s Hole pupfish, a teaspoon-sized fish in the Nevada desert of Death Valley National Park, is the impetus for recurring complaints from park officials against sprawling development in southern Nevada.

Park officials link the incremental decline in the water level of the endangered fish’s rock-pool habitat to pumping of the interconnected aquifers that quench the region’s thirst.

The park awaits money from Washington to determine which part of the deep aquifers affect Devil’s Hole and the 38 adult pupfish it holds.
Homes seen from inside parks - Page 2
'Reactive mode' during peak times - Page 3
'Juggling act' at nation's parks is not funny - 3 pages

I know its a long read but well worth it. Locally NW Ohio is losing its historical and Unique to America Black Swamp land to development at quite a fast rate and if it continues there are only going to be just a few hundered acres left which is already in protected parkland. We've already lost a Newly discovered Battle of Fallen Timbers site to another high end mall development even though 2/3's of the local population is middle - low class. Especially read Juggling act.
Keep the debate clean.

I know there's pressure to open up logging in the Olympic national park up here.

But really, i though part of going to national parks was to get away from all of that? If i'm heading up to Mt. Rainier...i expect there to be no cell signal.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

They should close all these parks. What purpose do they serve? It's "nature" for people who've never actually been in nature. Real nature doesn't include trails, signs and a tour map. Also, most people are too dumb to wander around in nature, they think everything is either a toilet or a trashcan. So they just throw their crap on the ground. People have no respect for nature or life so they shouldn't be allowed pretty places to relax in. I say close the parks, get rid of all that woodland, and the a-holes who never appreciated it while it was around can go hang out in a concrete parking lot their next vacation. Plenty of toilets and trashcans there.

Besides, it's about as "real" as a Hollywood backlot. Right next to my house are woods that go right up to the North Pole if you follow them long enough. Thousands of miles of uninterrupted woods. Real nature, not expertly maintained fakery.

parks should remain. timbering and any other man made advances should NOT be allowed. our forests and wetlands are disappearing faster than we know what to do. im not a "hug the trees" hippie type by any means. but we need to preserve this stuff for future generations.

Everything ends. Everything dies. Every generation has had to live in world totally different than the one before it. This is no different.

no one is trying to prevent that....they are just trying to save some for the next generations to enjoy. could you imagine growing up and not knowing what a forest was? or not being able to see the natural beauty that our country has to offer?

The purpose of national parks is not just our petty enjoyment... it is to protect the most spectacular scenery and wildlife that remains in this country. It doesn't matter if there are restrooms or a couple gift shops, you barely notice these things if you are in these parks. The "conveniences" may take away from the nature, but they have to put these things in there for the tourist market. The parks would have no funding or interest if there were no tourist facilities. The facilities have little or no impact on the surrounding landscape anyway. Have you been to a national park before? Less than 1% of the acreage is man-made. You can easily hike away from the roads and forget about everything.
If you lose this stuff, what will be around for the future generations to appreciate? Plus, imagine the impact on wildlife if the national parks were eliminated. I'd say 50% of all US creatures would go extinct. Plus you'd have ugly oil-drilling facilities and cities built over one-of-a-kind sights...

Here's another article on the same subject I scanned out of the December issue of Men's Journal

