Bill Will Sell-off National Parks: Big Greens Finally Starting to Wake UP
author: Scott Silver
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Congressman Richard Pombo has introduced a bill to sell off 1/4 of our national parks and completely commercialize and privatize the rest. This has finally stirred from their sleep the Sierra Club and other so-called conservation groups about the long-running, right-wing agenda to carry out the above.
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From:  ssilver@wildwilderness.org
Subject: Is Pombo Joking?? - Making Wildlife "pay its passage"
Date: September 27, 2005 3:07:14 PM PDT
To: ssilver@wildwilderness.org
The appended Commentary about Pombo's efforts to sell National Parks is
EXCELLENT.
The blank, deer-in-the-headlights, stare from NPCA director Kiernan is
CLASSIC while the indignant bitching from others in the conservation
community is appreciated, even if it comes about 5 years late. Everyone was
well warned that this day was coming. No one but Rumpelstilskin could have
been caught unaware.
So why are conservation leaders now acting surprised???? Is it because they
chose to ignore the warnings and carry on as if the privatization of
America's public lands wasn't an imminent threat in spite of knowing better?
Is it because these so called "leaders" now feel they must appear shocked
and awed in order to avoid being held publicly accountable for their failure
to act sooner!? YOU ARE ACCOUNTABLE. You failed in your responsibility to
protect this nation's public lands from these very threats. It was not
ignorance. It was failure of judgement!
So now I ask: "What is the conservation community going to do to STOP Pombo
from utterly and totally commercializing, privatizing and motorizing
America's National Parks and other public lands?"
As for the question of whether Pombo is Joking --- of course he is NOT.
Scott
PS... Some persons quoted below have done a wonderful job fighting the
ongoing privatization agenda. To each of them, I say "Thank You: I, perhaps
more than anyone, truly appreciate everything that you have done."
-- begin quoted --
 http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2890
COMMENTARY
Our Parks in Peril - By Jim Motavalli
Is Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA), the chairman of the House Resources
Committee, joking? Did he really circulate a razed-earth anti-parks bill as
a rather mean-spirited joke, or was he for real? It's a little hard to tell
with him, but the national parks sections are certainly laughable. In any
case, the idea of making wildlife "pay its passage" is not new: In the 1997
film Fierce Creatures, a sequel to the fabulous A Fish Named Wanda, an evil
magnate modeled on Rupert Murdoch takes over a small British zoo and demands
that it produce a 20 percent return. Among his bright ideas: hanging
bank-promoting advertising sandwich boards on the big cats.
If Pombo's bill was a joke, it was an elaborate one, paid for with federal
dollars:
Section 6302 requires the National Park Service (NPS) to raise $10 million.
by selling advertising in official maps and guidebooks, as well as placing
billboards on buses, trams and vans. The Interior Department would also be
required to sell commercial sponsorship of visitor and education centers,
museums trails, theaters and other facilities. Thus the "Exxon/Mobil
Visitors Center" or other such designations. (If the place was already named
after an individual, it would get a reprieve);
Section 6306 requires NPS to sell for private use any park that receives.
less than 10,000 visitors per day. Most of the 15 parks that meet that
designation are in Alaska, and all are national treasures.
The parks that would go on the block for poor performance include 23 percent
of total park system acreage. They include the Eugene O'Neill National
Historic Site in California (where the esteemed playwright wrote "The Iceman
Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey into Night"), the Bering Land Bridge
National Preserve in Alaska and the Frederick Law Olmstead National Historic
Site (dedicated to the creator of New York's Central Park, among other
treasures) in Massachusetts. Poor Mary McLeod Bethune's council house in
Washington, D.C. would have to go, too, but who remembers her? She was only
a pioneering African-American leader.
To say that the environmental community reacted strongly to the idea of
prostituting and/or selling the parks would be a considerable
understatement. "I have no idea what they could be thinking putting together
a proposal this extreme," said Craig Obey of the National Park Conservation
Association (NPCA). "These proposals are unconscionable." NPCA's president,
Tom Kiernan, added, "Congressman Pombo seems prepared to put our American
heritage on the auction block, insulting the American people and tarnishing
the birthright of current and future generations."
Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) noted that Frederick Law Olmstead had a hand in
designing the gardens of the U.S. Capitol, the White House and other
national treasures. "In keeping with his design to gut our country of
national treasures, the chairman has put the home of America's foremost
park-maker.on the list of national parks to be cut," Markey said. "He is
trying to sell the park-maker's park."
Jim DiPeso of the national grassroots group Republicans for Environmental
Protection agreed. "Pombo's extremism, if turned into law, would turn our
treasured national park system into a tawdry carnival of advertising and
fast-buck commercialism, squandering a priceless inheritance," he said,
adding that Pombo and his friends were using Hurricane Katrina-related
energy shortages as a smokescreen to push through "extreme" legislation.
The parks were already under fire from the Bush administration, which has
relentlessly championed both privatization and commercialization. Bill
Berkowitz reported at WorkingforChange.com last year, "Over the past few
months, NPS has quietly imposed a hiring freeze, abandoned maintenance
projects, cut visitor services and reduced park hours at a number of America
's national parks. In response, according to Ski magazine, 'Forest Service
officials appear to be leaning toward a policy change that would allow more
visible displays of sponsors, whose logos, names or ads could appear on
items they underwrite.'"
