The Parks for People

It was a mammoth centennial celebration and the party was appropriately planned. There was a huge barbecue, with burgers, beer and cooks in ten-gallon hats. The backdrop could not have been grander--Yellowstone National Park's majestic peaks and verdant valleys. Yet as night fell and the ceremony continued, sleet swept over the assembled dignitaries. Interior Secretary Rogers Morton talked on (and on). Numbed with cold, Montana's Bozeman High School band packed up their instruments. Finally, wearing a brave, frozen smile, Mrs. Richard Nixon held aloft a symbolic torch, and the U.S.'s national park system officially entered its second century.

Starting with the creation of Yellowstone in 1872, Congress has step by step pioneered in establishing what is surely the world's greatest system of national parks--with tremendous new parks yet to be selected in Alaska. The system embraces the incense cedars and sapphire waters of Crater Lake in Oregon, the Great Smoky Mountains' misty rills in Appalachia, the giant cathedrals of California's redwoods, Arizona's mighty Grand Canyon, Maine's sparkling Acadia. Each park was chosen for its beauty and grandeur and preserved intact forever for public "enjoyment."

Social Ills. Despite the built-in contradiction--how can a place be inviolate and used at the same time?--the U.S. example has stirred other nations to emulation; by now, 102 countries from Australia to Zaire, from Japan to Argentina, have set up some 1,200 national parks of their own. Their parks specialists gathered in Yellowstone last week to discuss mutual problems at the Second World Conference on National Parks.

The fact is that most of the U.S.'s national parks are in trouble. Day after day, crowds of tourists--some 200 million of them this year--pour into the national parks, monuments, historic areas and recreation sites. Hoping to escape the social ills of suburbs and cities, the visitors instead bring those ills with them. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, pollution, overcrowding, crime, drugs--every urban problem is now an increasing problem in every major park. Worse, every solution erodes the ideal of preserving nature. To cope with the 2.5 million annual visitors to Yellowstone alone, the National Park Service has had to install 2,100 buildings, 30 sewer systems, ten electric systems, 750 miles of roads and 3,000 campsites.

Can the parks survive? One answer came last week in the form of a 254-page report by conservation-minded citizens all over the U.S. Called National Parks for the Future and sponsored by Washington's respected Conservation Foundation, it bravely recommends a complete redefinition of the parks and their purpose. For one thing, the study says, parks proposed for locations near urban centers, like Gateway East on New York Harbor or Gateway West outside San Francisco, should not be part of the national system, but should be run by the states or cities that use them. Nor do the 172 historic areas, like Gettysburg, and the 37 National Recreation Areas, like man-made Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border, really fit the definition of unspoiled natural beauty. They should be removed from the National Park Service and operated by a separate federal bureau.

The report's emphasis is on preservation above all. Thus its recommendations are bound to provoke heated controversy. Among them:

>Limit autos in parks, because they "can destroy our National Park heritage just as surely as they have desecrated much of our urban countryside."

> Declare a moratorium on road building in the parks.

>Ban wheeled campers. Those trailers and "motorhomes" are "contrary to the park ethic."

>Phase motel, food and recreation concessions out of parks and relocate them outside park boundaries.

In other words, the report agrees entirely with President Theodore Roosevelt's words when he first saw the Grand Canyon in 1903: "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it."

Park officials disagree on two counts. Their job includes more than preservation, and reform has already come to the park system. "That report might have had some credibility two years ago, but not today," says Yellowstone Superintendent Jack Anderson. Take Yosemite, once the most troubled park of all. In 1970 the lovely, steep-walled valley was choked with auto exhaust and campfire smoke, and so overcrowded, says Ranger Bill Whalen, that "camping was tent-peg to tent-peg." Long-haired kids noisily sought kicks from nature--with a little help from drugs. On July 4, 1970, pot-smoking youths clashed with armed police in the first riot ever in a national park. In Washington, the National Park Service reacted by dispatching a new breed of rangers, more Peace Corps volunteer than scoutleader or cop.

The result has been dramatic. Double-decked buses, powered by nonpolluting propane fuel, have taken the place of the plague of private cars. Caravans and most cars must be left in specified lots. Rangers teach new ecology courses, keep visiting kids interested and involved, even talk like sociologists. Yosemite is once again a quiet, orderly, pleasant park.

Ironically, the Conservation Foundation report was commissioned by the man whom it implicitly excoriates, George B. Hartzog Jr., 52, director of the National Park Service. Hartzog is known as a consummate politician, the last high-ranking Democrat in the Nixon Administration. Since his appointment in 1964, he has persuaded Congress to add 2.5 million acres to the national park system.

In his eyes, the report focuses too narrowly on preservation. "Congress also mandated the Service to preserve lands for the enjoyment and benefit of the people," he told TIME Correspondent Bonnie Angelo last week. "Unless you are prepared to walk into parks with a pack on your back, Congress intended that there should be roads. The real crunch coming in this country is to articulate an environmental ethic to guide corporate and human conduct --and this speaks basically to the issue that man is part of his environment. The practical problem is that we know exactly how many elk a park can handle ecologically, but not how many people. I have said 'No more physical facilities' until I find out the answer."

At week's end, the 500 experts attending the conference settled into the Grand Tetons Lodge for a five-day debate on just that: how to bring urban man and unspoiled nature into some sort of balance.

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