The Declining of the World's Parks
By Kurt Repanshek
While the state of the world’s parks is sometimes depressing, knowledge is our first step toward a solution.
Not far from the western edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the shade of black birches, hemlocks, tulip poplars, and oaks flickers across a pastoral slice of a simpler time. In late summer, black bears slip from the dense forests surrounding Cade’s Cove to gorge in the cove’s apple orchard, and hayrides carry laughter past clapboard churches, log cabins, a working gristmill, and cascading streams.
But life in the cove isn’t always so simple. On a typical Saturday or Sunday in summer more than 4,100 cars, trucks, minivans, and SUVs intent on exploring the 6,800-acre, almond-shaped valley crowd its 11-mile-long loop road. You might avoid the congestion by venturing to Clingmans Dome, the Eastern Seaboard’s third-highest mountain at 6,643 feet. But atop the park’s highest point poor visibility, thick ozone, and acidic rainfall underscore why the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) ranks Great Smoky as one of the nation’s five most-polluted national parks.
Great Smoky is not the only park with a smog-shrouded skyline or eye-stinging air. Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Acadia, Joshua Tree, Mammoth Cave, Shenandoah, and Yosemite national parks, as well as Cape Cod National Seashore, typically record summer days when ground-level ozone levels exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s upper limit of 85 parts per billion. That is not the vision many see when they consider a national park vacation. They expect pristine air, endless horizons, verdant countryside, and gushing rivers.
But in recent decades problems have mounted, and not just in U.S. parks. Despite their revered status, national parks the world over face myriad challenges. Population growth has skyrocketed the numbers of tourists searching for a glimpse of wildness and brought development that, in some instances, has a choke hold on these wilderness atolls.
"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."
— John Muir
Pollution, overcrowding, and underfunding aren’t new visitors to America’s national parks. Fifty years ago conservationist Wallace Stegner complained that "Our parks are like a child whose teeth have been neglected." Long before Stegner, national park icon John Muir learned from his frequent travels in the mountains and forests how sensitive parks were to outside pressures. Upon returning from his first summer in California’s High Sierra, Muir mused, "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."
Today, much is tugging on the world’s national parks. Many problems stem from visitors’ love affair with the parks. They want to traipse through them whenever possible, and living nearby is even better, as that offers both a beautiful view and quick access. The results are traffic jams inside and outside some parks, and subdivisions on the borders of others.
"There are some areas, particularly in the United States and in parts of Europe, where what you might call the success of the parks is really almost their biggest threat, the over-utilization of some of the most popular and spectacular parks," explains Bill Eichbaum, vice president for the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Marine Portfolio. "The need to manage that is a real problem."
Efforts to manage people have led to lawsuits in Great Britain, where park watchdog group Council for National Parks sued to halt construction of 340 timber lodges, a village, sports club, "subtropical Waterworld," and sewage treatment plant proposed to infringe on Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. A rugged seascape of precipitous cliffs, sandy beaches, and heathlands on the southwestern shore of Wales, the park, established in 1952, has seen its popularity grow around its status as Great Britain’s only true coastal park. In unsuccessfully challenging the Bluestone development, the council contended Bluestone would "seriously harm national park purposes," if allowed.
Shore-side shops and beach umbrellas are among the threats to wildlife in Greece’s National Marine Park of Zakynthos. When the weather warms in summer and crowds swarm the park’s honey-colored beaches, so, too, do loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta), a species of sea turtle that likes to bury its eggs in the sand. Not surprisingly, the interaction between humans and marine life does not favor the turtles.
Poaching is also a significant threat to the world’s national parks, as hunters stalk trophy game animals, elephant ivory, and, simply, food. In the boreal forests in and around Anuisky National Park in far eastern Russia, where the WWF has worked to protect and rebuild the amur tiger population in the regions of Khabarovsk Krai and Primorsky Krai, the organization has encountered a poaching problem not just with the tigers, but also with their prey, deer and wild boar.
In Garamba National Park (D.R. of Congo) the white rhinoceros has been poached close to extinction.
A continent away, poachers lurking through the veldt of Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are decimating the world’s only wild population of northern white rhinoceros. Once considered a protected reservoir for regeneration of the species, the park has seen its rhino herd culled by poachers from at least 30 animals in April 2003 to fewer than 10 as recently as last year.
While poaching occurs in many U.S. parks, it is not the system’s biggest problem. Steady population growth and inadequate funding are undercutting many parks and their wildlife, according to the NPCA. Growth is generating pollution and impinging on habitat vital to wolves, bears, bison, and migratory species.
"Many of our parks are becoming strangled, the noose being inappropriate development," says Laura Loomis, the NPCA’s senior director of government affairs. "When you do have development encircle a park, it has a huge impact on the natural processes that keep a park a living organism, and affects the experiences of visitors."
The European Lynx, one of the many animal species the European Green Belt hope to protect.
In Europe, 22 former countries hope to avoid such a death-hold via a "green belt" knit from national parks, forests, and other protected areas. Ranging north and south from Finland on the Barents Sea to Albania on the Adriatic Sea and Bulgaria on the Black Sea, the Green Belt is envisioned as "the backbone of a European habitat network." This network will bind together such national parks as Thayatal in Austria, Podyji in the Czech Republic, Ferto-Hansag in Hungary, and Neusiedler-See in Austria. Its creation would protect old-growth forests, mires, taiga, and other habitats for numerous plant and animal species, ranging from wolves, brown bears, European lynx, and wolverines to black storks, great gray owls, white-tailed eagles, and otters.
At the World Wildlife Fund, such ecological integrity is a key in the organization’s efforts to preserve the environment and ecology of parks.
"In virtually every place where we work, our strategy is to have the park, or the protected area, but then you have to have the corridors and capacity for wildlife to move out of those parks and follow their traditional migratory paths, or just to ensure genetic intermixing across different populations, so you don’t have these little islands," says Eichbaum. "That’s where we really end up working very closely with communities. We don’t say that the community has to disappear, but we’re trying to work with these communities to ensure that they’re able to manage their agricultural activities, or their woodcutting activities, in a way that is more consistent with wildlife movement."
While the multitude of threats seems staggering, Eichbaum is surprisingly optimistic that the world’s societies will, for their own good, preserve and protect national parks. There is growing scientific evidence and acceptance that society needs to protect these places, he says, and more and more countries realize that healthy national parks can be an integral part of their overall economic development strategy.
Writer Kurt Repanshek lives in Park City, Utah.
Posted on July 19, 2007