Posted on 06/28/2011 11:01:55 PM PDT by Hunton Peck
Sitting miles offshore in Lake Superior, Isle Royale National Park is about as good as you can get for a wilderness sanctuary in the interior of a continent.
But while the park's isolation has provided a perfect, controlled laboratory for its famous predator-prey studies of wolves and moose, the island is not immune to "unnatural" threats, both from the air and the ground.
Mercury from air pollution is measurable in the fat of its inland-lake fish, and stowaways from hikers' boots - non-native, invasive plant species such as garlic mustard - now sprout from its interior trails.
The problems facing Isle Royale are among dozens of threats documented in a decade-long study released Tuesday of 80 of America's national parklands.
The "sobering" findings by the National Parks Conservation Association: "National park cultural resources are often ignored and consistently underfunded, many natural resources are being degraded, and throughout the (National) Park System, conservation efforts are failing to keep pace with the forces that threaten resources."
The nonprofit said its report, which likely will rank among a handful of significant studies of the National Park System over the past 20 years, is the most comprehensive ever undertaken of the system, which includes 394 national parks, lakeshores, battlefields, national monuments and historic sites.
Among the findings: Climate change is melting the glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana and Advertisement
making life inhospitable for the Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park in California. A lack of coordination with other federal agencies that control neighboring lands has left the borders of Olympic National Park in Washington visible from space.
Closer to home, the sand-based ecosystems of a number of Great Lakes parks, including the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, are vulnerable to being loved to death, Isle Royale wolf Isle Royale National Park in Michigan is an ideal outdoor laboratory to study wolves and moose. (File photo courtesy Rolf Peterson) as hikers and snowmobilers have too frequently trod on the delicate flora. Humans have been living on Isle Royale for 4,500 years, yet there's little to show for it in terms of historical and archaeological information for visitors - one of the premises behind national parks - according to the report. The visitors center at the Apostle Islands lacks a fire-suppression system, leaving many of its maritime artifacts vulnerable.
A National Park Service spokesman said the agency doesn't dispute any of the findings.
"It confirms what our staff and scientists and visitors have confirmed for some time: There are a lot of challenges to the national parks," national spokesman David Barna said.
The report serves as a call to action for the array of groups that support and lobby for the parks at the beginning of the run-up to the centennial of the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916. Expect such groups to turn up the volume in Congress and around the country on the perennial issue of funding for what documentary filmmaker Ken Burns called "America's Best Idea," emphasizing figures like an estimated $9 billion backlog in maintenance to park roads, visitors centers and other facilities.
"These parks are in jeopardy," said Ron Tipton, senior vice president of the National Parks Conservation Association. "But we also believe that there are solutions to all the challenges."
In short, the solution is money, according to the report's findings and recommendations. The National Park Service's current annual budget is $2.8 billion, Barna said. That's about $600 million short of what the agency says it needs. At most parks examined in Tuesday's report, unfilled staff positions are listed, the result of year-after-year belt-tightening.
"Obviously, we're in fiscally difficult times. We understand that," said Tom Kiernan, president of the NPCA, which used a scoring methodology that was peer-reviewed by scholars and scientists from several institutions, including Stanford University and the Smithsonian. But $600 million a year, Kiernan contended, is small in the scope of the overall federal budget deficit, which tops $1 trillion. "Funding the national parks is not going to impact the deficit one way or another."
But nothing another trillion dollars in taxes wouldn’t fix. C’mon, Hunton. Pony-up. Quit being a piker.
You’re right. The only thing that can ease these pangs of guilt is money.
Q: How much money?
A: More.
We will probably will all end up living in them after the Big Reset.
I wonder what kind of “stowaways” my SUV tires will track in?
might as well try to douse out a gasoline fire with more gasoline.
Who moved my cheese?
A catch phrase that corp America was pushing in late 90’s early 2000.
Change is gonna happen whether we like it or not.
Why not in nature also, change happens , if some envirowonk does not approve oh wellMy cheese is tired of fundng your cheese to take more of my cheese.
Envirowonks get a real job, and start paying your cheese to fund these stupid studies.
No! The glaciers of Advertisement National Park are our nation's most beautiful resource.
You just can’t have TOO MANY “studies”. They do keep the unemployable employed though so I guess I can’t complain.
They need to have them “in peril” so they can be turned over to the UN.
LOL! Somehow, it seems so right. Save the Ads!
Actually if the Department of Interior spent the money on the parks instead of feathering their nest in Washington there'd be more than enough money. Ask yourself how many lawyers work at NPS and how has that number grown. The number of parks remains roughly the same but the NPS budget went from 0.919 Billion in 2001 to 1.069 Billion in 2006. What's wrong with this picture? If they were rated by Charity Navigator they'd get an "F" because the bulk of the money goes for administration.
Close the Parks down, let them go back Nature; and start with Yukon Charlie. Defund them Don Young like you promised.
...non-native, invasive plant species such as garlic mustard - now sprout from its interior trails.
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It’s caused by those damn illegal immigrant deer and birds from outside the park. This is terrible! Next thing you know the bears will be all brown and black....no more white bears!
The problem of our times in a nutshell. We have to spend a billion or a wilderness area will fall apart. And we have to mortgage our kids’ future to do it.
Oh, and if we get more money for National Parks the money will be spent on making snow to put on the peaks and on weeding???????????????
“Isle Royale is a huge rock sticking out of Lake Superior. Everything on that rock is from somewhere else.”
Bingo!!!
And require that everything upwind/upstream of it be sterile and non-toxic.
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