According to the Jackson Hole Daily, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne has appointed Clay W. James chairman of the National Park Service Concessions Management Advisory Board.

Mr. James sat on the board of directors for the National Park Hospitality Association (NPHA), a group based in Washington, D.C. that, according to its website, acts to “increase visibility of the concessions industry in Washington” and to “increase Congressional and Executive branch awareness of concessioner contributions to park quality.” In other words, a the NPHA is a lobby. The NPHA lobbied the National Park Service every year for at least the last decade.

In 2000, when James served on NPHA’s board, the lobby sent a letter to the Associate Director of Energy, Resources, and Science Issues at the GAO. The letter advocated concession ownership of national park facilities.

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Zion National Park’s Oak Creek Canyon by Anonymous.
My, that’s a beautiful tree. Too bad about all that incompatible development around it.

On January 11, I posted an article on the NPS’s seeming hypocrisy toward privately owned inholdings. In a Christian Science Monitor article, Zion’s Chief Ranger worried about private property owners’ potential “incompatible development” and expressed a desire for all land “inside” the park to be “protected at the same level”.

Remarking about “impact that parks try to prevent through planning guidelines distributed to neighbors”, Mrs. Landau, who owns an inholding, stated, “. . . the language makes it sound that if you do build on land that you own you might be in trouble and they’ll come take it.” It’s unfortunate that such planning guidelines weren’t distributed to Zion and other national parks when they decided to trash land inside national parks.

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National Mall War Protest 1/27/07 by JW Landis
Hey, buddy! We are not seeking to restrict First Amendment demonstrations whatsoever! Now get off the grass before we arrest you!

The Washington Post has a story you won’t find on a national park traveler and tourism site. A few years back, offended Christian conservatives pressured the NPS to censor “gay images” from a Lincoln Memorial video; non-Christians have pressured the NPS to scratch out any historical references to “God” from the National Mall memorials. Now the NPS wants to limit citizens’ First Amendment rights in order to . . . save the grass?

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A hazardous chemicals stockpile at Crater Lake National Park - Photo by NPW Editor

In the previous post, I challenged the National Park Service’s condemnation of development of private inholdings because the NPS has created development that marred the landscape. I mentioned a junk yard in Zion National Park’s Oak Creek Canyon. Wanting to give Zion National Park a chance to respond, I sent my concerns to Zion’s superintendent, Jock Whitworth. Mr. Whitworth has assured me the area, which he called the “boneyard”, has been cleaned up and an audit found no hazardous materials. I look forward to receiving more details from Zion’s superintendent, and I hope he will also address the pipes strewn throughout upper Oak Creek Canyon and the extensive and marring development in Zion Canyon. While the Oak Creek dump may have been cleaned up, for several decades it was a mess. I’ve heard rumors that oil was dumped directly into Oak Creek as recently as the late 1980s; when visiting Oak Creek, I discovered ubiquitous piles of rubbish and a wooden building rumored to store dynamite and other hazardous materials.

Since the 1970s, the National Park Service has been waging war against private inholding owners. The NPS takes the high road, as it did in the Christian Science Monitor article, claiming private development might be incompatible with parks’ mission. However, during the same time frame, the National Park Service has created and/or maintained several junk yards in national parks, which would seem to be incompatible with parks’ mission.
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Zion Lodge by BigPhilUK
Do as I say, not as I do: Is maintaining a lawn in a desert incompatible with Zion National Park’s mission?


A previous article discussed how a federal plan bypassed private property rights in a proposed power line corridor. A recent Christian Science Monitor article, When pieces of national parks go on sale, U.S. can’t pay, mischaracterizes the nature of private property inholdings in national parks.

When some national parks were founded (see: Shenandoah National Park), government invoked eminent domain, which forced private property owners out of their homes and destroyed entire communities. In other instances, only existing federal property became a national park, and existing private property became inholdings. The Christian Science Monitor article’s title insinuates that these private property inholdings are actually “pieces of national parks”, which is absolutely not the case. Read the rest of this entry »

PHOTO: Starlight over Joshua Tree by Laura Travels
Would become “Power Lines over Joshua Tree” if Fed has way

Bypassing the standard environmental review process, the federal government has designed a 70,000-square-mile power line corridor that crosses Joshua Tree National Park, Carrizo Plain National Monument, and Sonoran Desert National Monument.Thankfully, the plan is being challenged.

