Under Obama, who speaks movingly of a childhood Greyhound bus trip with his family to see some of our parks, another 12 percent has been chopped from the NPS budget -- bumping the deferred maintenance bill to a staggering $11.5 billion!
To his credit, Obama has proposed a 2016 "Centennial Budget" for NPS, mitigating years of destructive under-funding and calling for $1 billion to address the backlog. Good for him. But the sour duo of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner, with Mitt-like cluelessness about "what the purpose is," will oppose even a dime increase. Hidebound by their twisted corporate ideology, they dismiss public parks as government intrusion into the private realms of Disneyland and Sea World.
Washington is literally stripping "service" out of the National Park Service. And, by refusing essential upkeep year after year, America's so-called "leaders" are guaranteeing that this invaluable national asset -- deemed America's "best idea" by novelist and historian Wallace Stegner -- will fall into acute disrepair. The only solution, they say, is to commercialize, industrialize, and privatize, converting our common good into just another corporate cash cow.
PROUD PARTNERS. Step one in the corporatization process was "co-branding" agreements, rationalized by NPS as "aligning the economic and historical legacies" of public parks with crassly commercial advertisers. They are selling the Park Service's proud public brand... as well as its soul.
First in line was Coca-Cola. In 2010, the multi-billion-dollar colossus donated a mere $2.5 million (tax-deductible, meaning we taxpayers subsidized the deal) to the NPS fundraising arm. In return, not only did Coke get exclusive rights to use park logos in its ads, but it was effectively allowed to veto a scheduled NPS ban on selling bottled water in the Grand Canyon park. Disposable plastic bottles are the park's biggest source of trash, but Coke's Dasani is the top-selling water, so bye-bye ban. Public outrage forced the ban to be reinstated, but NPS' integrity has yet to recover.
Then this April, the park service abandoned its long-standing policy of disallowing links to alcohol or tobacco products. Anheuser-Busch became a "Proud Partner" with NPS by making a $2.5 million tax-deductible "gift." In turn, its Budweiser brand was given the Statue of Liberty. Not literally, but symbolically, authorized to roll out "patriotic packaging" featuring Lady Liberty, the iconic symbol of the USA.
Never mind that Busch is now Belgian-owned, the real hypocrisy is the claim that such co-branding is a philanthropic service to the commons. Indeed, creeping commercialization no longer creeps but runs rampant, with brands such as Disney, L.L. Bean, and Subaru buying their pieces of NPS integrity. And take a whiff of this: Air Wick is being allowed to market a fragrance collection "uniquely inspired by America's national parks."
DRILLERS, MINERS, DEVELOPERS. A rash of corporate exploiters is all over our pristine lands, cashing in on the public's wealth. Oil and gas giants, for example, have drilling leases on 38 million acres (45 percent of the people's parkland), where they are producing record levels of fossil fuels, especially natural gas. They get the profits, foreign countries get much of the energy, and everyone gets more global climate change. Annual gas production on public lands and waters produces as much global warming methane pollution as 42 million cars.
Now comes uranium mining to the very edge of the Grand Canyon. Energy Fuels, Inc. intends to re-open Canyon Mine, a uranium venture that failed in 1992. Located in the Kaibab National Forest, just six miles from the majestic park, the mine perches atop an aquifer that supplies water to locals and discharges into creeks along the South Rim, as well as into Havasu Falls in the park itself. Levels of cancer-causing uranium in excess of EPA drinking water standards have already been found. Full-scale mining threatens to contaminate the Colorado River, a major water source for cities in Arizona and California.
On April 7, American Rivers, an environmental advocacy group, named the Colorado the "Most Endangered River" of 2015. That very same day, a federal judge in Arizona okayed Energy Fuel's plan to restart Canyon Mine -- without even requiring an update of an obsolete 1986 environmental review. Wasting no time, the corporation has begun refurbishing the site in preparation for mining. But the battle continues: The Havasupai tribe that lives on the Canyon floor and Sierra Club, which sued to stop the mine, have filed an appeal.
Piling insanity on insanity, the US Forest Service is now considering a crass scheme of plunder by Italian consortium Grupo Stilo, which is hot to build a grandiose mega-mall at the park's south entrance. Bigger than Mall of America, it includes plans for a shopping mall, a dude ranch, resort hotels, high-end restaurants, and 2,100 housing units. Rather than allowing Grupo to bring the traffic, pollution, noise, artificial light, and sprawl of Everyplace USA into the mystical ambience of the Canyon's natural wonder, the Forest Service should simply heed the timeless advice of Teddy Roosevelt: "Leave [the Grand Canyon] it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."
RIGHT-WING LANDGRABBERS. After de-funding and commercialization, the next step is obvious: Privatization. For that job, bring in the clowns. And here they come -- a gaggle of GOP congress critters, ALEC-trained state legislators, tea-party-infused presidential candidates, and corporate front groups -- all with pockets stuffed with cash from the Koch brothers, Big Oil, and other plutocratic interests that combine ideological disdain for anything "public" with selfish coveting of our public assets.
This clique is riding in from the right-wing fringe on a tired old horse named "states' rights," shouting that the Western territories were induced to join the Union with a pledge that all federally owned lands within their boundaries would be transferred back to them. This "take-back" campaign panders to and energizes far-right extremists who hate the national government. The attack is orchestrated by two Koch-funded groups: ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and Americans for Prosperity.
Legislators in several Western states, as well as a swarm of DC Republicans and such presidential wannabes as Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum, have been hawking cookie-cutter versions of a model take-back bill dubbed the "Sagebrush Rebellion Act." It was written and distributed by ALEC, based on legal fantasies concocted by corporate lawyers.
There are, however, four large hickies on the GOP's scheme. First, none of the "sagebrush" states could begin to afford managing these lands -- wildfire control alone costs $4 billion a year.
Second, lawmakers pushing for federal disinvestments brag that state control would allow them to privatize the lands and raise big bucks for the states. But privatization would mean locking out millions of people with signs reading "Private Property -- No camping, swimming, hunting, fishing, or trespassing."
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