In what's being described as another example of the Bush administration whittling away the conservation ethic of the National Park Service, the Interior Department today published a proposed rule to "streamline" the regulatory landscape regarding mountain bikes in national parks.
Pushed by the International Mountain Bicycling Association, the rule, which is attached below and open to public comment for the next 60 days, would give individual park superintendents more power to authorize mountain bike trails in their parks. While conservation groups said the proposed rule could lead mountain bikers down hiking trails and into lands that are either proposed for or eligible for wilderness designation, IMBA officials said the proposal merely makes it easier for parks where mountain bikes make sense to allow their use.
"The proposed rule change will not diminish protections that ensure appropriate trail use. All NPS regulations, general management plan processes, and NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) still applies," said Drew Vankat, IMBA's policy analyst. "In fact, the proposed rule specifically requires at least an EA (environmental assessment) to open an existing trail to bicycles. Absolutely no environmental processes or agency policies will be shortchanged. The public will still have ample opportunity to comment both locally and nationally."
At Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, though, officials interpret the proposed rule as much more egregious, saying it could open thousands of miles of existing national park trails to mountain bikes. And Wilderness Society officials said the proposed rule change would degrade the Park Service's conservation ethic by creating user conflicts on trails and eroding the landscape.
According to PEER, current NPS rules require that backcountry trails may be opened to bikes only after adopting a park-specific regulation in the Federal Register, a process that allows public review and comment. The proposed rule, the group argues, would require a special regulation only for bike use on yet-to-be-constructed trails. As a consequence of this change, says PEER:
* Nearly 8 million acres of recommended or proposed wilderness lands in approximately 30 parks would be opened up to mountain bikes, which would be prohibited only in officially designated wilderness (the Wilderness Act of 1964 prohibits bicycles). This proposal also reverses a commitment made by former NPS Director Mainella in an October 4, 2005 letter to PEER that parks will not open trails to bikes in recommended or proposed wilderness areas; and
* It will be easier to open trails that are now open to hikers, horseback riders and other uses to mountain bikes, whose introduction often creates conflicts with these users.
"The pending proposed bicycle rule is an example of special-interest intrusion into national park management," commented PEER Board member Frank Buono, a former NPS manager. "The need for this change is mysterious as several parks have designated bike trails under the current Reagan-era rule."
In addition to PEER, a number of national park advocacy, hiker and other outdoor recreation groups are mobilizing to oppose this change.
"While we support mountain biking or other activities that get park visitors out of their cars, it is important that one of our national parks uses does not preclude other uses," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "The other concern is that mountain biking on narrow backcountry trails can create damage and new maintenance demands, which is precisely why the Park Service adopted regulations for mountain bikes on backcountry trails only after a stringent decision-making process."
At The Wilderness Society, Kristen Brengel said IMBA officials weren't being entirely truthful when they claimed the proposed rule changes nothing.
“They’re trying to make it seem that there’s no change, but there is a change. That’s the whole point of the document. They’re not accurate," she said.
Under the proposed change, said Ms. Brengel, park superintendents could make a "determination," which requires less scrutiny and public input than the special rule-making process, to expand mountain bike use in their parks.
"If you’re a park manager who thoroughly understands the policies, you should not designate any mountain bike use in eligible or recommended wilderness. The problem comes in when the very same superintendent and park managers get pressure from the mountain bike community to open up hiking trails to mountain bike use and these policies do not give those folks (park managers) a credible defense," she added. "They (the proposed rules) are lenient and appear to allow the use anywhere, and it’s a problem. ... Rather than having absolute clarity, a a manager or superintendent needs to make a choice between following one set of policies or another one.”
The National Parks Conservation Association issued the following statement:
The current National Park Service mountain biking rules, which have been in effect since 1987, have been working well in offering all visitors to our majestic national parks a safe and enjoyable experience, and should not be changed by the Bush Administration.
NPCA supports the use of mountain bikes in national parks under appropriate circumstances. However, the proposed new rule would, in certain cases, circumvent the normal public process and limit the opportunity for full public discussion of the use of mountain bikes on existing trails now used by hikers and equestrians. The rule also limits the scope of public involvement in Park Service consideration of mountain bike access. NPCA strongly believes national parks should offer full transparency on important park management decisions, including this one.
NPCA also feels that the proposed rules should explicitly state that Park Service-recommended Wilderness areas or areas that are now under study for potential designation as Wilderness, are off limits to mountain bike use.
Of the approximately 25 national parks where mountain biking is currently taking place on dirt trails, only Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California and Saguaro National Park in Arizona have completed the necessary public process and designated specific trails for mountain bikes. NPCA believes that all parks should come into compliance.
