Editor's note: The following was written by Audrey Peterman, an author, speaker, and advocate reconnecting people to nature, promoting enjoyment and stewardship of our public lands. It initially appeared on the Huffington Post.
While the 413 places and approximately 85 million acres protected in our National Park System belong to the American people, a significant number are so important to the entire human family that they sit atop the world’s greatest conservation lists: World Heritage Site, (22) Biosphere Reserve, (23) and Ramsar International Convention of Wetlands, (2). They are among the rarest of the rare on Planet Earth, of the same stature as the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and the Galapagos Islands among others. So what happens to our national parks and public lands affects not just America but the world.
I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when we ran into our longtime friend Babacar M’Bow, nephew of Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, the African who spearheaded many of these designations in his term as Secretary General of UNESCO from 1974 -1987. The legacy of mankind since we first emerged from the caves and sat around a campfire is desperately at stake in our upcoming elections.
Though Glacier National Park is a World Heritage Site among other unique designations, intrusive noise from helicopter tour operators is a big issue that our friends at Quiet Glacier need our help to correct/NPS
The Democratic and Republican parties have starkly opposing views of what “public lands” should mean. The Democrats' conservation platform calls for collaborative stewardship similar to what we’ve been advancing through the Next100 Coalition. The Republican candidate scoffs at climate change and the platform aims to raid our public lands treasury and withdraw large swaths, with no benefit to the nation. So the future of our children and all the children of the world will be enhanced or greatly diminished, depending upon who is elected.
This brought me moments of extreme poignancy over the past week when we visited our grandchildren. Looking into the bright eyes of an 11-year-old who builds robots and computers, worships Elon Musk and still loves to roller board and play hide-and-seek with his friends, I felt a pang:
Am I doing everything I can and should to secure an environment in which he can live out his dreams as our ancestors did for us? In the future will he have to wear a face mask or carry oxygen when he goes out? It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have to buy bottled water.
I also saw vividly how the actions of our predecessors affects us today when I attended Homecoming at Morehouse College with Frank and spent time with many of his classmates, now in (or approaching) their 80s. The alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a few miles from his birth home protected in Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site was teeming with the happy expectant faces of young men, joined by the beautiful young women from neighboring Spelman College.
Entering the Morehouse School of Medicine building for the alumni breakfast, I was elated to see a sign promoting an upcoming Hike Out to Cascade Springs Nature Preserve, an activity we helped spearhead many years ago as part of the Keeping It Wild program. We connected with Frank’s first roommate at Morehouse and lifelong friend, Dr. Wilbur Leaphart, an educator who revolutionized the middle school system and served as Chair of KIW for several years.
At the President’s Brunch we met a young rear admiral who told us that our son Frank Jr., was the Morehouse Man who “made him” in their fraternity. While he and Frank talked Morehouse, his wife and I talked about what national parks were easily accessible on their trips across the country, other than the ones they already visited.
Rear Admiral Alvin Holsey talked Morehouse with Frank while his wife and I talked national parks.
Over drinks that night with two longtime Morehouse friends, I saw the light come on in Frank’s eyes as we walked down memory lane and he realized how he was tapped to go to Morehouse. One of his classmates recently retired as the Chief Design Engineer for a multi-billion dollar US Army Combat Systems program after a hugely successful career. The other chuckled when he told us how he got his Morehouse nickname, “Iron Stomach.”
“We were protesting the food and ‘mystery meat’ so it was agreed that all of us would walk out and not eat it,” he said. “But I had no choice. I had to eat it because I didn’t have 50 cents to buy a chicken sandwich off campus.” Later he was invited to the Dean’s house and to his amazement, they were eating the same food. In his career as a plastic surgeon he was at one point among the 350 highest qualified in the land. Living in Seattle they are big fans of our national parks. All three Morehouse men said there was no doubt that Morehouse was the turning point in their lives.
