Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
summer, users entering the most popular U.S. national
and state parks often face hour-long backups and ex-
perience noise, congestion, eroded trails, and stress in-
stead of peaceful solitude.
Many visitors expect parks to have grocery stores,
laundries, bars, golf courses, video arcades, and other
facilities found in urban areas. U.S. Park Service rangers
spend an increasing amount of their time on law en-
forcement and crowd control instead of conservation,
management, and education. Many overworked and
underpaid rangers are leaving for better-paying jobs. In
some parks, noisy dirt bikes, dune buggies, snowmo-
biles, and other off-road vehicles (ORVs) degrade the
aesthetic experience for many visitors, destroy or dam-
age fragile vegetation, and disturb wildlife.
Many parks suffer damage from the migration or
deliberate introduction of nonnative species. European
wild boars (imported to North Carolina in 1912 for
hunting) threaten vegetation in part of the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park. Nonnative mountain
goats in Washington's Olympic National Park trample
native vegetation and accelerate soil erosion.
Nearby human activities that threaten wildlife
and recreational values in many national parks in-
clude mining, logging, livestock grazing, coal-burning
power plants, water diversion, and urban develop-
ment. Polluted air, drifting hundreds of kilometers,
kills ancient trees in California's Sequoia National
Park and often blots out the awesome views at Ari-
zona's Grand Canyon. According to the National Park
Service, air pollution affects scenic views in national
parks more than 90% of the time.
Figure 8-22 lists suggestions that various analysts
have made for sustaining and expanding the national
park system in the United States.
Solutions
National Parks
• Integrate plans for managing parks and nearby
federal lands
• Add new parkland near threatened parks
• Buy private land inside parks
• Locate visitor parking outside parks and use shuttle
buses for entering and touring heavily used parks
• Increase funds for park maintenance and repairs
• Survey wildlife in parks
• Raise entry fees for visitors and use funds for park
management and maintenance
• Limit the number of visitors to crowded park areas
• Increase the number and pay of park rangers
• Encourage volunteers to give visitor lectures and tours
• Seek private donations for park maintenance and repairs
Figure 8-22
Solutions:
suggestions for sustaining and
expanding the national park system in the United States.
Critical
thinking: which two of these solutions do you believe are the
most important?
(Data from Wilderness Society and National
Parks and Conservation Association)
we have strictly protected only 7% of the earth's terres-
trial areas from potentially harmful human activities.
See the map of our ecological footprints (Figures 2 and
3) in Science Supplement 2 at the end of this topic.
Conservation biologists call for full protection of
at least 20% of the earth's land area in a global system
of biodiversity reserves that includes multiple exam-
ples of all the earth's biomes. Achieving this goal will
require action and funding by national governments,
private groups, and cooperative ventures involving
governments, businesses, and private conservation
groups.
Private groups play an important role in estab-
lishing wildlife refuges and other reserves to protect
biological diversity. For example, since its founding
by a group of professional ecologists in 1951, the
Na-
ture Conservancy
—with more than 1 million members
worldwide—has created the world's largest system
of private natural areas and wildlife sanctuaries in
30 countries.
Most developers and resource extractors oppose
protecting even the current 12% of the earth's remain-
ing undisturbed ecosystems. They contend that these
areas might contain valuable resources that would add
to economic growth.
8-7
NATURE RESERVES
Science, Economics, and Politics: Protecting
Land from Human Exploitation
Ecologists believe that we should protect more
land to help sustain the earth's biodiversity, but
powerful economic and political interests oppose
doing this.
Most ecologists and conservation biologists believe the
best way to preserve biodiversity is to create a world-
wide network of protected areas. Currently, 12% of the
earth's land area is protected strictly or partially in na-
ture reserves, parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness, and
other areas. In other words, we have reserved 88% of
the earth's land for us, and most of the remaining area
consists of ice, tundra, or desert where we do not want
to live because it is too cold or too hot.
The 12% figure is actually misleading because no
more than 5% of these areas are truly protected. Thus
