Privatization of America’s National Parks
Our National Parks are threatened by many things. The changing global climate is shrinking the alpine tundra atop America’s highest mountains. Mechanized travel in and around our public lands is endangering the silence found in the backcountry. Recent trends in recreation are shifting towards digital distractions for and may be leaving the National Parks obsolete to young Americans. But, most threatening of all is the idea of privatizing of our Nation’s greatest treasures.
Groups within the federal government as well as nonprofits like Property and Environment Research Center (P.E.R.C.) support the outsourcing and privatization of the National Park system. Among the many arguments for privatization there are some key themes. First, the Parks are commons and because use is difficult to manage degradation will result from overuse. Second, declining budgets in the park system have left few other options to accomplish park functions besides the formation of “partnerships” with private industry and outsourcing park responsibilities. Third, without the bureaucratic regulations that govern the park service, private firms could more effectively provide park services while at the same time gaining profits.
In 2003 the Bush administration found that almost 70% of full time workers in the National Park Service could be replaced with private sector workers. But, these numbers are misleading and fail to account for the multidisciplinary nature of careers in the National Parks. Employees in the parks often perform tasks ranging from environmental interpretation and education to wildland firefighting. These employees are responsible for many different duties and accomplish these tasks efficiently. Outsourcing these jobs or shifting them to private vendors would require extensive cross training and the effects these transitions would have on visitor experience is unknown.
Two years later in 2005, the deputy assistant secretary of the Interior Department Paul Hoffman proposed 194 pages of revisions to the park service’s planning documents. By changing phrases like “harm” to “irreversibly harm” and other similarly small yet impactful changes, these plans would have made it much easier for off-road vehicles and snowmobiles to be used in the National Parks, a policy change that is highly supported by recreation societies outside the NPS. These policy changes were rejected by senior National Park employees but they show how even though the government is mandated to protect park resources balancing the protection of the resources within the parks with the use of the parks remains a challenge. How could a private firm achieve this balance while simultaneously pursuing profit?
The pro privatization group P.E.R.C. claims that privatizing the parks will make it “… possible to avoid more regulation, government bureaucracy, and financial waste, and, instead, solve environmental problems in a cooperative and collegial manner…” Private industry can certainly provide recreational opportunities and Disney could manage a National Park to provide recreational experiences to the public. But, how would Disney manage the ecological services provided by the National Parks? By privatizing the parks we would be handing these nonmarket benefits over to groups whose main concern is monetary profit. Economics guides a firm towards production of a product that is profitable to them and this leaves the land as an investment that can be exploited and transferred or exchanged. Without regulations these firms would not be able to provide the nonmarket benefits that make our National Parks so valuable.
Although the privatization of our national parks seems like a good idea because of the themes most of the agencies point out, I don't think it's a good idea. You mentioned that the Bush administration found that 70% of full time workers in the National Park Service could be replaced by the private sector. I agree that this could cause the need for cross training but where would the 70% of National Park Service employees go to work. Don't you think that most of those employees would just switch over to the private companies and continue to work the same jobs. Yes privatizing could create jobs in the private sector, but how many jobs would it really create?
ReplyDeleteAlso, you mentioned a quote from the P.E.R.C. about the privatizing of parks solving environmental problems. Are there solid results out there that show us that the privatizing them would actually solve these problems. There aren't many examples of the private sector taking a huge initiative and solving environmental problems.
The most profound apparent problem with park privatization is the conflict of ideological approaches. Public control has one ultimate goal, that which was established in 1916: preservation. Private control similarly has but one end: profit. The consequences of this priority shift are drastic and systematic, namely marginalizing environmental objectives for the sake of profit.
ReplyDeleteThis concept would penetrate every aspect of the operation. Employees, from custodians to managers, would all be answering to their private wage-paying employer instead of federal regulations. This would result in many of the same consequences as private defense contractors replacing national military (i.e. Blackwater debacles). Additionally, education programs would be transformed from public education and outreach to private unregulated teaching without subjection to public standards.
Historically, capitalist economics and the environment have rarely, if ever, mixed well. Because of basic operating principles and a lack of assigned value to environmental amenities, a rational, economically-minded company will never choose natural resource preservation over profit maximization. This would essentially defeat the purpose of national parks. Overall, the goal of national parks is, and must by necessity remain, preservation and public outreach. Because this can never function as the priority of private enterprise by definition, I fully agree that park privatization cannot be the solution.