Over the past two summers I’ve had the good fortune to hike in eight of the western US national parks. This is a “bucket list” item for many people around the world, for good reason: the scale, the beauty, the unspoiled state of the nature are all hard to find anywhere, never mind that so many are within a day’s drive of a major US airport. The trips proved to be thought-provoking in many ways, some of them related to the information technology umbrella under which this newsletter operates.
First, some facts. The US national parks, strictly speaking, number 60. The most recent national park to be added is the St Louis Gateway Arch area, added earlier this year (at 192 acres, it is also by far the smallest). 7 of the 9 largest parks (by acreage) lie within Alaska. The largest park in the lower 48 states is Death Valley, followed by Yellowstone. The national parks are seeing massive attendance numbers: 330 million recreation visits (to all sites administered by the National Park Service) in both 2016 and 2017. Grand Canyon National Park saw a record 6 million visitors last year. 11 million plus people came to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
An “America the Beautiful” pass is accepted at 2,000 federal recreation sites. The bureaucratic allocation of those sites is of course complex:
-The national parks belong to Department of the Interior
-560 national wildlife refuges fall under the Fish and Wildlife Service, also Department of Interior
-10 national seashores (including Cape Hatteras and Point Reyes) and 4 national lakeshores on lakes Superior and Michigan are administered by the National Park Service
-National Historic Sites (like Edgar Allen Poe’s birthplace and many presidential homes and/or other structures) are usually managed by the National Park Service. 43 important areas are designated National Historical Parks, such as the one surrounding the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
-US Army Corps of Engineers recreation areas (almost 2000 of them) fall under Department of Defense
-154 National Forests are an arm of the Department of Agriculture, managed for multiple uses
-The Bureau of Land Management is a different piece of the Department of Interior, with another multi-use mandate covering 245 million acres plus subsurface rights (including almost the entirety of the state of Nevada).
All of these areas must manage visitors, and the numbers of people who want to get outside (whether to hike, birdwatch, fish, hunt, or drive off-road vehicles) are growing. BLM visits were climbing as of 2012 (the last figure I could locate) while the record-setting national park attendance is stressing budgets, infrastructure, staffing, and nearby local governments. The politics of government land ownership and management are heated, especially in the past few years, and I will only note the tensions here: the multi-use mandate is of course understood differently depending on where you stand in relation to the land in question.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has stated that the parks are being “loved to death.” As long ago as 2001 when I was in Acadia National Park in Maine, visitors were warned not to take rocks off the shore: the souvenirs were denuding the fragile ecosystem. Cars are effectively banned from a large segment of Zion National Park, replaced by mandatory shuttle bus service. It seems other parks will have to follow suit. Passes to popular hikes are rationed and even guest space in lodges (managed for the parks by outside contractors) fills up months or years ahead of time.
Of course as visitorship increases, budgets have dropped, so park management is getting creative: many helpers in ranger-like uniforms are in fact volunteers, and the role of gift shop profits in helping run the parks is good-naturedly highlighted. The popularity of the parks is a mixed blessing, of course, but I did notice visitors were generally patient, respectful to rangers (who sometimes had to deliver unpopular news such as trail closures), and aggressive in their bookstore purchases. One large population struck me (though it’s obvious in retrospect): international travelers are a significant percentage of the visitor base. Comparing models of managing visits to natural wonders illustrates the contrast. Seeing the Great Wall of China, the Matterhorn in Switzerland, or a Norwegian fjord involves very different logistics and fees compared to the US model. It’s no surprise millions of people come from literally every continent to see glaciers, geysers, ancient trees, and the rest of the wonders on offer.
If you’ve seen the standard national parks graphic identity expressed on brochures and other materials, you may note the use of the same Helvetica font used on New York subway signs. This is not coincidence: Massimo Vignelli, the great Italian-American designer, did both projects, along with the iconic Helvetica American Airlines branding of the 1960s and many other familiar identities. The print model has not been seamlessly ported to web and mobile environments, but neither is every park sporting an idiosyncratic look and feel. I also found it noteworthy that parks dispense a LOT of paper, which is both costly and ecologically questionable. At the same time, getting maps into as many hands as possible is a good idea when cell signal is often nonexistent and people are in places that they can and do get lost.