As I listened, I remembered Bill O’Reilly a few years ago saying he was shocked to find that Black-owned Sylvia’s restaurant in New York was just like any other restaurant, and no one was using expletives or yelling for food. The current Republican presidential candidate reveals a deplorably similar lack of awareness about Black lives and seems to get his ideas about his countrymen and women from sitcoms/reality TV. How would those two stack up at this table, I wondered? How does the calculated trumpeting of derogatory falsehoods about non-white Americans distort our perception of each other?
The grave conflict underway at Standing Rock involving First Nations striving to protect their sacred land demonstrates what happens when corporate “rights” are made to trump human rights and indigenous cultural practices. Though Standing Rock is not a national park, it isn’t difficult to imagine the damage that a pipeline can do to faraway ecosystems. The indigenous people are calling for help from all who respect their cause.
In the remaining months of President Obama’s term, our Next100 Coalition is pressing for him to establish the Freedom Riders National Monument in Anniston, AL, for all the reasons Frank listed here. More than 500 people showed up last week to speak in favor, to the satisfaction of the four surviving Freedom Riders and their allies.
This may be the last time I write before that fateful date November 8. I pray that each one of us will exercise our right to vote, and do so in a way that is responsible to the future of our public lands treasures, our country and our world.
Follow Audrey Peterman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Audreypete
Comments
So you take the Scalia view.. Well, i prefer the Ginsberg view.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-45-years-of-conservative-r...
I have ethics and values. I just dont share your view of the world, which seems sheltered, and a bit inept. I spent enough time living in a stale old ski resort ran by boomers. I know exactly what it is like.
Peggy Noonan's column yesterday is another worth reading -- and thinking about: http://www.peggynoonan.com/
Sorry, my view of the world, and that of our founding fathers, is that we should have sound principles by which we govern ourselves. Principles that protect our freedoms and basic rights. Principles that don't change based on who is in office or who is on the supreme court. I would be more than happy to match my life experiences against yours. I am confident they are deeper and broader than yours. There is nothing "sheltered" in my life story.
Summit County has a median age of 31.4 which is below the national average a median income of $35k well below the national average and 15% hispanic population, which is above the national average. My granddaughter his half black. Your accusation that I live in a "sheltered exclusive community" is laughable.
Yeah, of course, that's why every time one of the biggest politicial issues in western ski towns is trying to get affordable housing in the center of town so that the worker bees don't have to commute 50 miles every day since the price of real estate is intentionally kept high since it's meant to be exclusive to one population dynamic. Yet, the ol' boomers never want that to play out. I already know the game of most of those towns, since I spent too much time providing web and computer services to wealthy boomers so that I could pay the mountain tax and run off into the mountains on my free time. It was nice for a while, but man...it gave me a perspective on that 1% caste system that definitely exists here in this country. In fact, Trump is definitely someone I can't respect because he's one of them. At least Hillary came from a middle class background. Trump never had a day in his life where he had to work his way up any ladder. The only thing he has to step on is the people that serve him.
As for your comment about protecting "our freedoms and basic rights". You're going to have to go beyond just simple buzzwords and soundbytes because that brush is one that can't be painted with just small strokes. The Bush administration sure did try and shift the balance from civic freedoms to stringent state authority many times while they beat the war drums against "terra". Yet, I bet you weren't offended by the curtailing of those freedoms during that time in our history..
Anyway, i'm happy with what i'm done in my life. I have decent and varying experiences, and have taken sharp turns in the road that i'm happy about. I'm not competing with your life, something I would never want anyway. I plan to never turn into someone like you, and if I did, my wife would have every right to smother me with a pillow in my sleep.
You can pontificate all you like, but those are the demographics. Are there people that earned alot of money that own here? Yes. Is that the majority of residents? No. If anything the demographics of Summit County are below the national average and I work and play with these people every day.
"Principles", "freedoms", & "rights" are buzz words? Perhaps you should read the Constitution and see what they actually mean. They are spelled out quite explictly there and in the Federalist Papers.
A massive overstatement. The patriot act did push the envelpe but met with signifcant resistence by conservatves. It was a unique war scenerio. Were you in NY on 9/11. I was. I saw people walking uptown covered in ash. One of the pilots was from my town. I knew many who died in the towers. At times of war some limits are pushed.
