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Editorial
from the Fresno Bee
January 27, 2002
Managing Yosemite National Park has always been a delicate balancing act between
two ultimately contradictory needs: The park is the property of the American
people, and the owners have every right -- and should have every opportunity
-- to visit and enjoy the magnificence of this natural jewel. But the more
the owners visit, the more the park is degraded from that state of natural
wonder.
We've come as close as humanly possible to achieving that balance, in our opinion, with the Yosemite Valley preservation plan pushed to completion in the waning days of the Clinton Administration. That plan's key elements -- a reduction in both campsites and parking spaces -- now face a powerful threat in the person of Rep. George Radanovich, and the Bush administration isn't exactly on fire to help move things along.
Radanovich, the new chairman of the House's national parks subcommittee, has made it clear he has no use for the plan to cut the number of parking spaces from about 1,600 to 550, or for the proposal to scale back campsites, to 500 from their historic high of 849.
Radanovich and other opponents of the plan point out -- correctly -- that campsites are the only option for visitors who can't afford the pricey permanent lodging in the valley, or prefer to stay closer to nature than the luxury of the Ahwahnee Hotel. But many of those original campsites were wiped away in the historic floods of 1997, sending a strong message that nature never intended for humans to grow too comfortable living in a floodplain.
There may be options for campsites in other parts of the park that would make up the gap, and Congress has funded a study of the notion of restoring the number of campsites to its historic high.
But simply putting Yosemite Valley back into its former urbanized mode isn't the right answer. That 1997 flood left an extraordinary opportunity in the wake of its damage. A plan had been kicking around since 1980 for reducing the human impact on the valley, and it had been pretty well kicked to death. Suddenly, nature itself took a hand at cleansing and restoring, and did a thorough job of it. It would be unwise to rebuild what nature has scoured from the valley. Instead, we need to take a cue from nature and restore as much of the valley to its pristine state as we can manage.
Driving much of the opposition to this plan -- apart from knee-jerk antagonism toward anything that carries a whiff of "environmentalism" -- are the business interests in the gateway communities that surround Yosemite. One of those, Mariposa, is Radanovich's home base. Local business people fear that losing the parking spaces in the valley will reduce the number of customers they serve on the way to and from Yosemite. Those business interests have strongly opposed efforts to create park-and-ride solutions for the park's problems, convinced that such programs would be the death knell of local economies.
But in fact, those economies are suffering now, and the parking spaces in the valley still number 1,600. There are several factors at work, including Sept. 11 jitters and Yosemite's high entrance fees. In any case, it's never been clearly explained how it hurts business for several thousand people to visit and park their cars in the gateway towns each day. As services inside the park are moved out -- another part of the plan -- it seems the demand for services in the gateway communities would only rise.
Radanovich has
thrown down the gantlet on the campsite and parking issues, and it will have
to be picked up. It should be picked up by the Bush administration itself.
The National Park Service should be running the nation's parks, not local
congressmen, and Yosemite has already waited far too long for answers.
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