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THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA'S PARKS
by Joshua Kurlantzick
MOST DAYS DURING THE SUMMER THE COBALT Waters of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore look smooth and calm, a blue canvas dotted with islands and fringed with beaches. One of the world's top sea-kayaking destinations, Apostle, on Lake Superior, draws paddlers who come to island-hop, explore deep caves, and drift beneath crimson sandstone bluffs that jut dramati­cally over the water. Some kayak-ers stop for hours on Stockton Island, where wild black bears, some weighing 400 pounds, tear through the thick forests. But Superior around the Apostles should not be underestimated, as deceptively severe storms can make it seem less of an inland lake and more like the North Sea.
In August 2004 a father and son from Wisconsin planned a sea-kayak outing from the Apostle launch site. The son, an athletic 23-year-old, was looking forward to returning to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he captained the soccer team, playing
so joyfully fans reportedly donned shirts with his name on them at games. The father remained in good health too, and the pair reached the put-in wearing light­weight clothing — the son wore a T-shirt instead of a wetsuit — despite the ss-degree water. Miss­ing a small-craft advisory but aware of the building wind, the two decided against the open lake and opted for following the shore­line. After two tries they launched successfully but soon rounded a bend to find themselves exposed to winds clocked at 40 knots and tossed about like tub toys in six-foot swells. Eventually the swells ejected the two from their kayaks and swept them toward shore. Washed up on the rocks at the mouth of a cave, the son was most likely suffering from hypothermia.
Among the whitecaps the father made an impos­sible decision: stay, or go for help. With no one around, he decided to swim for help. He swam nearly a mile through turbulent water back to a beach, an almost superhuman feat of endurance. A hiker, seeing the father in the water, roused a res­cue crew. They zoomed back to the young man and then airlifted him to a nearby hospital, where doctors spent hours trying to resuscitate him. He died in the hospital that evening.
The dad later found a salve for his loss. "The father told me that what happened was meant to be," says Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Apostle Islands. "He seemed to be at peace with it, as if God had ordained it."
But Krumenaker can never forget. If they had more rangers on hand, Krumenaker says, someone from his staff might have persuaded the pair to wait out the weather. "We would have said, 'Hey, do you have experience in these conditions?'" Even today, Krumenaker says, "we still have a small staff of
I rangers to do search and rescue. It's very frighten-| ing." A soft-spoken man with a lilting, upbeat voice, I Krumenaker becomes solemn. "Had we been staffed
at the levels of previous years, we might have been
able to stop them."
Budget Crisis
THE APOSTLE ISLANDS' STORY IS TRAGIC, the kind of worse-case scenario that haunts conscientious rangers forever. Sadly, our parks have never been more vulnerable to such misfortune. At present America's national parks no longer have enough money or staff to protect visitors, prevent the poaching of wildlife or fossils, or even keep restrooms open in some of our country's proudest attractions. President Bush and the new secretary of the interior Dirk Kempthorne announced this August an ambitious park revitalization plan for 2016, the centennial of the modern Park Service, but they face a greater chal­lenge than they probably realize.
Behind the scenes, away from the best photo-op turnouts and overlooks, the reality on the ground in our national parks varies from passable to downright grim — the result, according to career Park Service personnel, nonpartisan government auditors, and cit­izen advocates, of a decade or more of budget cuts. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently revealed that when inflation is taken into account, a majority of parks experienced a decline in their operating budgets between 2001 and 2005. Another recent study, conducted by the Congres­sional Research Service, which provides nonpartisan research and analysis to lawmakers, estimated that the maintenance backlog (defined as scheduled or planned maintenance that has not yet been per­formed) ranges from $5.8 billion to $12.42 billion. I Much-needed repairs to bridges and roads alone — j safe passage into and through the parks — exceeds j $3 billion. And the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a Washington, DC-based group devoted to parks upkeep and revitalization, projects that the annual budget shortfall for parks has grown from $600 million to $800 million. Any way you slice it, the parks are in need.
Cuts in the parks budget, which is set and approved by Congress and the White House, haven't just hurt the more remote, less visited parks. The GAO report and other investigations found that top-tier parks like Grand Canyon, Acadia, and Bryce Canyon have stopped or reduced patrolling in the backcountry, opening the door for more accidents. Yosemite has left some dispatcher services vacant, threatening the park's ability to provide 911 rescue services around the clock. The single most pronounced and pervasive impact of the budget cuts has been on payrolls. Nearly every park had fewer full-time employees in 2005 than it did in 2001, and many are going with­out biologists, botanists, safety experts, and, perhaps most alarmingly, law enforcement rangers. An inter­nal park document recently released by Public Em­ployees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a watchdog group, revealed that the parks have only 601 of the recommended 806 U.S. Park Police offi­cers, which is fewer than the number employed before September n, 2001. Yet the park police are re­sponsible for some of the most cherished national monuments — and potential terrorist targets — such as the National Mall and the Statue of Liberty.
Setting aside any terrorism threats, the frequency of assaults and other crimes victimizing guests to locations such as the National Mall have risen markedly, and rangers find they have to go on dan­gerous calls without backup, accepting risks no big-city cop would tolerate. One shocking oft-cited study, from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, concluded that park law enforce­ment rangers were 12 times more likely than FBI agents to be killed or injured on the job.
Short of money, park superintendents face difficult choices. Mount Rainier National Park sits near an active volcano, but — no joke — the superintendent does not have the money to hire a volcano expert. At Glacier National Park, officials have floated the pos­sibility of discontinuing maintenance on some hiking trails. In fact, volunteers now fill in regularly as the ranks of interpretive rangers (those with science and history degrees) have thinned. A study by NPCA found that parks now have one interpretive ranger per 100,000 visitors, the lowest ratio in years. Some parks, says a separate report prepared by the Coalition of Na­tional Park Service Retirees, cannot afford first-aid
personnel, safety demonstrations, or even tests to en­sure safe drinking water. Moreover, rangers also lack resources to prevent poaching, even though it is in their charter to protect and conserve the natural resources of the parks they patrol. The FBI estimates thieves re­move artifacts from national park land nearly every day. At Death Valley National Park, one of the sys­tem's greatest treasures, superintendent J.T. Reynolds faces a typically hard set of choices. One concerns how big a priority to make of the old mine shafts dot­ting Death Valley that visitors love to explore. Some are safer than others. And many are unmarked and open to the sky. "We just don't have the funds to make the shafts totally safe," Reynolds says. He would love nothing better than to build safe covers for these shafts, but Reynolds needs what funding he has for other priorities. The shafts remain uncovered. "Someone could just fall in," he says. "It's like play­ing Russian roulette."
Malign Neglect
THE DECLINE OF THE NATIONAL PARKS HAS not been merely a function of bureaucratic bungling or gross mismanagement, but a deliberate starvation diet that the public has only been made aware of thanks to a handful of brave whistleblowers. Under the cover of green-sounding phrases and programs, a group of lawmakers in the White House and Congress has quietly un­dermined America's national parks for its own gains. Many of these folks are Bush or Norton appointees and have survived recent turnover at the top of the Park Service and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the parks, and they remain a threat.
