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The Role of National Park Service in its Second Century
What do you expect from the National Park System? How would you like to see the National Park Service manage the 391 parks? Those are at the same time simple and complex questions.
Perhaps the obvious answer is that we want parks managed for people to enjoy. But from there the obvious quickly fades away. Do we want them managed for preservation, for the betterment of species that inhabit the parks, for their landscapes to persist immemorially? Do we want history on display and interpreted? How do we want to pay for the parks?
And if we want them preserved, at what moment in time? Should they reflect the parkscapes of the 1930s, the 1940s, or the 1960s, when many Baby Boomers made their first treks into the parks? Or should they be preserved from today forward, with your electronic rangers and cellphone hot spots?
Delving more deeply, what role should the National Park Service play in managing the parks? Again, seemingly an easy question, particularly if you can come up with answers for the previous paragraph’s questions. But as the National Park Service approaches the end of its first century and looks towards its second, not everything is obvious.
For the past year the Second Century Commission has explored these and other questions that revolve around the parks. Questions about funding, about appealing to all walks of society, about what educational role the parks can and should play, about protecting natural resources.
more at :
http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com...second-century
Perhaps the obvious answer is that we want parks managed for people to enjoy. But from there the obvious quickly fades away. Do we want them managed for preservation, for the betterment of species that inhabit the parks, for their landscapes to persist immemorially? Do we want history on display and interpreted? How do we want to pay for the parks?
And if we want them preserved, at what moment in time? Should they reflect the parkscapes of the 1930s, the 1940s, or the 1960s, when many Baby Boomers made their first treks into the parks? Or should they be preserved from today forward, with your electronic rangers and cellphone hot spots?
Delving more deeply, what role should the National Park Service play in managing the parks? Again, seemingly an easy question, particularly if you can come up with answers for the previous paragraph’s questions. But as the National Park Service approaches the end of its first century and looks towards its second, not everything is obvious.
For the past year the Second Century Commission has explored these and other questions that revolve around the parks. Questions about funding, about appealing to all walks of society, about what educational role the parks can and should play, about protecting natural resources.
more at :
http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com...second-century