National Parks Traveler

Op-Ed | Do We Love The National Parks Enough?

By William Lowry

People love the national parks, to the point where many, including Kurt Repanshek in his compelling column in a recent edition of the Traveler, worry that we are loving them to death. I argue that, in at least one respect, we are not loving them enough.

The parks are one of the few issues today that inspire Americans, regardless of ideology or political party. Americans have backed up their talk with action, even voting for increased taxes for parks and other open spaces. Even Congress overcame its polarization and in 2020 passed a bipartisan measure - the massive Great American Outdoors Act -  that dedicates nearly two billion dollars per year for much needed maintenance and repair projects in the national parks. This was a crucial step, but the dangers the parks face are far greater than maintenance and repair can remedy: the existential threat of climate change.

My friend Michael Yochim, who passed away in 2020, tackles this question in his important new book, Requiem for America’s Best Idea: National Parks in the Era of Climate Change, which will be published later this month by High Road Books. He focuses on climate changes occurring in the crown jewels of the park system: Glacier, Olympic, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. While many of us claim to love the national parks, Yochim not only loved them, he lived them. He worked for the NPS in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia and Grand Canyon for nearly 30 years. And he did much more than work in these places. He was the epitome of someone who did what Edward Abbey always advised, do what you can for wild places but also take the time to enjoy them.

In his book, Yochim meticulously documents the effects of climate change on the park system:

1) Snowpack levels are down as much as 40 percent in these parks over just the last few decades.

2) Half of the glaciers in Olympic are gone. Nearly all will disappear from Glacier by 2030.

3) Water levels on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon during the megadrought, the worst in the West in 1200 years, have dropped to levels that triggered the first ever mandatory cutbacks in water usage.

4) Fires are increasing in size and severity throughout Yellowstone, Yosemite, and elsewhere in the West.

5) Pine beetles are thriving with shorter winters and devastating entire forests. Plant and animal species have been impacted by changes in habitat like never before.

6)  Sea level rise will likely inundate freshwater ecosystems in the Everglades in our lifetimes.

And these situations will only become worse if we don’t take actions now to address climate change and its causes.

What makes Yochim’s warning even more powerful is his story. In 2013, Yochim was diagnosed with ALS, the devastating neurological disorder better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The disease ended Yochim’s long career and ravaged his body. It's usually fatal to people within just a few years. Yochim fought it for eight, as the disease destroyed the ability of his body to function while his brain, trapped inside, remained active.

During those years, he knew he was dying, but he didn’t want the parks, as he and so many of us know them, to die as well. In the last few years of his life, the only thing he could use were his eyes. So, with an eye-tracking machine, he would pick out letters to make words and then put them together into sentences. It would take hours to write a single paragraph. But he persisted and wrote this book with just his eyes. Mike died on Leap Day 2020, working at his computer, writing me a gentle reminder that he had asked me to finish the book if he could not. So, with some help from Mike’s brother, Brian, and a mapmaker named Eric Compas, we finished the writing, collected the photos and coordinated the maps. The final product is a call for action and a warning about the consequences of not doing so. 

Addressing climate change requires more than just words and promises. Neither party is doing enough. The Biden administration, even while acknowledging the impacts of oil and gas drilling, announced in November that it will continue to sell oil and gas leases on large tracts of public land in the American West. Republican opposition in Congress continues to prohibit far-reaching climate change legislation. Nor is the American public unified in demands for action. In spite of reminders nearly every week of the dangers from climate changes in the form of massive fires, droughts, storms, and wild temperature swings, many Americans are blasé about the issue. In a poll last year, Gallup found almost exactly as many people who view the seriousness of climate change as exaggerated (38 percent) as those who see it as underestimated (39 percent). I encourage the 38 percent to go to one of their beloved national parks sometime.

The national parks are wonderful places, where families have bonded, where people have enjoyed some of their greatest experiences, where some have been inspired to do amazing, even death-defying, things. Think of Alex Honnold doing the free solo up Yosemite’s El Capitan in 2017. People plan their vacations around the parks, take photos, collect passport stamps. And they bring millions of dollars into local economies.

The parks are there for all of us. And we own them. No wonder we love them. But now it’s time to take care of them. Nothing guarantees their existence, at least not in the form we find so inspirational. Even while we worry that we are loving the parks to death from excessive use, we are not loving them enough. Perhaps we can heed the compelling words of a dying man and finally take serious actions to protect them as if we do in fact love them. 

William R. Lowry is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis who long has studied environmental and natural resource policy in the United States. He is the author of Repairing Paradise, The Restoration of Nature in America's National Parks.

Traveler footnote: Requiem for America’s Best Idea – online launch event hosted by Left Bank Books – March 15 at 7pm CT. Register here.