Here's how they've operated: First, cut budgets. Then, as the parks realize they need to rely on more money from outside sources, gather private-sector interests that support new uses (timber cutting, energy exploration and extraction, motorized recre­ation), and present them as willing to lend a hand to "rescue" the parks from their financial woes. Next, coach these lobbies and corporations to say all the right things about the parks — about restoring our natural heritage, how parks are America's gift to the world — and pledge to help spruce them up in exchange for concessions contracts, sweetheart spon­sorship deals, more grazing or mineral rights, etcetera. Following this approach, park-conservation groups, rather than serving as allies, become a hindrance, so cast them as backward, anti-fun purists unwilling to consider opening parks to new uses or to prepare for the future.
As with Bush's first secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, many of these self-styled parks reformers became involved in politics in the 19805, when, as young activists, they got their first Washington jobs under Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt. Watt and others helped create the conservative "Wise Use" movement, which celebrated landowners, farmers, ranchers — the little guy, whom advocates
saw as burdened by environmental laws. Wise Use also focused heavily on expanding into Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property and the national parks for resource extraction.
"They were the Earth First! of industry," says David Helvarg, author of The War Against the Qreens: The "Wise Use" Movement, the New Right and the Browning of America. "The Wise Use agenda was pretty explicitly about getting access to public lands, but it took on this cloak of empowering people."
Watt, in particular, proved controversial, and a rallying cry for environmentalists, so much so that many of his proteges, including Norton, learned from his mistakes and either kept their agendas more discreet or moved into lobbying. As lobbyists they maintained their suspicion of conservation and em­braced big business — big timber, big energy, big outdoor recreation. These industries desired public lands, but unlike the little guy they did not want gov­ernment to leave them alone; they needed access to government lands. Among the most notable lobbyist-appointees: Steven Griles, who would serve as Bush's deputy secretary of the interior, became one of the leading lobbyists in Washington; Rebecca Watson, an Interior assistant secretary who represented groups that wanted to weaken environmental laws; and the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, who lobbied for mining firms, even coauthoring an article called "Defending Charges of Environmental Crime — The Growth Industry of the '90s."
Although many parks enthusiasts agree that rethinking parks management has merit (parks need to embrace new technologies, employ modern business practices, and attract the YouTube gener­ation) they also say that the starve-and-invade tactics of the Wise Use alumni have led directly to the sorry state of the parks today. Under the influ­ence of these legislators and lobbyists, one former Interior Department official says, "Congress has zero-funded a lot of the programs for which the National Park Service is responsible."
A Confederacy Of Motorheads
THE CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE BUILDINGS in downtown Washington don't pose any architectural threat to the Capitol's majestic dome. Square, blocky structures, they con­tain mostly drab offices with bare walls. But not Room 1324 of Longworth House Office Building. Befitting the home of the House Committee on Resources, where congresspeople decide the future of America's lands, the walls of Longworth are covered with vast murals of legislators posing like hard-bitten outdoors-men. One shows a congressman atop a broad mesa, surveying the vista like a big-game hunter.
On a humid day in early June a horde of lobby­ists in suits waits at one end of Room 1324. They're here for Great Outdoors Week, in theory a series of events to celebrate conservation, the national parks, and "improving health through recreation." But Great Outdoors Week, the brainchild of the Amer­ican Recreation Coalition (ARC), is not all it seems. The group does not represent environmentalists
or hikers or skiers; its membership comprises motorized-recreation companies that want more access to public lands and large businesses trying to make profits off the parks.
Many Great Outdoors Week events exclude the public and focus on arranging meetings with gov­ernment officials, a strange tactic for encouraging public health. "The motorized-recreation industry needs to have high-profile events so that our voices are heard loudly enough," says Brian Hawthorne of the BlueRibbon Coalition, another leading motor­ized advocacy group.
The ARC's members have come out in force: people such as Aubrey King, a veteran lobbyist for the snowmobile industry; or representatives from the Good Sam Club, a recreational vehicle as­sociation; all wearing large "Great Outdoors Week" stickers on their suits. There's Derrick Crandall, a longtime lobbyist who now serves as head of the ARC, an energetic, hawk-faced man with arched eyebrows and a narrow mouth. After making small talk with other lobbyists, Crandall bounds up to the front of the crowd. He tells a heartwarming story of how disadvantaged kids rebuilt a park boardwalk. He touts Toolbox for the Qreat Outdoors, the ARC's
CD of ideas for outdoor fun.
Then he gets down to his real agenda. He lists the ARC's lobbying priorities, then makes way for Congressman Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican. A middle-aged man with an oblong head and a tuft of hair crowning a receding hair­line, Pearce chairs the House National Parks Subcommittee, on which he oversees every element of how parks are run.
A conservative and a former oil-industry busi­nessman, Pearce apparently has decided that rangers discriminate against anyone who wants to bring a lit­tle petroleum-powered fun to the parks. "The cul­ture [of the parks] says there is one mission, to conserve and preserve," Pearce says. "Actually there are two missions, and I think they subjugate the sec­ond, which is entertainment and enjoyment." Other key congresspeople overseeing the parks agree with him, though a few, such as Republican senators Craig Thomas and Lamar Alexander, have proved to be old-school holdouts.
Value of marijuana plants removed from California's Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks between January and September 2004: $176 million
The room goes church quiet as Pearce begins to speak, launching into a tirade against how the NFS operates today. "The parks hate visitors," he tells the crowd, his voice marinated in disdain. "We have a culture in which the parks view visitors as an inter­ference to deal with." He pauses as lobbyists in the audience nod in agreement. The congressman also believes rangers won't deign to raise money from companies. "Seeing someone who didn't want to increase their business was offensive to me," Pearce thunders. "You, as a concessionaire, they didn't want you in their religion. They've got this mentality that [the Park Service is] more pure than anyone else."
He looks out at his people and promises to dras­tically change the parks. "It will take years for this culture to go away."
Pearce is trying to speed up the process. For hear­ings he controls he picks witnesses who focus on how parks are alienating visitors and their need to bring in more money, possibly through motorized recreation. According to the former Interior official, Pearce has adopted handicapped usage in the parks as a pet issue in part because helping the dis­abled, especially those in wheelchairs, will require roads and trails that can be used by off-road vehicles. Pearce's politics may be galling to some park advo­cates, but he's not even their biggest worry.
Commercial Threats
THOUGH PEARCE MAY KNOW SOME LUDDITE parks officials, most NFS superintendents realized more than a decade ago that they could not rely exclusively on government funding if they wished their parks to succeed; pro­gressive superintendents have sought outside money to
fix parks and cultivate new visitors. Consequently, they built local support groups to fund certain oper­ations, developed plans to raise more of their own money, and, carefully, outsourced park services. "We have a business plan; we have future analy­ses; we know how to handle business plans," says John Donahue, superintendent at the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. "We are try­ing to pay for as much as we can." Donahue adds that the park already has some properties leased.