A lawsuit brought by an environmental NGO claims the “federal approval process would allow energy companies to bypass state jurisdiction, environmental laws and even private land ownership in pursuit of constructing transmission lines.”

Note the bold section: Feds allowing energy companies. Sound familiar? This is another example of corporatism, yet we continue to trust the federal government to manage national parks.

Property & Environment Research Center (PERC) is one of America’s first non-profit free market environmental organizations. According to PERC’s website, it’s:

the nation’s oldest and largest institute dedicated to original research that brings market principles to resolving environmental problems. Located in Bozeman, Montana, PERC pioneered the approach known as free market environmentalism, which is based on the following tenets.

Private property rights encourage stewardship of resources.

Government subsidies often degrade the environment.

Market incentives spur individuals to conserve resources and protect environmental quality.

Polluters should be liable for the harm they cause others.

PERC has researched national park management and presents a compelling argument for making parks self-sufficent. In Back to the Future to Save the Parks, an extensively researched article featured in the PERC Policy Series, Donald R. Leal and Holl L. Fretwell show that national parks were originally meant to be self-sufficient: Read the rest of this entry »

Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE) is a Montana-based think tank. FREE’s mission:

FREE advances conservation and environmental values by applying modern science and America’s founding ideals to policy debates. We are intellectual entrepreneurs, explaining how economic incentives, secure property rights, the rule of law, and responsible prosperity can foster a healthy environment.

FREE also maintains that some confuse its libertarian philosophy with corporatism:

FREE has consistently fought corporate subsidies (see “A Welfare Act for U.S. Oil” and “Spare that Tree”) fostering exploitation and strongly advocates such efforts as wolf reintroduction to the federal lands of the West. The intellectually naïve confuse FREE’s classical liberal, pro-market process orientation with that advocated by supporters of a subsidized, pro-business position that exploits the environment (e.g., below-cost timber sales on the national forests).

FREE has responded to its critics, and Mr. Fischer, the Northern Rockies Director of Defenders of Wildlife for twenty years, wrote a letter supporting FREE that stated in part:

I’m chagrined to hear that FREE is under attack by people who claim it is a tool of the radical right and big business. They clearly know nothing of your organization. . .

Anyone who has paid even superficial attention to FREE’s work over the last two decades would have to acknowledge that most of FREE’s positions are pro-environment. As for being a corporate tool, FREE has attacked subsidies that benefit big business at the expense of the environment with the same zeal it has attacked the federal government that provides them. FREE’s criticism of these environmentally-damaging business subsidies has been both pointed and public, appearing on the pages of our nation’s leading newspapers. . . .

John A. Baden, Ph.D., chairman and founder of FREE, has written several articles advocating conservation trusts for national park management.

Environmental Economics: Economists on Environmental and Natural Resources: News, Opinion, and Analysis

Economists Tim Haab and John Whitehead author an environmental economics blog that is surprisingly entertaining, understandable, and often humorous. Its mission:

The Environmental Economics blog is dedicated to the dissemination of economists’ views on current environmental and natural resource issues. We hope this blog will help bring economists’ views on environmental issues further into the mainstream. The intended audience includes the general public and students. Posts are non-technical.

We aim to fill the gap between traditional academic journals and the general interest press by providing a widely accessible yet UNscholarly source for [slightly uninformed] thinking on environmental economics and related policy.

Charlotte Yee authors Government Accountability is a Citizen’s Responsibility. Yee worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and writes about her experiences with “agency absurdity“:

. . . I was subjected to retaliation from an unsupervised boss. I don’t think I would have survived had I not reported his egregious fraud. He was made the subject of an Inspector General (IG) investigation, ”placed on paid leave, and left the employ of the agency.” We later found out during discovery that he received a golden handshake from Uncle Sam. I was assaulted. I filed a Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) case as a whistleblower. I lost.

Yee left the agency and now blogs about issues surrounding government accountability. She writes, “I love my new life, yet there are portions of me that cannot give up the battle for transparency and accountability to the people.” Sounds like yours truly.