IMHO: Answer is YES!
"Should Native Americans control national parks? Examining an argument for reparations" PBS NewsHour 5/17/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Trekking to and through a national park is one of the joys of an American summer. As COVID restrictions lift, millions are expected to explore the great outdoors. Now, a provocative article examines the deeper history of how these parks came to be — and their complicated legacy. Stephanie Sy reports.
The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed its first significant public lands conservation bill in years, designating more than 1 million acres of wilderness for environmental protection and permanently reauthorizing a federal program to pay for conservation measures.
The House passage of the bill, on a vote of 363-62, sends the measure, which was passed by the Senate this month, to the desk of President Donald Trump. The vote Tuesday offered a rare moment of bipartisanship in a divided chamber and a rare victory for environmentalists at a time when the Trump administration is working aggressively to strip away protections on public lands and open them to mining and drilling.
Nonetheless, Trump was expected to sign the bill into law. But the 1 million acres of wilderness that would be protected by the bill stand in contrast to the administration’s plans to open up for drilling 9 million acres of protected habitat for the sage grouse, 2 million acres of protected land in Utah, parts of the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and most United States coastal waters.
Lawmakers and environmentalists celebrated passage of the bill as a victory for bipartisanship and conservation.
“This bill represents Congress at its best and truly gives the American people something to be excited about,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz) chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. “It’s a massive win for the present and future of American conservation.”
Grijalva is one of several Western lawmakers from both parties who have worked for four years on the bill.
The bill is packed with parochial provisions designed to help the home states and districts of its authors. Among those is a provision for a land transfer in La Paz County, Ariz., to allow for the development of a solar farm, and a land exchange of 360 acres in Custer County, S.D., to allow the county to expand its airport.
Among the most consequential provisions is the permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program established in the 1960s that uses fees and royalties paid by oil and gas companies drilling in federal waters to pay for onshore conservation programs.
Although the program has long enjoyed bipartisan support, Congress typically renews it for only a few years at a time, and it expired on Sept. 30 and has not been renewed. The new public lands package would authorize the program permanently, ending its long cycle of nearing or passing expiration and awaiting congressional renewal.
SUMMARY: The incredible views in America's national parks are seen largely by a specific demographic. Visitors are overwhelmingly white, with just one in 10 being Hispanic and 7 percent African-American. Special correspondent Tyler Fingert from the Cronkite School of Journalism reports on efforts to increase diversity among visitors as well as staff, and whether an admission price increase will keep people away.
SUMMARY: At Saguaro National Park, the namesake cactus is both the main attraction for hikers -- and thieves. Special correspondent Tyler Fingert of the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University reports on how the problem is plaguing parks across the country, and depriving the public of its national treasures.
SUMMARY: California's Channel Islands National Park is the site of a recent mammoth discovery: a pygmy mammoth skull, to be precise. This report was produced as part of our Student Reporting Labs by students from Etiwanda High School in Southern California.
SUMMARY: One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, creating the National Park Service. To reflect, Jeffrey Brown takes his Bookshelf segment outdoors to Virginia's Great Falls Park. He's joined by Terry Tempest Williams to discuss her new book, which narrates the stories of America's "sacred lands," the power they offer visitors and the challenges of maintaining them.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): It was a hundred years ago today that President Woodrow Wilson signed what was called the Organic Act, creating the National Park Service.
Jeffrey Brown takes our Bookshelf outdoors.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Terry Tempest Williams, author, naturalist and environmental activist, grew up in Utah surrounded by national parks.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, Author, “The Hour of Land”: They were our backyard. And with our family business, laying pipe in the American West, it was this wonderful juxtaposition between intrusion in the land and protected land.
JEFFREY BROWN: The story of the land, right?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: So, I feel like the American West is in my bones in the deepest way. And I also felt conflicted at a really young age, because I saw my father, my uncle, my grandfather, my brothers digging trenches in the land.
And yet I saw prairie dogs on the side of the trenches. And my impulse was to protect them from the very destruction that was putting food around our table..
