(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Hypervisitation, the Fate of the National Parks, and Tourism Toxification in a Small Town : Corner Post [1]

[]

Date: 2023-04-12

The Parks’ current troubles can be directly traced to the prevailing values of the era in which they were created. The spirit of Henry Ford presided over the birth of the Park Service. Auto-tourism was all the rage, and in the 1920s, the Service was quick to embrace the paradigm that more cars would mean more visitors, more visitors would mean more public support for parks, more public support would mean more influence in Congress for bigger budgets. Obviously more roads needed to be built, along with more infrastructure to support the larger crowds in their fast-paced autos: bigger visitor centers, more and bigger lodges, more viewpoint pull-offs on the ever-expanding roads, and more walking trails.

After World War II, visitation reached levels that Park Service officials a few decades earlier could hardly have believed possible. By the 1960s, NPS administrators worried that the public’s experience of parks was suffering, and by the 1970s, lawmakers took notice. Congress began crafting legislation to limit visitors to national parks and spare people the immiseration that comes with overcrowding. The 1978 National Parks and Recreation Act required the Park Service to institute social and ecological carrying capacities in order to address the problem of hyper-visitation. The NPS didn’t exactly rush to fulfill the congressional mandate. It took more than a decade for it to outline, agree on, and finally release from the slow-moving bowels of bureaucracy the Visitor Experience and Resource Protection program, or VERP.

VERP was radical. For the first time in the history of the Park Service, the agency was to establish social and ecological carrying capacities—the number of visitors the park could reasonably support without harming either their experience or the survival of plants and wildlife—and a ceiling on visitation. Arches, importantly, was the pilot site for VERP, the place where the program would be tested for use in parks nationwide.

Congress was clear that the responsibility to determine carrying capacity for the parks would rest with individual park superintendents, who would have to champion the effort using “the best available natural and social science” to produce “desired resource conditions and visitor experiences for the area.” At Arches, that superintendent was Noel Poe, a veteran NPS staffer who headed up the park from 1990 to 1995. Poe announced that under his watch, VERP planning, which began in 1991, would serve as the model for all other parks to deal with a problem that was appearing to veer particularly out of control at Arches. Visitation had gone from 150,000 in 1965 to 700,000 in 1991, and internal documents from the 1990s revealed the profound concern of Poe and his administrative team. “Doubling time went from 20 years to 6 years,” explained a 1993 planning memo. “It took this park from its establishment in 1920 until the 1980s to serve one million visitors; in the near future, this is the expected yearly visitation.” “It was alarming,” said a manager who worked alongside Poe.

VERP’s initial phase, which lasted several years, consisted of interviews with thousands of visitors to discuss their experience. The most important insight gleaned from this public counsel phase of the program was that people polled in Arches wanted fewer of themselves – not more visitation, but less. In the language of visitation planning, they were “crowding-intolerant.” Accordingly, administrators proposed limits to parking spaces and the number of visitors at each turnout and scenic trail. “I do not believe that national parks should always build more and more facilities in order to meet ever-increasing visitation,” Poe stated in a 1993 VERP planning document—though this was exactly what the park service had been doing for decades.

In a 1994 statement of “proposed management actions to address increasing visitor use,” Poe asserted that “the first action that should be taken to return use levels to acceptable conditions is reduce the areas available for parking.” Again, he was contradicting decades of park service orthodoxy, which maintained that parking areas should be constantly expanded. Officials floated numerous other ideas for regulating visitation, and premier among them was the establishment of a reservation system. Forcing the public to make reservations for a visit wouldn’t necessarily deal with overall numbers of people, of course. It would merely spread the people out, without imposing a cap on the total visits per day. The park would still be crowded, but visitors would be dispersed in what the Park Service believed would be manageable intervals.

Faced with the prospect of limiting visitors, businessowners in Moab, who were increasingly dependent on revenue from visitation at Arches, descended into hysterics. “There were folks, including the mayor, who thought this huge axe would come down,” VERP planner Karen McKinlay-Jones, an administrative ranger who worked for 20 years at Arches, told me. “That was the doomsday theory of how we were going to implement VERP.” The proposal for a reservation system was a nonstarter, so hostile were tourism interests in Moab. “By god, don’t use the ‘R’ word,” said McKinlay-Jones, who worked closely with Noel Poe on VERP. The idea of being forced to make a reservation at the park, she told me, not only threatened profits, it “went against the American ethos of ‘I wanna do what I want, when I want, and screw you people.’”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://cornerpost.org/2023/04/12/hypervisitation-the-fate-of-the-national-parks-and-tourism-toxification-in-a-small-town/

Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/