Ah, Wilderness!

By Richard Stengel

Listen to the call of the wild: the whistle of hawks and the whir of helicopters. The growl of grizzlies and the groans of chain saws. Gaze upon the glories of nature: fleet-footed antelope and wide-wheeled ATV's. Towering mountains and low-slung condominiums. Packs of wolves and parades of Winnebagos.

Once, visitors to the Grand Canyon could see mountains a hundred miles distant; now the air can be so smoggy that it is hard to make out the opposite rim. Once, Yosemite offered respite from civilization's excess; on Memorial Day a major entrance to the park had to be closed because of a traffic jam.

The national parks have been likened to America's crown jewels, repositories of majesty and beauty passed from one generation to the next. But as development and tourism have grown, these heirlooms are becoming shopworn. "There never has been so much pressure on parks as today," says Paul Pritchard, a former Interior Department official who is now president of the National Parks and Conservation Association. The General Accounting Office reported this spring that the parks need an immediate $1.9 billion to repair roads, trails and buildings. "Deterioration of some assets is so advanced that they may be lost permanently," GAO stated. Among the worst cases:

-- Pollution, increasing salinity and encroaching farms and housing developments have reduced the wading-bird population in Florida's Everglades National Park by 90%, down from 2.5 million in the 1930s to 250,000 now. Thousands of acres in the "River of Grass" have been contaminated by pesticides from agricultural runoff.

-- Yellowstone National Park is ringed by oil and gas drilling, timber clear- cutting and road building, jeopardizing its wildlife and geothermal geyser system. The Guru Ma religious cult is building a world headquarters for 600 plus disciples on a ranch abutting the park's northern border.

-- Yosemite National Park is plagued by traffic jams and overcrowding. Logging, road building and vacation homes on nearby land are affecting the grazing and migration patterns of park animals.

-- Uranium mining on the edge of the Grand Canyon National Park creates a threat that flash floods might wash radioactive debris into the park's water sources. Some 50,000 small plane and helicopter flights a year for tourists have turned the place into a flying circus, prompting federal authorities to consider limits on low-flying aircraft.

-- The groundwater at Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, the largest underground system in the world, is being contaminated by local sewage disposal. The park, which has 1.6 million annual visitors and is the most heavily used facility in the Midwest, often runs out of parking spaces.

Last year 287 million visitors tramped, trekked, drove, wandered or flew through America's 341 national parks. The tourist population has nearly doubled since 1971, and could jump to 500 million by the year 2010. Current facilities cannot handle the crush. Use has also brought abuse: people may visit the parks to get away from it all, but they bring civilization's discontents with them. Popular parks spend more than half their budgets on chores like garbage patrols and bathroom maintenance.

But misguided policy, not guided visitors, constitutes the gravest threat. Owing in part to the oil crisis of the late 1970s, Washington has encouraged strip mining, oil exploration and commercial development on the edges of many parks. Timber cutting next to Olympic National Park in Washington State has reduced the area's forest from 689,871 acres in 1959 to 106,000 acres today. "Trees in the forest are cut down to the edge of the park," says Wilderness Society President George Frampton. The Reagan Administration has authorized very little money for purchases of park land. In 1978 the budget was $681 million; for 1989 the Administration has requested $17 million.

Development is dangerous, contends Frampton, because the parks are part of ecological systems extending beyond set boundaries. Animals, Frampton suggests, do not follow dotted lines. "We don't object to logging on the edge of the parks just because we love trees," he says. "We object because it changes the natural conditions within the park."

The Park Service, for its part, maintains that deterioration is a myth. The lands "are in better shape than they were ten years ago," says Director William Penn Mott. The Interior Department, which operates the Park Service, is still motivated by the philosophy of former Interior Secretary James Watt that the parks are for the people -- and if the people want extra bathrooms, fast food and motels, so be it. It is only elitists, Watt used to say, who have the time and money to tiptoe through the tall grass, hearkening to birdcalls. He demonstrated his point by roaring through Yellowstone on a snowmobile.

Minnesota Democrat Bruce Vento, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands, contends that the Park Service has been commandeered by the political appointees of Watt and current Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. He has introduced legislation to create a separate and independent National Park Service with a director who would be a presidential appointee, subject to Senate scrutiny and confirmation. The bill, which has 90 co-sponsors, has a good chance of passing.

New law will not restore the parks to the purity of Eden, nor halt the waves of people pressing in on them. "Preservation involves two paradoxes," writes Alston Chase, author of Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park. "We can restore and sustain the appearance of undisturbed wilderness only by admitting that undisturbed wilderness no longer exists." Watt was right that the parks cannot be preserved like museum pieces under glass. But without better management, they risk becoming lessons in how quickly man can use up a continent.

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and Pat Dawson/Yellowstone, with other bureaus