[Awclist] [Fwd: RRFW Riverwire - COMMENT NOW TO PROTECT PARKS FROM BAD POLICIES ]

[Thomas Robey]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	RRFW Riverwire - COMMENT NOW TO PROTECT PARKS FROM BAD POLICIES
Date: 	Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:44:10 -0700
From: 	Riverwire <riverwire at rrfw.org>
Reply-To: 	<Riverwire at rrfw.org>
Organization: 	River Runners for Wilderness
To: 	riverwire at rrfw.org



RRFW Riverwire – COMMENT NOW TO PROTECT PARKS FROM BAD POLICIES

February 17, 2006

Please take a few moments today or tomorrow to comment on the proposed 
wholesale rewrite of the policies managing Grand Canyon and all of our 
country’s national parks. These National Park Service policies guide 
park managers in how they govern their parks, what uses they allow, 
their efforts to protect and conserve park lands and waters and their 
relationship with park concessionaires.

The current policies were adopted in 2001 and place appropriate emphasis 
on protecting parks over recreation and other uses. Keeping sound 
policies intact is critically important to ensure the protection of the 
parks from degradation, abuses and escalating commercialization. 
Unfortunately, the new proposed policies elevate recreation and 
commercialization over protection. Your comments submitted by Sunday, 
February 19^th will discourage the adoption of this ill-conceived re-write.

Especially critical to Grand Canyon is the National Park Service’s 
proposal to prematurely remove from protection any wilderness areas that 
have been recommended for wilderness designation but not yet been 
presented to Congress for a vote. Thus, Grand Canyon would immediately 
lose the protection it has enjoyed due to the NPS’ current policy of 
treating recommended wildernesses as fully designated wildernesses until 
a vote. This opens all potential wildernesses to degradation, and by the 
time Congress considers designation, the qualities formerly making those 
areas suitable could be gone along with the opportunity, never to be 
regained. The backcountry and river of Grand Canyon were recommended by 
the park for designation in 1980 but it has not yet been presented to 
Congress for approval.

Another area of great concern is the minimizing of the importance of 
natural quiet in parks that would result from the proposed changes. The 
new proposed policy deletes language directing parks managers to 
preserve “to the greatest extent possible, the natural soundscapes of 
parks” and instead substitutes language that directs the restoration of 
degraded soundscapes “wherever practicable”, a much weaker mandate. This 
new standard would allow degradation the old policy does not.

The new policies would also elevate concessionaires’ rights to operate 
free from “unacceptable impact” by park managers, including efforts to 
mitigate or prevent resource (environmental) damage. This would severely 
limit managers in dealing with concessionaires and places the importance 
of concessions operations higher than anything else in a park, already 
an issue of great concern in Grand Canyon.

Motorized equipment, personal watercraft and off road vehicle use will 
enjoy more protection from managers’ attempts to regulate them under the 
new policies. Policy direction that instructs managers to consider the 
removal of helicopters, motorized boats, PWCs and ORVs will be removed 
in the proposed changes, a dangerous precedent and one that disregards 
the wishes of tens of thousands of Americans who have made it clear that 
these uses should be removed from Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National 
Parks, among others.

Please write your comments and preferences for preserving the current, 
standing policies and direct the National Park Service to abandon the 
ill-conceived 2006 Draft Policies rewrite. You can submit your comments 
by midnight, February 18^th via email to waso_policy at nps.gov 
<mailto:waso_policy at nps.gov> or by letter to: Barnard Fagen, National 
Park Service, Office of Policy, Room 7252, Main Interior Building, 1849 
C Street NW, Washington, DC 20240.

To see what will be deleted and what will be added in a single document 
(as a pdf file), go to the NPS website at: 
http://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?projectId=13746&documentID=12825 
<http://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?projectId=13746&documentID=12825>.

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