Why National Parks?
Societies have tried many ways to deal with private versus group ownership. Private ownership often raises ethical questions—did you come by that piece of land fairly? Can you claim for your king some land that was already occupied by other peoples? Do other species have land rights? Public ownership often raises the “tragedy of the commons”—if I can sneak a few more of my sheep onto the public green, I’ll gain in the short term, even if, in the long term, we all lose because the extra sheep kill the grass.
The U.S. tradition has focused on private ownership, but we have also recognized the benefits of public ownership. The idea of a National Park—taking the choice pieces of the country and placing them under public control—is a U.S. idea, developed by the Washburn expedition to Yellowstone in 1870 and eventually enacted by Congress in 1872.
Since then, the idea of national parks has spread across the nation and worldwide. This is surely one of the great ideas of the modern world, to save key scenic environments in the public domain.
However, the national parks of the United States, and the world, face a grave dilemma. The act establishing Yellowstone and the concept of national parks specified “conservation... unimpaired for...future generations” and “to provide for the enjoyment” of the parks. Saving a wild region for the future while having it enjoyed by millions of visitors each year is perhaps the largest of many difficulties facing the parks today.
Most of the national parks were founded to preserve geologic features—the geysers of Yellowstone, Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, etc. Many national parks were founded when they were, biologically, small pieces of a vast, unbroken wilderness of similar habitats. Today, the parks are often becoming islands of the natural environment in a sea of human-controlled and human-altered land. Thus, much focus on the parks today involves biodiversity. We will revisit the questions of biodiversity and island biogeography later. (Yes, this is a geology course, but some things are too important to pass up just because they belong in a different department.)