But instead of rewarding park managers for their growing business sense, the White House has pushed them for more cuts. In 2000, while cam­paigning, Bush promised to spend $5 billion over five years in new money on parks. In office he has sub­mitted budgets reducing park funding. Today the maintenance backlog stands at more than two times the figure it was when Bush took office.
Even after a federal internal audit revealed that most parks faced declining budgets, the administra­tion ordered parks to identify potential new budget cuts. At the same time, many rangers say, the Inte­rior Department has done little to support park man­agers who have solicited money from local donors and "friends of the parks" groups rather than turn­ing to corporate patrons.
With little fanfare, says former NFS deputy director Denis Galvin, top park officials informed staff that they must aggressively solicit corporate money. Controversy erupted last year when the Park Service proposed a rule change that would have allowed employees to directly solicit donations and donors to be recognized on plaques and benches. The agency backed down after public outcry.
"Superintendents being out there solicit­ing funds is a really dangerous idea," says one superintendent who worries rangers will cater to whichever company gives them funds.
With less money and little government support for conservation, rangers are also too strapped to fight energy companies and groups such as the ARC that want to al­low more snowmobiles, off-road vehicles, or jet skis into parks. Motorized recreation leaves a greater scar than hiking or biking or boating, and polls consistently show the public opposes motorized vehicles in parks. The NPS's own studies show that in Yellowstone, snowmobiles top no decibels, a wall of sound equivalent to a Korn con­cert. Worse, studies show off-road vehicles cause erosion that can take years to repair, trample cultural and archaeological sites, crush vegetation, and leak fuel into streams.
Ultimately, if the parks go broke, they could be vulnerable to attempts by some legislators to sell them off. That could lead to more situations such as the one at Fort Hancock in New Jersey, part of the Gate­way National Recreation Area, where the Park Service has leased some of the fort's historic buildings to a private developer be­cause the agency can't afford the upkeep. Opposition to the plan has been fierce, and the project has been delayed.
Future beneficiaries of parks in trouble will likely not be real estate developers but energy companies. In a 2005 speech, Rebecca Watson, the Interior assistant sec­retary, succinctly summarized the admini­stration's energy philosophy when she announced, "The Interior Department is implementing an aggressive program to en­courage industry to develop energy re­sources.... Nowhere is the challenge greater than in the development of natural gas on federal lands in the Rocky Mountain West." And the administration has fulfilled Watson's intention. BLM officials say a secretive White House group — the Task Force on Energy Project Streamlining, by name — subtly pres-sured public-land managers to ignore environmental concerns and endorse drilling or mining from 2001 to 2005. The number of drilling permits issued by the BLM more than tripled between fiscal years 1999 and 2004, according to the GAO, from 1,803 to 6,399.
So favorable has Interior been to oil and gas interests, the department's inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, told Congress this September that "short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of Interior." The furious Devaney, a former cop, added that "ethics failures on the part of senior department officials — taking the form of appearances of impropriety, favoritism, and bias have been routinely dismissed." The former Wise Users-turned-industry lobbyists-turned-Interior officials have not only neglected national parks, they have failed to collect royalties owed the federal government on these energy leases they helped push through — to the tune of $10 billion, or roughly the equivalent of the maintenance back­log of all the U.S. parks combined.
A Near Death Experience
AS IF BUDGET CUTS, PROFITEERING, AND failing to collect royalties weren't enough, the Wise Use park reformers took it upon themselves to institutionalize their values, and to do it they found a hatchet man: Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had headed a chamber of commerce in Cody, Wyoming, near Yellowstone, where he fought for the right to bring snowmobiles into the park. Handed the position of deputy assistant secretary of the interior in 2002, the kind of seemingly obscure but pow­erful job that really makes policy, Hoff­man set to work. In 2001 the Park Service had rewritten its management policies, the rules that control how parks operate. Normally the service waits years before another rewrite, but not now. Hoffman began a revise.
"People who were working in the National Park Service heard Hoffman was working away on the policies at his desk, but no one had seen them," says Denis Galvin. Top Interior officials seemed to be in the dark about Hoffman's rewrite. According to Galvin, in 2004, when he asked Lynn Scarlett, then an as­sistant secretary of interior and now the agency's number two, about Hoffman's draft, she replied, '"Management poli­cies? Management policies?'" as if she had no idea what he meant.
For nearly a century the NPS had emphasized preservation over all other uses, but just as some rangers realized the parks could not rely exclusively on federal funds, rangers also recognized that parks need to welcome modern types of recre­ation, like mountain biking. But even pro­gressive rangers recoiled in horror at Hoffman's changes because he cut what they consider the most important words in the existing policies, the ones asserting that the fundamental purpose of the park sys­tem "begins with a mandate...to conserve park resources" and that parks should be left "unimpaired for future generations." His guidelines allowed a massive increase in polluting snowmobiles, jet skis, and off-road vehicles, whose use could permanently compromise the integrity of the parks. And he reworded the policy guidelines such that previously protected areas could be legally opened to energy exploration.
"People in the Park Service were just disgusted" when they saw Hoffman's draft, says a senior park official. Yet the Interior Department tried to silence Hoffman's de­tractors. In documents obtained through the Free­dom of Information Act, senior NPS officials boast of convincing former heads of the service not to write a letter to NPS expressing their opposition to the rewrite.
"We get phone calls from regional directors who will tell you to back off," says J.T. Reynolds, of Death Valley National Park, one of the few who refused to be muzzled. Due to the pressure of superintend­ents such as Reynolds, the guidelines were eventu­ally made available to the public for comment. Thousands wrote to protest the changes, and Inte­rior backpedaled, shelving Hoffman's draft guide­lines until tempers cooled.
If Hoffman's guidelines had gone through, says Don Barry, a former Interior assistant secretary, now executive vice president of the Wilderness Society, "the effect would have been threefold. It would have been terribly demoralizing to the career men and women of the Park Service; it would have had an adverse impact on park resources; and ultimately, the visitors' experience would have been affected."
Particularly damaging would have been the effect on air pollution standards. The parks enjoy the high­est protection available under the Clean Air Act, and park superintendents have a long history of sounding alarms when threats like coal-fueled power plants come near the parks. "[Hoffman's plan] was designed to handicap the Park Service's ability to object to coal-burning power plants nearby," Barry says. "If you have duct tape over your mouth as a park superintendent, it can have a very adverse effect over time on the visitors' experience. People don't want the Great Smoky Mountains to be named for the pollution."
Oddly, the Park Service director herself stayed out of the fray. In the past, NFS directors protected the parks from politicians. For his first director, President Bush picked Fran Mainella, a former Florida state parks manager with little national reputation. An almost overbearingly friendly woman, she quickly revealed little stomach for combat. At public meetings Mainella announced that the NFS was doing swim­mingly. "The director was complicit in [the conflict over Hoffman's rewrite]," says Robert Arnberger, a former member of the Park Service's National Lead­ership Council. "She took Hoffman's draft and told her senior staff that she didn't see any problems with it."
