32
pogenic influences, while frequently monitored, interact across every designation.
11
As the National Park Service in America decreased by 11% its staffing between
2011 and 2018, and the Congressional Natural Resources Committee in 2017 passed
legislation imposing additional hurdles to designating future national monuments,
as originally envisioned by the Antiquities Act, it became clear that Republicans in
Washington were turning their backs on the environment. One nation, one trend
oriented toward undermining 50 years of NEPA, the critical National Environmental
Policy Act, as well as nearly every significant piece of legislation in EPA history.
Such measures represent a form of reprehensible irrationality at the biological
level. Even within ranks, there are social consequences. For example, there was the
grassroots formation of an “Alt National Park Service,” devoted to continuing the
values of the service for future generations, as embraced by NPS employees in collective ethical compliance with the substance of the original National Park Service
Organic Act of August 25, 1916, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
Perversely, the NPS’s first superintendent, Stephen Mather, was an industrial magnate who believed in as many automobiles and roads heading into the parks as possible, coinciding with the demise of resident indigenous peoples in the case of one
of America’s most famous parks, Yosemite, and its former Southern Miwok occupants. And while the 417 park units covering 84 million acres have been slowly
expanded in the century following Wilson’s mandate, most notably by President
Jimmy Carter’s doubling of the acreage in the late 1970s in one fell swoop, trends
into the twenty-first century have not boded well.
4.2 Psychology and Policy
Policies of national, psychological sovereignty have resulted in regard, or disregard,
to economic and political vagaries predicating an outright negligence of moral
duties on one continent after another toward the environment. Our species’ topographical hubris can be measured according to any number of distinct biases, some
in accord with true nurturance, but most, deceptive and/or disinterested. The basis
for environmental sophrosyne (excellence, soundness), as practiced, monitored, and
policed by governance, is a fast-moving target subject to all the flaws built in to any
collective tide of constituency discords. Realism and idealism, both, easily warp
political aspirations; while real people can accomplish nearly anything. As ranked
by the amount of terrestrial protection, the US is number 114, with 12.99% of its
sovereign borders protected, as of 2018. Given the numbers, one sees how vague,
diluted, and unclear the word “protection” really means. Rankings for New Zealand,
Canada, Mauritania, Bhutan, and particularly Suriname are all soft data, riddled
with complex, on-the-ground discrepancies in data assessment. To its significant
11 See, for example, community monitoring in Colorado, https://wildernessworkshop.org/
wilderness-monitoring/
4 Protected Area Dilemmas
pogenic influences, while frequently monitored, interact across every designation.
11
As the National Park Service in America decreased by 11% its staffing between
2011 and 2018, and the Congressional Natural Resources Committee in 2017 passed
legislation imposing additional hurdles to designating future national monuments,
as originally envisioned by the Antiquities Act, it became clear that Republicans in
Washington were turning their backs on the environment. One nation, one trend
oriented toward undermining 50 years of NEPA, the critical National Environmental
Policy Act, as well as nearly every significant piece of legislation in EPA history.
Such measures represent a form of reprehensible irrationality at the biological
level. Even within ranks, there are social consequences. For example, there was the
grassroots formation of an “Alt National Park Service,” devoted to continuing the
values of the service for future generations, as embraced by NPS employees in collective ethical compliance with the substance of the original National Park Service
Organic Act of August 25, 1916, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.
Perversely, the NPS’s first superintendent, Stephen Mather, was an industrial magnate who believed in as many automobiles and roads heading into the parks as possible, coinciding with the demise of resident indigenous peoples in the case of one
of America’s most famous parks, Yosemite, and its former Southern Miwok occupants. And while the 417 park units covering 84 million acres have been slowly
expanded in the century following Wilson’s mandate, most notably by President
Jimmy Carter’s doubling of the acreage in the late 1970s in one fell swoop, trends
into the twenty-first century have not boded well.
4.2 Psychology and Policy
Policies of national, psychological sovereignty have resulted in regard, or disregard,
to economic and political vagaries predicating an outright negligence of moral
duties on one continent after another toward the environment. Our species’ topographical hubris can be measured according to any number of distinct biases, some
in accord with true nurturance, but most, deceptive and/or disinterested. The basis
for environmental sophrosyne (excellence, soundness), as practiced, monitored, and
policed by governance, is a fast-moving target subject to all the flaws built in to any
collective tide of constituency discords. Realism and idealism, both, easily warp
political aspirations; while real people can accomplish nearly anything. As ranked
by the amount of terrestrial protection, the US is number 114, with 12.99% of its
sovereign borders protected, as of 2018. Given the numbers, one sees how vague,
diluted, and unclear the word “protection” really means. Rankings for New Zealand,
Canada, Mauritania, Bhutan, and particularly Suriname are all soft data, riddled
with complex, on-the-ground discrepancies in data assessment. To its significant
11 See, for example, community monitoring in Colorado, https://wildernessworkshop.org/
wilderness-monitoring/
4 Protected Area Dilemmas