Thank you Ms. Cannon for your efforts to overturn the directive to allow ATV usage in Utah National Parks! Please continue your efforts and know that you have a lot of support.  Following are my comments sent to the NPS and the Department of the Interior: 

Please reconsider allowing ATV use in Utah's National Parks! These are intrusive, cause damage, noisy, and impact negatively the visitor experience.  While many ATV users are conscious of rules and polite, many others are not - and the damage caused by just a few users will be lasting and severe.  One only needs to sit on a bluff overlooking ATV trails in the Moab district to realize how intrusive these are. There is a constant ATV roar as hundreds cruize these tracks and roads. The only areas free of this noise and disruption are the National Parks. The influx of motor sports into the Moab area has been good for local merchants, but harsh for all other users looking for an enjoyable non-motorized experience.  This is a poor decision and will have lasting negative impacts on our National Parks. Please reconsider.  Sincerely, Dan Holmes

Okay, I wasn't going to say anything about this relatively outdated article or the belated comment posted on it.  I tried; but, the whole thing illustrates such a pervasive spectrum of problems so well that it forced my hand.  The comment seems to be and probably only is an earnest effort to highlight threats posed by unrestrained ATV use in Utah's national parks and to encourage this NPS official in Utah to recognize those threats and push back against efforts to reduce or eliminate existing controls on ATV use.  But, the comment was, first, posted on a news article dated November 1, 2016, almost three years ago; second, posted on a news article announcing that the particular NPS official in Utah had received an award for meritorious service; and, third, posted just as a flurry of comments criticizing the weak, potentially even corrupt on some occasions, performance of NPS officials in Utah showed up under another, more recent news article.  I certainly agree with the poster's position regarding unrestrained ATV use in Utah's national parks; I acknowledge that the poster did a good job in stating his case; and I must agree that Ms Cannon has generally done an admirable job under difficult circumstances.  However, reaching back into the files, resurrecting a three year old award, and using that news, from three years ago, as a platform for a misplaced comment on ATV use could also be construed as a bit of a contrived defense of NPS officials in Utah at a time when NPS officials in Utah are taking a little justifiable heat.

What makes that defense so contrived?  First, the comment has to go back so far, all the way into the Obama years, to find something good to say; the news about this award is, again, almost three years old.

Second, let's look at the award itself.  It's the Stephen Mather Award presented by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), which was founded as the National Park Association (NPA) in 1919.  Students of NPCA history will recall that, although Mather was instrumental in the creation of the NPA (now known as the NPCA), Mather's friend and famed national park advocate Robert Sterling Yard was the actual driving force behind the organization that was founded as a nongovernmental booster for the fledgling NPS.  Under Yard's leadership, the NPA, the NPS, and Mather initially stood shoulder to shoulder with John Muir in firm opposition to the infamous Gifford Pinchot and his support for the dam at Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite; but, by 1924, Yard and the NPA (now known as the NPCA) would be increasingly critical of Mather's willingness to accept development in and around national parks, which Yard and the NPA saw as a way for Mather to curry favor with politicians and commercial interests.  By 1930, Yard and the NPA (now known as the NPCA) were again opposing most in the NPS and taking the side of young naturalists like Aldo Leopold, George Melendez Wright, and Olaus and Adolph Murie who believed that preservation of remaining wildlife and wild lands, rather than mere scenery and human amusement, was the proper role for national parks.  By that time, the NPA had evolved into more of a watchdog group over the NPS rather than simply a booster group.  By 1935, Yard had joined Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and others to form The Wilderness Society, a group with different priorities than Stephen Mather's had been and in direct opposition to Pinchot's vision.  So, why am I rehashing history?  To illustrate how, in presenting a Stephen Mather Award, the modern history of the NPCA has been inherently "revised" from what it was in earlier days.

Third and as the article points out, the modern NPCA's Stephen Mather Award is "endowed" by Booz Allen Hamilton.  To the best of my understanding, this company has a history of GOP political connections and lucrative federal national security contracts.  Again, to the best of my understanding, the disgraced "whistleblower" Edward Snowden was an employee when he decided to illegally release classified material, allegedly not at the behest of any hostile foreign power, but because of his disagreement with the work he was being asked to do by his employer.  Why is this relevant?  It raises the question of why a company with this history and these connections would choose to "endow" a conservation award, especially one to be presented by the NPCA.

This is an unfortunately relevant question nowadays.  We have plenty of examples of conservation and preservation groups being "infiltrated" and having their missions and histories "revised" as their leadership gets pushed and pulled or just downright ousted.  We have strange news being reported from WWF operations in Africa.  We have turmoil in the World Resources Institute.  We have problems in The Nature Conservancy that led to Sally Jewell needing to step in.  National Mill Dog Rescue is in the news.  The RMEF, NRA, and dozens of other "sportsmen's" groups  ...well, never mind.  We even have horrendous problems with folks who should not be, but are, on the board and the staffs of the nonprofits in the national parks, eschewing transparency and obstructing good governance in those organizations (not my words, but the words of former longtime board members who were ousted when the current administration took over).  That is why having a company with a history of GOP political connections "endowing" awards being given out by an alleged conservation group raises relevant questions.

So, it is for these and a few other reasons that this belated comment seems interesting so to speak.