NPCA will be analyzing the proposal and will be providing comments to the Park Service. We encourage our members and other national park advocates to do the same.
Back at IMBA, spokesman Mark Eller said the proposed rule change would simplify, not weaken, the process to open up park landscapes to mountain biking, when appropriate. As for proposed wilderness areas or park lands eligible for wilderness designation, he said the group wouldn't fight official designation unless there had been existing mountain bike use on the land.
"Once it’s adopted as wilderness, we accept that there’s no bicycling in wilderness,” said Mr. Eller, who also put his faith in park managers to make appropriate decisions when it came to where to allow biking.
“We think they have good judgment and they won’t put mountain bike trails or shared use trails where they don’t belong,” he said.
While Mr. Eller suggested opposition to mountain biking in national parks is more of a perceptual issue than an on-the-ground problem, that view was challenged by Mr. Buono at PEER and Ms. Brengel at The Wilderness Society.
"The structure of the bikes, the nature of their use, makes them more than conveyances to take one into the backcountry. In some ways they are a thrill sport, similar to jet skis, or downhill skiing where the activity is by and large the end in itself," said Mr. Buono. "Our recent experience at Big Bend where mountain bikers want a new trail constructed near Panther Junction show that IMBA representatives want the NPS to construct a trail particularly suited to speed and sharp maneuvers. This has no place in the 'enjoyment' framework of the NPS mission. I am not a believer in 'all enjoyments are equal" under the Organic Act.'"
As for Ms. Brengel, she said mountain biking is definitely an enjoyable activity, but one that brings certain user conflicts with it into the national park landscape.
"I think bikes do cause damage. I think you can look at areas like Moab (Utah) and you can see some of the direct impacts of mountain bike use," she said. "In addition, they’re fast-moving vehicles on public lands. A land manager has to weigh having a vehicle on a route with a hiker, and user conflicts are a real problem on public lands. So it is unclear to me why the Park Service would decide to go from taking a careful look at user conflicts to not taking a careful look. It seems contrary to the pro-user mission of the park system.”
Interestingly, IMBA officials, in their current marketing efforts for their "National Bike Summit" scheduled for March in Washington, D.C., are promoting a session on "Developing National Park Service Singletrack Near You."
Comments
Apology accepted, Zeb, not that it was entirely necessary. This can be a rough and tumble place from time to time;-)
I do sincerely invite you to stick around and weigh in on some of the other issues when the mood strikes. There are some important ones out there.
I try to do it all: fish, hunt, bike, bird, photograph, sleep, eat, etc. What I recognize is that groups do not self-regulate and we tolerate idiots in the ranks. As a result I struggle with the mountain bike "issue" in the parks, particularly Yellowstone, in the event bikes are permitted on trails. The nature of mountain biking is the challenge, not simply a conveyance, though would I be tempted to use a bike to convey me faster and easier to the back country with all my photo gear...probably. But I need to think about what I am doing: do I meet the park on its own terms or set up a system of rules which makes its enjoyment easier?
My answer is obviously selfish: I do not want to see bikes on trails in Yellowstone. I'm 62 now and know I will not be able to enjoy the park as I did years ago, but I do not expect the park to accomodate me at the expense of other users who are using the park as it was intended.
There are some simple solutions to cut down on the user conflicts. Some places have instituted an even-odd day regulation for some more crowded trails. On odd days, horse riders can use the trail, on even days, cyclists can use it. Hikers can use it all the time, but also know what kind of other users they'll encounter. This seems to me like a very fair and reasonable way to share a common public good.
Dave, you make some great points. I would add that the way Yellowstone was intended to be used say 50 years ago can change over time as users change. As long as the use of the park does not harm it, I don't see the problem. At the end of the day, if we restrict the parks to a diminishing number of people (horse riders numbers are dwindling and kids tend to gravitate more toward biking than hiking), it'll do the parks no good. This regulation has the potential to bring practical solutions to the bike access issues (I'd rather see these issues solved on the ground than in Washington) and as a result more users to the park. This seems like a win win to me.
Zebulon,
I favor the part of this that shifts discretion to the local Park-unit ... which is also what the bike-opposition, the 'pure hikers', are objecting most strongly about. This is the way these user-decisions should go: The central Park HQ should be concerned with high-level policy and the overall-management of local managements. They should not be stroking their chin over each & every stretch of trail, nor should they be making up one-size-fits-all blanket rules to crudely regulate a range of situations across the NPS ... which is how your opposition hopes to ensure that what you'd like to see, neva happens.
