These pieces of land also serve as living laboratories for researchers and scientists. In the US over half of us live in cities, and the escape to nature provides us with a place to recharge our spiritual and emotional batteries. Setting aside a relatively small part of our wild places, to keep them as free from human change as possible, is an important thing to have on reserve for us. We as a species have been very good at modifying the earth to fit our needs and desires. “There aren't many places left untouched by man. Reading between the lines and seeing the nuance in this piece of beauty written legislation is where the meat is for me.” The TL DR version is that the parks are a place to conserve nature and history, while also being a place the public can use for recreation. to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."" Millerīecca Miller: “As dry as this might sound, the founding document of the NPS, The Organic Act of 1916, sums it up well. Note: Instead of questions, bold titles added post-interview show subject matter and aid flow of insights from Ms. So buckle up, or, if you want to follow advice from Abbey above, put your walking shoes on. The structure of this article will be different than the first one - instead of a standard Q and A, we'll break her answers into subject matters to aid flow of the article and ultimately arrive at tips for visitors to our great parks. For that, we turn to our second part of our interview with Becca Miller, National Park Ranger and terrific human. In that way, parks like Arches NP are very successful as their use has risen dramatically in the past 50 or so years.įinding the balance between preservation and use will always be a struggle for the parks, but there are ways in which we can support the goal of balance as visitors to these great parks. However there is another word in that Organic Act quoted above that is important - " enjoyment." Besides " leaving them unimpaired," another purpose of the National Parks is to be used and enjoyed by the public - by everyone. Looking through the lens of preservation, those facts would be alarming, almost apocalyptic. And desert solitaire would become more like desert bingo according to the visitation statistics - in 1968, 135,600 visitors came to Arches NP, while in 2019 there were 1,659,702 - a 1200% increase.
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles."įrankly, Abbey would probably gape in horror if he were to see Arches NP now on busy weekends where cars stretch for miles and miles at the entrance trying to get in for a drive through the park. In it, he argues that people should see the parks on horseback, bicycles, or walking as opposed to cars because the point of National Parks, as written in Organic Act of 1916, is to " leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."Ībbey writes: "The motorized tourists, reluctant to give up the old ways, will complain that they can't see enough without their automobiles to bear them swiftly through the parks. In prepping for this article, I picked through my roughed up copy of Desert Solitaire, a masterful reflection on nature, wilderness and conservation by a park ranger Edward Abbey at Arches National Park in Utah written in 1968. Views expressed in this article are in no way official nor endorsed by the National Park Service and all its affiliates.