Nor I with yours, but you are the one claiming I have led a shelter life despite knowing little if anything about my life experiences.
As expected - you were AOK with freedoms being limited when your party writes the rules, but the minute social change might arrive providing more freedoms to others that might contradict the knuckledragging agenda of the neocons, you cry foul. How hypocritical.
Wrong
As I said Bush's moves were "met with signifcant resistence by conservatves." I was one of those conservatives that wanted any stepped up surveillance (which was appropriate given the circumstances) to conform to the Constitution. Once again you just don't know what you are talking about.
Oh and by the way, this is an example of why we need a Constitution and it needs to be interpreted in a strict and consistent fashion. Otherwise the law, and our freedoms, will ebb and flow with the will of those that are currently in power.
Reading these comments this morning and then thinking back on Tom Brokaw's talk the other night, it suddenly hit me that what we are seeing and hearing all around us these days is one more manifestation of The Great American Entitlement Mentality.
Brokaw pointed out that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places where we've become entrapped by events, are completely different than the War fought by our entire nation in WWII. In that war, everyone was called upon to sacrifice through taxes, rationing, and actually going to fight. But beginning with our "War on Global Terror," there has been no sacrifice by anyone to any large extent -- except for the approximately 1% of our citizens (and many who are not actually citizens, but enlisted in hopes it would help them become citizens) who serve actively in our military. He told of having met many who have now been deployed to the Middle East a dozen or more times. The average is now up to something 8 or 9 deployments for those in combat wings of our military who have extended their enlistments.
But for the other 99% there has been absolutely NO real sacrifice. Except for watching TV reports with "embedded" journalists and perhaps pausing a moment when they announce another American death, few of us here at home have felt any impact whatsoever.
Instead, we have produced a loud and mournful chorus of "Why isn't our government giving ME what I want?" We are shouting, "My taxes are too high!" "I'm being regulated out of business!" "I'm not being paid enough! (And there, the cry is the same from those flipping burgers to those who are CEOs of mega corporations.) "Who can I blame because I sure don't want to blame myself?" "That last Supreme Court decision was horrible because it didn't provide the answer I wanted!" "Who elected that guy to office again? (Did I vote? Well, no, election day was the same day as the big game or whatever.) "Be kind to my neighbor? But he doesn't look like me, or speak like me, or worship like me, how can you call him an American?" Worst of all, we are crying, "I want what I want and I'll throw a tantrum if you give that guy what he wants (especially if he doesn't look, speak, or worship as I do or if his business competes with mine)!"
Compromise has become the new F-word. Any attempt to work cooperatively or pay our share of the costs of keeping America Great is now condemned by branding it as Socialism or liberal or conservative or whateverative.
The news media, which in the day of Walter Cronkite was almost always community owned and driven by an ethic of truthfulness is now driven by the ethic of profit as more and more of our news outlets are purchased by fewer and fewer private owners who milk their readership or viewership for as much as they can. Truth? Accuracy? What the heck are you talking about? It's only the bottom line that counts.
Our politicians have made politics a profitable career. They seek reelection because office brings power and wealth. Where is the idea that they are supposed to serve their constituents -- and our entire nation, for that matter? They shout and pout and call each other names. "Fcompromise? What do you mean, 'Fcompromise?' If I do that, I might make my donors mad and then I wouldn't have enough money to fool the voters into voting for me next time! Nonsense! I'll shut down the government first! I'll try to embarrass the president! I'll blame it all on the Supreme Court!"
And to too many Americans, all that is important is "Who won the game? What's on TV tonight? How much will I pay for gas today? Who let those people into the neighborhood, they can hardly speak English?"
Brokaw noted that we've come a long way since JFK told us to ask what we can do for our country. Now we seem only to be asking what our country can do for us.
Read the posts here. Listen to FOX or CNN. Listen to your neighbors. Do you hear any indication from any of us that might hint at the idea that we are all in this boat together and that we all need to join in rowing it through the storm?
No.
So here we are, arguing endless arguments over just one tiny part of America (our parks). But perhaps it's a good diversion to keep us from stopping long enough to think of challenges even larger and more important. How myopic can we be?