Really though, this is a corruption of the American way, which says that central authority deals with the stuff that only the central office can deal with, while all the decisions that pertain to local stuff, should be made by the local offices. Written right into the United States Constitution ... and good enough for the Park Service, too.
Centralized authority was how they did it in the USSR, who now exist only in the history books.
Obama will make the call on the new bike-rules. None of this comes out of the oven, until middle of next year. So yeah yeah, it's the evil Bush crafting this cunning violation of Mother Nature, right? Well, might be a good move to think again.
Everything Bush does after his meeting with Obama a week or two ago, he very likely arrived at in consultation with Obama (during that meeting - which both of them refuse to discuss). It is now time for Bush to earn brownie points with everybody who has the future in their hands (#1, Obama) because that's how he minimizes the amount of crap he ends up carrying in the history books ... which at this point is looking like a helluva crap-load.
Do we have clues to how Obama is leaning in matters of Parks-management? Yes we do: He just appointed Ken Salazar as Sec. of Interior. That gurgling sound you hear is the enviro-purists, on the floor choking until they're blue. Salazar is Evil One In Training, in their view.
The selection of Salazar informs us very strongly, how NPS policy will go under Obama. There are 2 posts current on National Parks Traveler about this selection:
Updated: Salazar Pick For Interior Secretary Labeled a Failure, and
Sen. Salazar Seems to be the Interior Secretary Pick For the Obama Administration
The Salazar decision is far, far away from where 'enviro'-Obama was supposed to go, and is an indication of potentially historic changes in the management of our common resources ... which some have long presume should only be handled according one narrow (purist) point of view.
I think the correcting of that longstanding situation is overdue - and may now be in the offing.
Ted Clayton
Ted, with all due respect, I disagree that the discretion over park-specific activities should be given over to the local parks.
Perhaps I'm over-reaching on your comment, but think about the problems giving control to park units over many of their management decisions could produce. Even though an overwhelming majority of those who commented on the Yellowstone snowmobile winter-use plan thought snowmobiles should be phased out in favor of snowcoaches, snowmobiles are on the ground in the park due to local influence/interference.
Where else might something like this happen to "national" parks? Wherever there's a well-connected political lobby that can manipulate the process.
When you're talking about national parks, I like to think the National Park Service Organic Act is the over-arching authority that should be followed, and if you remove the hierarchy from the process, you end up with situations like snowmobiling in Yellowstone where the science clearly speaks against the numbers the lobbying arm has managed to achieve.
That said, if the Washington office says bikes are perfectly fine in the parks, then I'd agree that local park managers should be given the discretion to say, 'Yes, we have great biking terrain that can fit with our management plan,' rather than having biking (or whatever activity) stuffed down their throats.
Kurt
I admit that 'local authority' is hardly a panacea for or protection against mismanagement. Blagojevich is not an aberration, but one of many symptoms in a long history of local-authority-gone-bad, in the Chicago & Illinois region. Louisiana has a reputation for harboring squalid corruption, shielding it behind 'local authority'.
But local or distributed authority, one of the signatures of the United States, and a celebrated genius of its founders, also confers adaptability and resilience. It enables a system to reinvent and reinvigorate itself. Failure to move with the times and be relevant in new circumstances are hazards better avoiding by letting locals be the Captain of their own ship. The pride and the robes of responsibility lead to markedly better performance (even when it's wrong!), than do the feeble exhortations of centralization.
Although we call them "National" Parks, and though they are authorized under the "National" Park Service Organic Act, I don't get the sense that the intent was to "Nationalize" anything. To a high degree, Nationalization is associated with inefficiency, decay and decrepitation. No, the fact that the word "National" is used for our Parks is but a 'conventional rubric', and does not imply a commitment to centralization, such as we see experimented with in Latin America or Russia ... with predicable negative results.
I see evidence that points to recognition at high levels in America, that the localization I refer to is a good thing which they are seeking to gradually work back into the system. (Sudden large-scale radical change is unwise, and I am glad to see it happening gradually.)
Look at Alaska. Some Parks-aficionados do not like to. It is disturbing to some, that what they see is so unfamiliar, so different. The range of 'customized' Park-affairs in Alaska points to recognition that the local contexts of Alaska "National" Parks are not appropriately addressed, by imposing a "national" directive upon them. Instead, the priceless assets secured in Alaska are handled not only as local to, but also as local in the State. The State is large enough and varies enough, that different Parks within it are 'given their head' to better-fit to the local conditions they are embedded in.
