Last year, more than 600,000 nature lovers held memberships in the National Parks Conservation Association (2010 revenue, $43.2 million), with its noble slogan, “protecting our national parks for future generations.” The group is lobbying for 130 more parks immediately, and its website extols magnificent parks and historic sites that “embody the American spirit” and deplores “the many dangers that threaten to destroy them forever.” But the National Park Service, which actually administers the places NPCA touts, is a ruthless, insatiable land-grabbing bureaucracy that has brutally dispossessed thousands of homeowners nationwide, ruining lives to expand its empire with cold-blooded efficiency.
Everybody loves “America’s best idea,” as PBS filmmaker Ken Burns calls our national parks — from Acacia to Yosemite, and from Yellowstone to the Everglades. But even PBS couldn’t stomach the National Park Service’s atrocity in Ohio’s rural Cuyahoga Valley. In the 1970s, they came with sweet promises that the government would take only a modest recreation area. At first, that meant the loss of 30 homes. Then 200, then 600, and finally an undisclosed master plan to depopulate a 51-square-mile swath of the valley’s farms and towns and homes.
In 1983, “PBS Frontline with Jessica Savitch” ran an expose titled, “For the Good of All,” tracing the Cuyahogans’ hopeless struggle to keep their homes and heritage. Many viewers never forgave the parks service, but the National Parks Conservation Association cheered it on.
Today, the association glorifies Cuyahoga Valley National Park — trails for the hike and bike bunch and sanitized artisan farmers who pretend to be like those who once actually lived there.
Last week, the National Park Service took its Cuyahoga-like show to Millinocket, Maine’s high school auditorium, where park service Director Jon Jarvis and his boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, tried to sweet-talk 300 locals into a proposed 70,000-acre North Woods National Park that NPCA wants to create.
Roxanne Quimby, multimillionaire founder of Burt’s Bees products, proposed giving part of her local landholdings to the United States for a national park. The state legislature, the governor and both of Maine’s U.S. senators had already rejected the idea because it would certainly expand and consume the heart of Maine’s timberlands.
Mainers also recalled that Destry Jarvis, Jon’s brother, had been a high-ranking NPCA official who created a monstrous eight-volume, Rockefeller-funded, national park expansion plan in 1988. Destry’s wish list included five huge national parks in Maine.
Salazar denied accusations that it would expand, promising that Mainers would control the park’s size. Maine’s federal delegation and legislators would not allow it to be otherwise, he said. “We,” he reminded the audience, “are a nation of laws.”
State Sen. Doug Thomas, who represents the area, suspected that the NPCA and Quimby were actually behind this visit, and asked Salazar who invited him to Maine.
“I invited myself,” Salazar said. “Nobody invited me.”
If all this makes the National Parks Conservation Association sound like a private lobbyist for the National Park Service, that’s because it is. And that’s what it was meant to be. It was created in 1919 as the National Parks Association by Stephen Mather, borax millionaire and first director of the National Park Service.
Mather the bureaucrat was impatient with rules. And so Mather the industrialist circumvented them by founding NPCA’s predecessor organization, for the explicit purpose of promoting the National Park Service in ways the agency could not do legally.
With Salazar appearing “uninvited” in places that interest the National Parks Conservation Association, it’s a good bet that somebody is dusting off Destry’s list and checking it for easy targets.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
