The Business of Scenery: Why America’s national parks need new management

I've found the biggest issue in preserving wilderness is helicopters and planes - they can easily cover large amounts of terrain in short time in a very noisy and intrusive manner.

In NZ, we try to a) ensure the 'front country' has facilities for easy access by day trippers and that b) the 'back country' is not disturbed by commercial operations.

In some parts, the balance tips further in one direction than the other - as an example, while walking the Milford Track[1], hardly a backcountry experience due to the very well developed tracks and facilities to cope with huge numbers of visitors, I still found the very frequent overflights by tourist charters detracted from the overall experience.

It was still gorgeous, but the continual drone of tourist flights for people who didn't want to, or couldn't walk the track, detracted significantly.

In my usual stomping ground national park, no commercial flights or landings are allowed, you can't even lead a guided walk. You still get the occasional private pilot flying through, and of course can't really do anything about the airliners flying to Australia, but the frequency is far lower than you find in the more commercialised areas like Fiordland or Aoraki Mt Cook.

The Department of Conservation has a policy of focusing commercial activity in areas tourists want to be in anyway, so that the rest of the conservation estate is largely preserved for NZ citizens undertaking recreational activities.

[1]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/fi...

like the past few years i started going through history, from the 30s through 1990 (cuz most of that i lived through) and just started mapping out these long trends over 20-40 years. noticing the differences in what happens and so on. and it's kind of funny, you go back 20 years and it's limp bizkit burning down woodstock 99 to break stuff, and 20 years before that you get the sex pistols.

and then you fast forward back to now and it's literally aging johnny rotten screaming his love for trump on television and zoomers burning down anything they can, and having an intergenerational fight between those two camps. i think beyond all, it was that combination that most explains the events that have been going on. the sort of generations of goal post moving, the polished nature of diversity that is both a waste of time and ends up tokenizing the trend vs mavericks like roddenberry. and then you mix that with the sort of careless attitudes because so far we've equated freedom from government control, with freedom from any kind of civil order or basic ethical values.

when i was a kid, and this isn't that long ago cuz i'm barely in my 30s, if i got caught even considering any of the stuff i read in this article, somebody would've probably kicked my ass or gave me a stern talking to and rightfully so. you shouldn't have to NEED to feel something to do the most minimal of things. we shouldn't NEED to have some crappy surveillance state and have to pay a bazillion park service people to keep an eye on things. people should just do it. hell, go plant a tree or something and go insta that, go read a book, even go to a Broadway show or listen to some Jazz. that was the ethic that glued together this country, and now it's gone.

i've been watching a lot of the old generation, the pre you know stewart brand types. and the crazy thing is the bookchins and the ayn rands actually if you really look at it - hated them. because they thought they were too careless and merely wanted to just pick whatever sounded good or mostly plausible to run with it.

like this guy was right there along with brand and SDS and all them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd73MYOBV-k

i'm a big quality over quantity type of person. i think most people drift towards that, but we're habitually lazy. when the social ties reward that, i just don't really think that's a good idea.

Compared to normal patterns of human land use (agriculture, living space, resource extraction), national parks, inundated-with-tourists-or-not certainly qualify as preservation.

As another poster said, 50 yards from the trails lie hundreds of square miles of wilderness that few visitors venture into.

Yes, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and a few other places are absolutely crawling with tourists. They're victims of their own success as destinations for people to check off a bucket list.

But once you get outside that top tier, America has countless places that are just as beautiful, still legitimately wild if that's your thing, and definitely not as crowded.

In my neck of the woods, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smokey Mountains National Park (which are among the most-visited in the country, by the way) don't have the same sense of overwhelming crowding that, say, Yosemite does, except for maybe during peak leaf season, or at specific times/locations (e.g., Cades Cove in Spring). Most of the year, sure, they're not pristine wilderness, but it's not like they're wall-to-wall people and trash, either.

And, if wilderness IS your thing, you can go right next door to Pisgah National Forest or Nantahala National Forest, backpack for miles at a time without seeing another soul, and see views that are, IMO, equally as impressive as what you get in the official National Parks.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're looking for a more remote experience, venture away from the big-name National Parks, and hit some of the lesser known areas, and you'll find that America still has a ton to offer.