Mainella stepped down this summer and was re­placed by Mary Bomar, the Park Service's northeast regional director. Many environmental groups praise Bomar. Unlike Mainella, she comes from within the Park Service and has won superintendents' respect for her devotion to conservation. The Park Service direc­tor has a new boss too. This spring Bush appointed former Idaho governor Dirk Kempthorne secretary of the interior.
Kempthorne brings an entirely different style to the job. Compared with his predecessor, Gale Nor­ton, who seemed to bulldoze her opponents, Kempthorne is a former elected official, a smooth op­erator who knows how to woo the public. After hold­ing conference calls with conservation organizations, the new secretary backed a revision of Hoffman's revision that reemphasized conservation. The new management policies "affirm that if there is a conflict between use and conservation, we're going to come down on the side of conservation," Kempthorne told Men's Journal. "I think all recreationalists would agree with this. If you have an activity, and it's for your immediate enjoyment but it is going to consume a natural resource asset that will not be available to our children, we're not going to do it." (As for Hoffman, he wound up in the depart­ment's human resources division, issuing policies on employee dress codes.)
Soon after turning the page on Hoffman, Kempthome embarked on a high-profile national "lis­tening tour" and touted the administration's proposed $23 million in new federal funding for the parks. To top if off, he headed to Yellowstone for the dedication ceremony of a new educational center, and to an­nounce a parks renewal directive from the president.
The Centennial Challenge
"MANY OF THE BUILDINGS WE SEE HERE," Kempthome told the crowd gathered in Yellow-stone on August 25, "were built during 'Mission 66.' Mission 66 was a decade-long effort by Presi­dent Eisenhower to construct and modernize park facilities for the soth anniversary of the National Park Service in 1966." Kempthome added that, on Bush's orders, he would be leading a similar effort for the Park Service's centennial. To do so, he would establish "specific performance goals that, when achieved, will make sure our parks continue to be places where children and families can learn about our nation's great history, enjoy quality time to­gether, and have fun outdoors.... This should not be thought of as a budget exercise," he stressed, but instead "a thoughtful review of what needs to be done." Among the questions Kempthome said the Park Service should be asking: How do we double, or even triple, the 114,000 volunteers who help out in our national parks? Can we make better use of the internet to bring classrooms closer to the parks? What partnerships can we knit together to build more parks facilities?
These were all good questions, and although some rangers noticed that Kempthome had deftly not addressed a worry on many minds — What could the NFS expect from the government to pur­sue all these initiatives? — they praised the concern and sense of renewed mission.
"Now is the time we need to both reverse this funding and make up for it," says Tom Kiernan, NPCA president. "The secretary's announcement of the centennial challenge is a strong first step." Many also praise the influence of new Park Service deputy director Steve Martin, a career civil ser­vant believed to have fought against Hoffman's ideas who will report to Mary Bomar.
In an interview, Martin candidly addressed the parks' weaknesses, admitting that funding remains a problem.
"We're trying to combat [the shortfalls] in two ways. We have to become more professional, [but] if we are to keep our parks at the high standard, we need to get more funding," he says. He also seems to understand the potential impact of parks aggres­sively seeking corporate money. "We have a funda­mental stewardship responsibility," he says. "We shouldn't do anything that would lead to inappropriate commercialism."
Bomar, the new NPS director, has enjoyed a meteoric career rise and has only been in the upper echelon of the Park Service for three years. "Bomar is relatively new," says T. Destry Jarvis, former executive director of the National Recreation and Park Association, one of the biggest park-advocacy groups. "So that will shift more power to the Inte­rior appointees." In fact, says Jarvis, some park supporters floated the name of Robert Wallace, a moderate green Republican with 30 years of park experience, but he speculated that because, among other factors, the motorized-recreation industry has blocked Wallace in the past, he was passed over for Bomar. "Wallace would have been a much stronger director," says Jarvis.
Kempthorne and Bomar instead may win head­lines with glamorous small initiatives such as the lis­tening tour, podcast walking tours, and Operation Spring Break to recruit college students to parks projects. Some aren't sure if they'll be able to change the basic direction of the agency, as many of the same Norton-era appointees remain.
"There's very little discussion of making the organization stronger, beyond these flashy elements," says one superintendent. Despite the lo-year im­provement plan, in this year's budget the president cut $100 million from the parks, and Kempthorne has so far spent little time advocating for more funding.
"Kempthorne cares about the environment in a general feel-good way.. .but he's surrounded by peo-
ple who do not," says Rick Johnson of the Idaho Conservation League, who has known Kempthorne closely for 12 years. In particular, Johnson says, Kempthorne's Idaho aide Michael Bogert was known for his pro-industry views. (Another aide, Gary Smith, received an award for his work from the BlueRibbon Coalition, one of the motorized-recreation organizations.) Since arriving in Wash­ington Kempthorne has made Smith his director of external and intergovernmental affairs and Bogert his counselor to the secretary, a powerful position.
Kempthorne and Bomar also face challenges Mainella did not confront when she arrived in 2001. With the country now focused on terrorism and illegal immigration, the Park Service has to aggres­sively police the Mexican and Canadian frontiers. Making matters worse, in the past five years drug trafficking and human smuggling has increased on national park lands. On this score, rangers regu­larly tell the sad, cautionary tale of Kris Eggle.
At Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument along the Arizona-Mexico border, rangers now often spend evenings trying to protect hikers toting A-frames who stumble across drug smugglers toting AK-4/s. "It's a hard life here," says Organ Pipe chief ranger Fred Patton. In a park where daytime tem­peratures can top no degrees, Organ Pipe rangers arrested some 1,300 people last year. Patton groans. "The work is pretty much all-encompassing."
The afternoon of August 9,2002, at Organ Pipe, began like any other. On this typical Friday, 28-year- !
old Eggle was on duty in the 3Oo,ooo-acre park, and according to Organ Pipe staffers, the park simply no longer had the funds to provide rangers like Eggle with sufficient backup.
Eggle had joined the Park Service after study­ing bears in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But at Organ Pipe, home to people smug­glers, as well as drug smugglers and other criminals, Eggle found little time to focus on nonhuman fauna. That August afternoon two hit men linked to an execution-style quadruple murder in Mexico entered the park in an SUV, crossing over the park border and into the U.S. Eggle strapped on an Organ Pipe ranger's essential item, body armor, and headed out.
He zoomed across the park's potholed roads, look­ing for the pair until he glimpsed their SUV. He got lucky. Up ahead of him the gunmen went cross­country, steering their SUV off-road and into the desert. The vehicle got stuck in the sand, and one man sprinted out of the SUV. The other ran into nearby brush. With three Border Patrol agents also on the ground and a Border Patrol helicopter flying overhead, Eggle jumped out of his vehicle and gave chase.
He approached the man, and the suspect opened fire. This time Eggle got unlucky. The bullets pierced the skin just below his body armor. He hit the ground, and the gunman fled. An "officer down" call came over the radio. An ambulance sped toward Eggle, then carried him to a Tucson hospital. He bled to death before he reached the city. © MEN'S JOURNAL DECEMBER 2006