Back in August, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times reported that
Paul Hoffman, deputy assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior
for fish and wildlife and parks, had quietly rewritten many of the rules of
park governance. According to a coalition of environmental groups that
includes Friends of the Earth, NPCA, Natural Resources Defense Council and
The Wilderness Society, Hoffman's proposals "would harm national parks from
Gettysburg to Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, and compromise visitors'
experiences." The groups added, "As watchdog organizations, we share the
concerns expressed by park professionals that these policy revisions depart
radically from the fundamental stewardship ethic that has preserved our
national parks from their beginning. We urge the Department of the Interior
to immediately abandon this rewrite, heeding the advice of NPS professionals
who have effectively managed our heritage for decades."
Bush has also been studying the idea of outsourcing many parks jobs-and even
planned on sticking NPS with the $2.5 million to $3 million bill for
studying just how that outsourcing to private contractors would work. "This
is a quota-based ideological drive to replace civil servants with private
contractors, regardless of the cost to the public, the park service or the
national assets it protects," said attorney Jeffrey Ruch, executive director
of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
NPCA has been leading the campaign trying to stop the ongoing privatization
plan, which "could devastate an already understaffed agency and detract from
the experiences of the millions of people who visit the national parks
annually," the group says, adding that privatization plans "are damaging
morale and creating fear in the agency's ranks."
In the report A New Tragedy for the Commons: The Threat of Privatization to
National Parks (and other Public Lands), Bill Wade of the Coalition of
National Park Retirees reports that current NPS Director Fran Mainella came
into office promoting the idea of "partnerships" to "contract out certain
NPS functions, to increase opportunities for private, commercial interests
to become involved in park activities and to expand recreational (especially
motorized) uses in NPS areas-promoting what [the Bush administration calls]
the 'proper balance between public access and resource protection.'"
These efforts, Wade says, include attempts to outsource biological science
and archaeological surveys and assessments, replacing NPS workers with
low-bid private contractors. Meanwhile, despite scientific data recommending
against it, the Bush administration is opening the parks to wider
recreational vehicle use, including snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park
and off-highway vehicles in bird-nesting areas of the Cape Hatteras National
Seashore. The new intrusions are supported by the American Recreation
Coalition, representing the $400 billion outdoor recreation industry.
Park bookstores and gift shops are being turned into forums for
creationists. Visit the Grand Canyon and among the literature on sale is the
handsomely illustrated Grand Canyon: A Different View, which maintains that
the national treasure was formed not six million years ago, as most
geologists would have it, but about 4,500 years ago, a direct consequence of
Noah's Flood. The book is the work of Tom Vail, a former canyon guide who
"met the lord" some years ago. "Now I have a different view of the Canyon,
which according to a biblical time scale, can't possibly be more than a few
thousand years old," he says.
The superintendent of the Grand Canyon attempted to remove the book, but was
overruled by NPS headquarters, which claimed it would conduct a review. But
that review apparently never happened, and hundreds of copies of the book
were ordered. PEER's Ruch proclaimed, "If the Bush administration is using
public resources for pandering to Christian fundamentalists, it should at
least have the decency to tell the truth about it."
Pombo's staff can't seem to get their story straight about the proposed
legislation. Brian Kennedy, a Pombo spokesperson, said initially that the
language in the bill is just one option, a draft offering "the biggest,
broadest spectrum of options," and that "no final decisions have been made."
He noted cheerfully that the bill as stated would raise $5 billion.
But Kennedy, who failed to return calls asking for comment, also told the
San Francisco Chronicle that Pombo really has no intention of selling off
parks or historic sites, and that the staffers who prepared the document saw
much of the plan as "absurd and laughable." Its purpose, Kennedy said, was
to show other legislators why it was important to open up the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. A House budget bill directed
Pombo's committee to come up with $2.4 billion in savings, Kennedy said, and
the choice was either to drill in ANWR (obtaining the money through oil
lease sales over five years) or decimate the parks. "Ultimately, it's not
serious in any way as proposed legislation," Kennedy said, calling the bill
a "conversation starter."
Creating legislation for laughs would seem to be a new and novel use of
federal money. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, for one, was taking the
proposed bill very seriously, noting that it had been made the same week
that another Republican legislator, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, introduced a
bill that would sell 15 percent of all Interior Department holdings to fund
Katrina relief. "These public lands are icons of our natural and cultural
history," said Pope. "They belong to us all and it's not up to Congressmen
Pombo or Tancredo to offer them to the highest bidder."
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Scott Silver
Wild Wilderness
248 NW Wilmington Ave.
Bend, OR 97701
phone: 541-385-5261
e-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org
Internet: http://www.wildwilderness.org
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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It don't work that way anymore. The Republicans OWN the street -- the Congress (with a few struggling hold-outs carrying on with the good fight), the federal courts, the White House, the Federal Reserve, the corporate media. Oh sure, it was ALWAYS owned by the big dogs, so the two-party ILLUSION was never much to brag about. But it WAS a way to do business as usual, and hopefully some basic sanity could win out in the competition between the two sides, and that's what the Sierra Club and the rest of them have been thinking -- that such efforts were the PRACTICAL and REALISTIC approach as opposed to GreenPeace or whatever that was IMPRACTICAL and UNREALISTIC.
The two-party system is struggling to survive, with many wondering if it is worth saving. But right now, who has a better idea, practically speaking? For such reasons, the GP, with David Cobb leading, laid off in key states in 2004. That didn't work either. But, again, who has a better idea?
The problems are systemic, right up to and including embedded in the Constitution. BUT here we are and here in the real world of today is where we have to start, whatever we are going to do.
Many here at PIMC mock us all, saying, "You fools, when will you come to see that you are just totally FUKT!" So maybe we are kicking a dead horse, the Earth herself.