JEFFREY BROWN: One hundred years since the creation of the National Park Service, the contradictions and controversies over America's public lands continue.
But there is no denying the popularity of the parks themselves, Great Smoky Mountains in the East, Yosemite in the West, Yellowstone, the oldest park, established in 1872, and so many more, large and small, natural landscapes and historic monuments, some 412 parks and sites in all.
And attendance records continue to be broken, with more than 300 million visits last year. In “The Hour of Land,” a Terry Tempest Williams, who still lives in Utah, has written part natural history, part memoir, part call for preservation.
We talked at Great Falls Park, a small, but dramatically beautiful National Park Service site just 15 miles from Washington, D.C., with the Potomac River crashing over and through rock formations and turkey vultures hovering overhead.
So, what happens to you when you go out into a park?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: The miraculous.
JEFFREY BROWN: The miraculous? Nothing less than that, huh?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I mean superlatives. This is about superlatives.
Just seeing this, all of a sudden, you say, OK, I remember what matters, and I am very, very small. And, you know, humor returns, deep breathing returns, and that sense of affection.
SUMMARY: Last June, Darius Nabors embarked upon a journey: in honor of the National Park Service's 100th birthday, he would explore the country’s 59 national parks in 59 weeks. “I traded the modern conveniences of life...for beautiful sunrises, beautiful sunsets and just beautiful views of our country,” he says. We followed up with him as he set out for his last destination: Maine’s Acadia National Park.
SUMMARY: Last year, 30-year-old Darius Nabors decided to quit his job and embark on the journey of a lifetime, a tour of all 59 of the country’s national parks in 59 weeks. Nabors was inspired by his father, a former park ranger, and his trip is timed to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the National Park Service. So far, he’s visited 34 parks across the nation and shows no sign of slowing down.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): High atop Central Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountains, these students are continuing work begun 75 years ago.
They have been renovating the Skyland Stables, which for generations have provided national park visitors with horses to ride along 200 miles of equestrian trails. This is the pilot project of the Hands-On Preservation Experience, or HOPE Crew, a new nationwide initiative from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Monica Rhodes is its volunteer coordinator.
MONICA RHODES, National Trust for Historic Preservation: What the National Trust hopes to bring to this — through this new initiative is an opportunity for a younger, more diverse audience to get involved with these buildings, to really interact with their environment and contribute to their country.
JEFFREY BROWN: The Trust is partnering with the National Park Service, the Corps Network and other groups to bring a new generation into the preservation fold across the country.
ALISON STEWART: It’s one of those stories that comes and goes with little attention paid.
We’re talking about “National Park Week.”
It’s around this time every year that the Department of Interior designates new national historic landmarks. There are roughly 2500 of them on the list: buildings, properties, even objects that represent important aspects of American history. This past week, four more were added to the list.
In Detroit, iconic murals by the legendary Mexican artist Diego Rivera, considered some of his finest work. They’re called Detroit Industry, and cover four walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The murals were commissioned to celebrate Detroit’s history of manufacturing, especially the automobile industry.
Then there’s the 44-acre farm of politician and diplomat Adlai Stevenson II, located about 35 miles north of Chicago. A former Illinois governor and ambassador to the UN, Stevenson also ran twice for president unsuccessfully against Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson lived on the farm for most of his adult life.
Another new landmark, north of Philadelphia: the home and studio complex of renowned woodworker George Nakashima. He was a major figure in the American craft movement. Many of his pieces featured large slabs of wood with raw edges and imperfections like cracks and knots.
And on a more somber note, the site of a 1956 plane crash in Arizona. Two planes collided mid-air over a remote part of the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 aboard.
At the time it was the deadliest accident in commercial aviation history, and the Federal Aviation Administration was created just a few years later to increase safety. But in a curious twist, the site’s exact location is secret, officially closed for years. The Park Service told NewsHour that’s the policy for sensitive sites.
So unlike the other three new national landmarks – it’s unlikely the public will ever get to visit this one.