This article pissed me off so much I'm writing my local congressman and state senator.

SPike, I understand what you're talking about, however, to make the articles more readable, you should go through it and edit in some whitespace, the other thing: add a link to the originating article if you have it.

I'm not trying to be your english teacher, but knowing the source is a good thing.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

Knox: it's why I go off the trails, and have gotten into yuppie's faces about littering at the grove of the patriachs.

But then again, those same type of people look at a Western Red Ceader bigger across than a J is long and comment about how big of an addition that they could make onto their house with it.

Another incident at not a park, but Mt. St. Helens Volcanic Monument (Johnston Ridge Observatory) happened when a 14-year old girl (incidentally, blonde), asked her mom (incidentally, blonde, too), why "all those trees and sticks were sticking out of the sand?" The response, "I don't know, "honey?" (to her husband, not blonde), his reply, "i'm sure they'll tell us inside."

Maybe the fact that you're standing next to A LIVE @!#$ VOLCANO YOU @!#$ NIMRODS!!!! Ugh, i wished that was (at the time) 26 years ago, in mid-may, and i wasn't there...

Anyhow, As for the "Wilderness" and "Forests"...here, they've opened up the Olympic, Gifford-Pinchot, and Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie national forests up to logging...you have to go INTO the national parks to see virgin forest.

Why in a way i envy you canadians...


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

No problem GAM. In my first post there is links to the original articles as well as a few more and in my second post I did an extensive search to no avail in finding a link to the article so I scanned it into Wordpad and copy/pasted it here.

Quote:

