GOP Wants To Sell Our National Parks, Not Open Them

J.L. Finch - There really has been much public whining and gnashing of teeth by the GOP because the National Parks are closed as a result of the GOP shutdown.  The GOP would have Americans believe that they value our National Parks and are outraged - outraged! - that the parks are closed.

Oh really?

A powerful Republican chairman in the House of Representatives just shared with his constituents his desire to begin selling our national parks. Rep. Cliff Stearns of Floridawas caught on video in a local town meeting. Here is what he said:"I got attacked in a previous town meeting for not supporting another national park in this country, a 200-mile trailway. And I told the man that we don't need more national parks in this country, we need to actually sell off some of our national parks."

continued....

...

Unfortunately, Rep. Stearns isn't the only prominent politician who thinks of the conservation legacy of Theodore Roosevelt as just so much surplus property. Some of the current candidates for leader of the free world have also mused about putting America's national heritage on the chopping block, and the House of Representatives has actually passed or considered favorably a series of radical bills in this Congress that amount to an all-out war on the concept of holding public lands in trust for future generations.

There is a video of Rep. Stearns at Think Progress.   And more from that link:

This is not the first time Republican members of Congress have advocated selling off Americans’ public lands without clarifying how taxpayers would get a fair return for them.  Last fall, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) proposed selling off 3.3 million acres of the public lands that belong to all of us.  And former Rep. Richard Pombo proposed selling national parks to mining companies in 2005.

Republican presidential candidates have also recently been confused about the tangible and intangible values of our national parks and public lands.  Mitt Romney told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he doesn’t know “what the purpose is” of public lands, Rick Santorum told Idahoans that public lands should go “back to the hands” of the private sector, and Ron Paul advocated for public lands to be turned over to the states.

See also this excellent article from Salon:

Our national parks have been underfunded for years, not days, and the damage this has caused will last far longer than the shutdown. Inadequate resources have debilitated our parks for decades.  In 1998, for example, a Government Accounting Office study concluded that the dwindling funds were not a short-term problem. “Because of advanced, continuing deterioration, some of these assets may be lost permanently,” it said.  Ten years later, USA Today ran a story with the headline, “National program for ruins in ruins,” about the inadequately funded Vanishing Treasures program, tasked with protecting the country’s archaeological sites.  The aughts have not been kinder.  According to the Center for American Progress, since 2010, Congress has cut the parks budget by 13%, leading to the seasonal closure of national parks including the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon.

Most recently, the National Parks Group accused the Appropriations Committee-approved budget, which among other travesties completely removed funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, of having its “roots in fantasy rather than reality” and putting “national parks, historic places and cultural treasures… at ever-increasing risk.”  As Nicholas Kristof wrote in August, “[O]ld bridges have collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not been rebuilt, and signs are missing.” According to the National Forest Service, Kristof reported, only an estimated one-quarter of the country’s 158,000 miles of trails meet internal standards.  The Sierra Club told Salon that the national parks need $11.5 billion worth of maintenance. Half of this is reportedly needed for roads and bridges, whose disrepair poses serious public safety threats. The amount allocated in the 2012 budget? $2.2 billion.

For Congress, though, it’s not enough just to defund our parks so they slowly fall into total, unusable ruin. In this country, it’s also important that we “Drill, baby, drill,” not to mention, “Log, baby, log” and “Mine, baby, mine.” All of these efforts create serious threats to our parks.  In September 2012, the National Park Service identified forty-two park units where non-federal oil and gas drilling is or could be happening in the future.  At the time, twelve had active oil and gas operations.  Yet for plenty of politicians, this is still not enough.  In the 2011 primaries, Michele Bachmann proposed drilling for oil in the Florida Everglades, one of the country’s most endangered ecosystems.  Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Alaska, has run on a platform that includes turning the pristine Denali National Park and Preserve, the home to Mount McKinley, the U.S.’s highest peak, into an oil well.  And GOP thought leader Grover Norquist says to hell with all of it, let’s just turn them over to the states, or better yet, sell them to the private sector.

The GOP would love nothing better than to sell off (give away) our National Parks to their cronies and campaign contributors for drilling, condos, clear cutting, strip mining, whatever.

El Capitan, left foreground

Upper Yosemite Falls