Mt Ranier National Park is wrestling with the cell coverage question right now. The benefit would be to visitors; rangers would continue to use their radios for search, rescue, and related work. (The memorial at the Mt Ranier visitor center was sobering: many people have died helping make the national parks work, including six in that one park alone.) On the plus side, better coordination among city-dwelling visitors would prevent some misfortunes and maybe even a tragedy or two. At the same time, the place of wilderness as unspoiled and quiet is already under siege by armies of tourists bearing selfie sticks who often stand in truly stupid and/or dangerous spots in search of the perfect shot. The downsides (including false confidence) are real, but in the face of such sustained growth in visitorship, how long can the parks remain signal-free? Already many climbers are jarred working their routes on Yosemite’s Half Dome, interrupted by mobile phone conversations.
Another new source of contention relates to the use of drones. Whether for photography, stalking, or flying, these small (and sometimes not so small) flyers are frequently banned on paper, but enforcement is another matter. There’s also the irony of drones being banned at the Wright Bothers national monument at Kitty Hawk, dedicated as it is to innovation in flight.
Both smartphones and drones illustrate the range of issues in play. Both devices can improve safety, including rescues, just as both can impede it. Both devices can be used sensitively and creatively in the spirit of the place, while both are also fully capable of ruining other people’s experience of wilderness. Finally, both could be used as revenue generators just as both are a drain on scarce park service resources. When you have 330 million people visiting NPS and related recreation areas every year, one size does have to fit all, or almost all, so building a patchwork of regulations is probably a bad idea.
Another technology shift that will affect the parks is the rise of electric cars. With these kinds of visitor numbers, plus the fact that parks are often located far from infrastructure, the question arises as to how all those batteries on wheels will get charged. Many of the parks are vast, and range anxiety could enter a new phase: without a jerry can of gasoline in the back of the NPS pickup, how will dead batteries be revived? How will motels and other nearby accommodations deliver sufficient juice for armies of visitors’ cars?
That shift lies in the future. While it’s easy to rant against selfie sticks and their ilk, technology has coexisted with the natural parks for well more than a century in complex, cross-cutting ways. Well before the establishment of the NPS in 1916, Abraham Lincoln set aside land in what is now Yosemite for public use. Yellowstone was established as a park in 1872, long before the states it straddles — Idaho, Wyoming, Montana — entered the Union. Photographs were almost certainly the primary form of persuasion in both instances.
After 1916, which coincides with the rise of US automobile use, park vistorship climbed dramatically, particularly during the Great Depression. I was puzzled at the numbers, but as the US federal government was expanding its presence in so many ways, the number of NPS sites (“reporting units”) climbed from 44 in 1929 to 141 in 1941. (Visitor numbers climbed far faster in the same period, from 3 million to more than 20 million). Whenever we talk about preserving the parks, it bears mentioning that roads and parking lots were not there 100 years ago. 6 million people visiting the Grand Canyon in a year turn it from wilderness into something else: not civilization exactly, but some kind of naturalistic theme park maybe?
After World War II, photography was used as a powerful force in the debate over conservation and preservation. The great novelist Wallace Stegner edited This Is Dinosaur, a document of words, maps, and photos explaining and celebrating Dinosaur National Monument which was at the time the site of a proposed dam that was successfully defeated. Ansel Adams was only one of many documentarians who shaped how millions of people understand the wild, including the parks.
Today, millions of people watch bear cams, monitor snowfall, map glacier melting, or track eagles, via cam and other data feeds. The binary question — how do we keep technology from spoiling the national parks? — ceased to be relevant a long time (and hundreds of millions of visits) ago. Just as it always has been, the more pressing question is the more difficult one: how do we preserve wild spaces that by definition become less wild with roads, people, and mobile phones invading them? How do we increase access to people who historically aren’t big national parks users, whether for reasons of culture, disability, or whatever at the same time we preserve often-fragile ecosystems that aren’t meant to coexist with millions of footfalls, bathroom visits, or water bottles? as with the impact of technology in so many other domains, the simple questions turn out to be multi-layered and the tradeoffs ripple far outward from whatever point they begin.
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