Showdown in The Great Divide
AFTER SCRAMBLING to the top of a 10-foot rock mound in south-central Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin, biologist Erik Molvar examines the abandoned nest of a pair of ferruginous hawks, North America’s largest hawk. The time is late August, and the birds have departed for the season, so he is in no danger of disturbing them. “From up here,” Molvar says, “they don’t have to worry about coyotes.”
Nevertheless, this nest failed to produce any young last spring. Molvar suspects that a dirt road 100 feet away, leading to a failed natural gas well, gives people easy access to this once-remote site. Human disturbance causes adult hawks to flee. Left unattended, exposed eggs and chicks perish. Such nest failures, Molvar says, are increasingly common in the Great Divide Basin, an 11-million-acre expanse of sagebrush prairie, badlands and buttes where raptors have ruled the sky for millennia.
Natural gas drilling is reaching unprecedented levels in south-central Wyoming as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), responding to Bush administration directives to speed up oil and gas production on public lands, pushes increased energy exploration on the 4.5 million acres of the basin it oversees. As of this writing, roughly 3,000 wells have been drilled since 2000, and thousands more are proposed. “The Bush administration sees the domestic development of oil and gas as a priority,” Lee Fuller, vice president for government relations at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, told The Washington Post recently. “Energy has as much right in the hierarchy of decision making about the use of these lands as any other uses. That’s one of the principal shifts with the Bush administration.”
Critics of rapid development of U.S. public lands contend that another policy shift is more worrisome: Bypassing Congress and the public, the Bush administration soon after taking office issued directives to BLM and other agencies requiring more justification for any decisions that restrain energy development. As a result, millions of acres are now subject to weakened federal development regulations, including lands that Congress nominated for wilderness protection.
The Great Divide Basin is a key example of how the administration has diluted federal protection of public wild land on behalf of the oil and gas industry. “The problem is not energy development,”says Kate Zimmerman, senior policy specialist in NWF’s Rocky Mountain Natural Resource Center in Boulder, Colorado. “It is unleashing an unprecedented pace of development on one of the last great desert wildernesses in North America and doing it with a lack of safeguards for our natural heritage, from wildlife and grasslands to rivers and streams.”
Encompassing the eastern half of the famed Red Desert, the Great Divide is “a world-class raptor resource,” according to the report Special Values of the Great Divide, written by the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance (BCA), a nonprofit group headquartered in Laramie that works to protect wildlife habitat and roadless areas in Wyoming, western South Dakota and northern Colorado. Completed with funding from NWF and the Earth Friends Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Wyoming, the report says the area is “one of North America’s last strongholds for nesting raptors where natural population densities can still be found.” At least 15 raptor species nest there, ranging from burrowing owls (among the continent’s smallest raptors) and bald eagles (the continent’s largest) to ferruginous hawks, golden eagles, kestrels, merlins and great horned owls. Burrowing owls and ferruginous hawks are of concern because populations of both are declining. NWF hopes the report will spur policymakers and the public to pressure BLM—currently rewriting its resource management plan for future development in the Great Divide—to protect the area’s wildlife and wilderness-quality lands. “The Great Divide deserves stronger protection,” Zimmerman says.
In addition to raptors, the Great Divide Basin contains 234 sage grouse leks, or mating grounds, and Wyoming’s only population of endangered black-footed ferrets—88 at last count. These ferrets feed almost entirely on white-tailed prairie dogs, a species driven from 95 percent of its historic range. Seven of the largest prairie dog complexes in the country exist here, along with some 100,000 pronghorn, 85,000 mule deer and 18,000 elk. The basin also features scenic, recreational and historic treasures, including the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail and the Overland Trail used in the 19th century by westward-bound settlers. The region comprises 300,000 acres of wilderness-quality lands.
In this area, about four wells per square mile had been drilled as of summer 2005, and as this article went to press the administration was considering a proposal to double that number. Other proposed gas fields of 1,240, 2,000 and 1,250 wells were being considered. NWF and BCA have sued to prevent 385 wells from being drilled within potential federally designated wilderness.
In 2005, BLM issued a record 7,000 drilling permits nationwide and expects to top 9,000 this year—a frenzied pace that has oil companies importing drill rigs from China. More than 42 million acres of public land, most of it in the Rockies, are now leased for exploration, according to the Wilderness Society. Each well consists of a bulldozed area about 100 feet across, cylindrical metal tanks to store wastewater, a humming compressor station, pipes, gauges and other infrastructure. Eighteen-wheel tanker trucks, pickups with work crews, graders and backhoes rumble down the interlocking grid of gravel roads that has subdivided the Red Desert.
BLM field offices are so swamped with paperwork that the agency has adopted a controversial guest-worker program under which oil and gas companies pay the salaries of temporary employees hired to process permits. Environmental safeguards, when they exist (oil and gas exploration are exempted from provisions of the Clean Water, Safe Drinking Water and Clean Air Acts), are being skirted in the rush, according to a 2005 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The long-term environmental consequences for the West are unknown. “Natural gas has this reputation as the clean fossil fuel,” says Gwen Lachelt, director of the nonprofit Oil and Gas Accountability Project in Durango, Colorado. “But if you look at the toll it is taking on the landscape, it is one of the filthiest.” Intensive drilling cuts off migration and wintering grounds for elk, pronghorn and mule deer, causes sage grouse to abandon leks and decreases prairie dog reproduction, according to university and private studies. The proliferation of roads allows four-wheelers to penetrate deep into once-isolated public lands more easily, and workers have been caught illegally hunting pronghorn and sage grouse.
Little, if any, peer-reviewed research has been published about gas drilling’s impact on nesting raptors, according to James Bednarz, editor of the Journal of Raptor Research. “It’s a real important issue now because there is pressure to develop petroleum resources everywhere,” he says. Bednarz studied raptors in the late 1980s near Carlsbad, New Mexico, where oil and gas exploration was taking place. “My feeling is that it was definitely impacting the birds,” he says.
Ferruginous hawks, named for their rusty iron (or ferrous) coloring, have a four-and-a-half-foot wingspan and can live 15 years. Arriving in the Great Divide Basin in spring after wintering in Mexico and the Southwest, they feed on ground squirrels, prairie dogs and desert cottontails. Eggs hatch from May to early June, and adults take turns hunting and guarding nests. They often nest on high buttes that overlook hunting grounds but also on tall objects in the prairie, closer to their prey.
When natural gas wells appeared, ferruginous hawks built nests atop some of the metal structures. Due to activity around the wells, these nests often fail to fledge young. “Some will fly when a pickup truck is a quarter mile away,” says Bob Tigner, a retired BLM biologist who worked in the Great Divide. To ameliorate this loss, BLM implemented in the early 1980s an artificial-nesting-platform program. Wooden platforms on top of utility poles are being erected near wells—typically a quarter-mile away—where ferruginous hawks have previously nested. “We try to give them their distance,” says Heath Cline, a BLM biologist who oversees the program from the Rawlins office. He says BLM imposes restrictions on well construction close to artificial nesting platforms during the breeding season.
Molvar, however, says the breeding-season restrictions apply only to the drilling of new wells in the quarter-mile buffer around the nests. Work crews can visit existing wells at any time, even during breeding season. “If the parents take off and don’t come back in time, their whole reproductive year is lost,” Molvar says.
If the federal government wants to protect raptors, critics of accelerated development contend, it would limit the density of wells (in parts of Wyoming, there are 16 wells per square mile), disallow any exploration during breeding season and require directional drilling, in which wells are drilled into the side of a gas field from farther away. “BLM is not going to shut down gas development because of wildlife values,” Zimmerman says. Indeed, agency documents admit that 2,000 wells proposed for the Atlantic Rim section of the Great Divide would ruin hunting and wildlife viewing. “But we think they can conduct the drilling so it reduces the footprint,” Zimmerman adds. “It can be done a lot better. Artificial nest sites to help some raptor species are only a start, given the intensity of development that’s now being proposed.”
In the process of rapid development, priceless landscapes and wildlife habitat are being handed over virtually free to an industry making record profits. A New York Times investigation revealed in 2005 that energy companies appear to have cheated the U.S. Treasury out of hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty payments from natural gas leases. Despite soaring gas prices, royalty payments in 2005 were below those in 2001, according to the Times, which partly blames lax oversight by the Interior Department. The newspaper also blames an antiquated royalty payment system that, if updated to reflect the market value of gas, would have generated an extra $700 million in royalties for public coffers last year.
This hemorrhaging of public dollars continues. Projections in the fiscal year 2007 federal budget indicate that the Interior Department plans to give up $7 billion in oil and gas royalties in the next five years. The department also plans to allow energy companies to drill about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas on public lands without even paying royalties.
In some cases, BLM appears to be deliberately targeting potential wilderness. In 2004, the agency auctioned for development 39,000 acres in Colorado and 109,000 in Utah that Congress is eyeing for the National Wilderness Preservation System. Once roaded and drilled, areas no longer qualify for wilderness protection. “The Bush administration wants to tilt the scales in favor of careless oil and gas development,” Zimmerman says. “But tapping into those resources doesn’t have to be done that way. We can choose to drill smarter. We can choose to conserve wild places and wildlife. And the time to make those choices is now before we give away more than we can afford to lose.”
Colorado resident Paul Tolmé is a frequent contributor to National Wildlife. Read more of his environmental and wildlife stories at www.paultolme.com.

I'ts not enough they have to allow drill dericks(sp?) everywhere they also have to :cough:forget:cough: to ask for royalties from the Oil and Gas companies, boy somebody sure is getting paid off to look the other way .