For a second example, consider an important but 'minimized' aspect of the recent change in Park gun-rules. It is a hugely pregnant 'detail', that the new authorization to pack loaded firearms in Parks is linked directly to the firearms regulation of the local jurisdiction (State) in which each Park is embedded. That is very 'un-National', and appears to be a conscious & intentional nod - nay, "bow" - to that grand-daddy of all distributed authority: States' Rights.
I do not expect to 'convert' those who have long embraced a view of our National Parks as being above & beyond the local scene they are embedded in. However, I do think we have already embarked upon a course to try out & adapt new ideas for fine-tuning the management of Parks in different regions, to the different local situations of each. We see it with the Civil War Parks. We see it with the East Coast beaches. We see it in Yellowstone, big-time! We see it in the Southwest, and with the archaeological locales. We see it in the contrast between Crater Lake, and Glacier, even between Rainier & Olympic, which on a good day can see each other.
Local contexts make a big difference, and the way to make the most - and avoid the worst - of them, is to provide a meaningful element of local authority for the different units. Although there will of course be missteps with independence, the risks are a lot less scary than with the embarrassingly skimpy and startlingly flawed National Park Service Organic Act.
Those who appeal to the Organic Act invariably 'cherry pick' a couple sentences from it which they reiterate over & over, while shunning & disowning the rest of the document, which can be described as a mixture of babble & venality. The Organic Act is very short: anyone can easily pick it up and within minutes know for themselves just how inappropriate this document is for managing any national resource. It resembles the kind of nonsense you'd expect to find on a Blagojevich tape.
Sorry, but I honestly don't see the Organic Act as a credible instrument on which to base any rational national-scale management-plan for the Parks. Acknowledging that nobody is willing or able to fix it or throw it away and start over, then our present course - to ignore the Organic Act and move forward without much regard to it - seems the prudent & pragmatic ... option which we have evidently already adopted.
One last point: recognizing & empowering local authority does not "remove the hierarchy". On the contrary, the assignment of local or distributed authority creates, implements & structures the hierarchy. Although the United States explicitly distributes local authority to States, Counties, Municipalities, and Citizens, the hierarchy of authority within the system is intact & orderly throughout, clear & understood by all, and perfectly secure. It would be exactly the same, within a local-authority-endowed National Park System.
Ted
Ted,
Wish I had more time to delve deeply into this, but all the fresh snow of the past few days is too inviting to ignore;-)
That said, Alaska I don't think is a good example to point to regarding the intent, need, desire, or benefits for local rule in the context of the entire park system, not in light of how the Alaska park units were put together. As I'm sure you know, there was much local opposition to creating parks in the state, and President Carter and others tried to ameliorate those concerns as much as they could. My post of December 2 touches on that organization and the need to insert local concerns into the package. In part:
And....
(Now, in light of that recognition of Native American rights to the landscape, if we went back in time and honored those rights in the creation of all other parks, the Yosemites and Yellowstones, etc., think what we'd have. But that's fodder for another post....)
Further insights of that controversial creation in Alaska can be found in some of the comments to that post.
As for using the gun issue as an example of trying to return local control to the parks, in light of the recent history of that rule change I would borrow some of your words and suggest that the Interior Department's move "appears to be a conscious & intentional nod - nay, "bow" - to that grand-daddy" of all lobbying bullies and power grabbers, the NRA.
I think when you take the Organic Act, read Robin Winks' interpretation of that document, and toss in the 1978 Redwoods Act, you get a clear understanding of why these should be "national" parks. According to Winks even big business wanted central control over the parks:
The Organic Act outlines the "fundamental purpose" of the parks as being to is to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Note it doesn't say to "leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment" of the local residents. The intent was clear, that these places should be conserved for all to come, and for consistency across the 391-unit system (or is it 392 now?), I don't think you can give them over to local control.
My goal as an NPS employee, supervisor and manager was to attempt to accomplish in every park to which I was assigned three fundamental tasks: preserve and protect resources; provide high quality visitor services; and to maintain productive relationships with park interest groups. Among those interest groups were the communitiies that surrounded the park areas. Obviouly, park staffs have special relations with these communities in ways that they don't with people living, let's say, in Milwaukee. This does not mean, however, that the people in the surrounding communities should have a greater voice in park decision-making than others living in more distant areas. Make no mistake, these are national park areas, not state, county or municipal parks. This is a system of national park areas to which each generation of Americans gets to add the areas they believe merit protection in perpetuity. We ought to apply to these areas the highest standards of ethical, transparent management as a matter of generational equity. The shoddy, last-minute rule making that we have seen in the last several months is the antithesis of those standards.
Rick Smith