Quote:

No Safe Refuge
By Roger Di Silvestro
Illegal immigrants, drug trafficking and theft rings are making U.S. protected lands along the border with Mexico hazardous for both wildlife and people.
“I’m a field commander who’s been sent down here to deal with a war,” says Roger Di Rosa, manger of the 860,000-acre Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, which lies in southwestern Arizona and shares 56 miles of border with Mexico. The “war” involves thousands of illegal immigrants who yearly cross Cabeza Prieta, leaving a wake of destruction that affects endangered species as well as federally designated wilderness. To make matters worse, federal efforts to combat the illegal activities have themselves damaged fragile desert. “If the status quo continues, who knows what’ll happen in the future,” says Di Rosa. “We’re failing in our mission to manage and protect the refuge and its wilderness quality.”
Cabeza Prieta—the size of Rhode Island and 90 percent officially designated as wilderness—is one of three federally protected wildlife areas under assault along southwest Arizona’s border with Mexico. The 330,000-acre Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which is 95 percent designated wilderness, abuts 30 miles of border, and Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a former ranch covering 118,000 acres of native grassland, lies along 5.5 miles of border. All of these lands were set aside to protect desert wildlife and wilderness habitat. Cabeza and Organ Pipe are home to the Sonoran pronghorn, an endangered subspecies, and Buenos Aires was established in part to protect the endangered masked bobwhite quail.
Smuggling Operations
Since the 1990s—when the federal government intensified efforts to stanch illegal immigration at El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, California, two key ports of entry—southwestern Arizona has become ground zero in the smuggling war as unauthorized aliens switched to crossing in remote areas such as wildlife refuges. Eager to replace jobs in Mexico that pay less than $10 a day with U.S. jobs at more than $10 an hour, illegals gather in border towns and cross over, usually on foot. Almost all are guided by smugglers called coyotes. While leading parties of anywhere from 6 to upwards of 150 unauthorized aliens, the coyotes stay in radio contact with observers on hills south of the border who report law enforcement activity and steer immigrant parties away from areas under surveillance. The coyotes bring their groups to “lay-up sites,” where immigrants change into fresh clothes and leave behind everything they are carrying so they can be packed tightly into motor vehicles for a ride to a U.S. city. At least 500 tons of trash accumulates each year at lay-up sites on Buenos Aires alone, says Mitch Ellis, the refuge manager, not only damaging wildlife habitat but also siphoning off about 4,000 hours of volunteer time that must be devoted to cleanup instead of to other refuge work.
Mexicans pay $1,500 to $2,000 to cross the border, says Sean King, a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona. South Americans pay $6,000 to $8,000. Illegals come in great numbers. About 200,000 cross Organ Pipe every year, says Kathy Billings, the park superintendent. At Buenos Aires, Ellis reports that some 2,000 a day may cross in the peak season, from January to May, dropping to 200 a night by summer.
Of the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2005, about half were unauthorized Mexicans, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. According to Pew, at least 27 percent of U.S. meat, poultry and fish processors are undocumented immigrants, as are workers in the agriculture, construction and service sectors, making them a significant part of the U.S. economy. They have remained an important part of the Mexican economy, too. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, more than 60 percent of Latin Americans in the United States—both legal and otherwise—send money home. The $20 billion sent to Mexico alone each year accounts for 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and for 50 to 80 percent of the annual income of recipients.
Undocumented immigrants crossing into Cabeza Prieta are faced with an 85-mile trek through harsh, dry desert. At Buenos Aires they may have to walk as little as 12 miles to a pick-up site, King says. Along the way, they may be robbed by border bandits. On Cabeza Prieta, death from heat and thirst is “common,” Di Rosa says. Illegals crossing southwestern Arizona also face capture and deportation by the 2,500 U.S. Border Patrol agents now working there.
Refuge Threats
Despite their vast numbers, illegal immigrants are less dangerous, says Billings, than professional drug smugglers, from whom law enforcement personnel in 2005 confiscated 438,000 pounds of marijuana and 1,700 pounds of cocaine on its way through Cabeza Prieta, Organ Pipe and the adjacent Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. In 2002, one of Billings’ park rangers was killed in a shootout with drug smugglers. “In some areas we don’t allow our staff to go in without law enforcement people,” she says. She has banned visitors from about a third of the park where criminal activity has been high and has closed 90 miles of some 140 miles of backcountry roads. However, she says, barriers made of railroad rails recently were installed along the border, blocking motor vehicles—one of the most common modes of transportation used by drug smugglers, along with foot and horseback.
At Buenos Aires, smugglers steal 40 to 50 vehicles each year. In addition, criminal activity has claimed about 4,500 refuge acres along the border, a region so dangerous that refuge workers have put up a fence that cuts off this acreage. Because staff no longer patrol there, ranchers south of the border let cattle graze the zone illegally, denuding the earth. “It’s pretty well hammered,” Ellis says. The effect on local wildlife has not been studied—refuge budgets are being spread thinly to accommodate the need for greater border security—but Ellis says that a decline of wild species in that area is a certainty as forage grasses are lost.
Smugglers have etched more than 1,300 miles of illegal footpaths across Buenos Aires. These trails, as well as illegal vehicle tracks, are likely to erode, compounding the damage, Ellis says. At Cabeza Prieta, smugglers have created 250 miles of illegal, entrenched, “powdered out” roads and thousands of miles of illegal foot trails, Di Rosa says.
Wildlife at Risk
Among the species affected by illegal activity at Cabeza Prieta is the endangered lesser long-nosed bat, one of 11 bat species on the refuge. About 4,000 of them have been using an old mine on the refuge as a maternity roost, one of only four known maternity roosts in the area. These bats are critical to the pollination of local plants. When smugglers started using the mine for storage and lay up about two years ago, the bats abandoned it. After refuge staff installed a spiked iron fence to lock out the smugglers, the bats returned.
Another vulnerable animal is the Sonoran pronghorn, numbering only about 75 animals in the wild on Cabeza Prieta, Organ Pipe and nearby military lands, with perhaps another 400 in Mexico, where they are severely jeopardized by development. “Pronghorn are highly susceptible to human disturbance,” Billings says, but nothing is known about how smuggling activity affects them. Di Rosa says he lacks the staff and money needed to monitor pronghorn status at Cabeza. He spends 75 percent of his time dealing with border issues rather than with traditional refuge management, and the refuge budget is being drained to help combat illegal activities.
Smugglers have begun to avoid Organ Pipe and the two refuges since early 2006, when heightened law enforcement activity went into effect, Di Rosa says. Nevertheless, illegal immigration and other criminal activity cannot be stopped by the Border Patrol and refuge staff, he believes. Illegal immigration is driven by Mexico’s troubled economy, he says. People in need of work go where jobs are, even if it means hiking for days across virtually waterless desert. “The solution to the immigration problem is not on the border,” Di Rosa says. “It’s in Washington, D.C., and in Mexico City.”
Senior Editor Roger Di Silvestro visited Arizona border refuges earlier this year.