Threats to Alaska's National Parks
The "crown jewels" of Alaska stand at a crossroads. Decisions made over the next few years will determine the quality of the parks and the experiences of visitors well into the twenty-first century. One path leads to a stewardship that preserves these great parks as large, pristine ecosystems where wildlife roams free and rural residents continue traditional ways of life. The other path, favored by Alaska's congressional delegation and their developer allies, leads to parks crisscrossed by roads, pockmarked by random commercial developments, and scarred by unregulated use of motorized vehicles.
Key Threats:
- Demands for unlimited snowmobile and/or ATV access to Denali and other national parks, potentially creating intense noise and air pollution problems in pristine wilderness;
- Construction of a 90-mile road or rail line through proposed wilderness into the heart of Denali National Park, terminating in a 40-acre commercial resort at presently undeveloped Wonder Lake;
- Increased and unrestricted air-tour traffic from airplanes and helicopters;
- Opposition to a Park Service plan to improve visitor safety and regulate overcrowding at a brown-bear viewing site in Katmai National Park;
- Attempts to grant hundreds of road rights-of-way in Wrangell-St. Elias, which would fragment the park and preserve into dozens of pieces, jeopardizing wildlife and habitat;
- Proposals to create helicopter landing rights in wilderness;
- Proposed amendments to ANILCA, such as creation of private cabin rights and exclusive use, that would essentially reverse existing provisions and undermine the act’s compromises and its primary intent of conservation;
- Inadequate funding and staffing: Alaska, which accounts for two-thirds of all national parklands, in 1999 received a mere $43 million out of a total Park Service budget of $2 billion—3 percent of the budget for 66 percent of the land base; moreover, the Alaska region has fewer employees than Yosemite or Yellowstone.
Recommendations
Recognizing the challenges ahead, the National Park Conservation Association’s (NPCA) vision for Alaska’s parks is to protect these remarkable places from undesirable development and damaging uses; to see that the parks remain unspoiled, naturally functioning ecosystems; and to ensure that access to and use of the parks is compatible with the preservation of park purposes, resources, and values. Specifically, NPCA recommends that the National Park Service:
- adopt regulations that define "traditional activities" in parks and other conservation areas as utilitarian activities necessary for sustaining a traditional rural way of life, not including recreational activities or the use of motorized vehicles as an activity in and of itself;
- establish a set of specific principles and guidelines regarding reasonable regulation of motorized and non-motorized transportation to protect the full range of natural and other values of the parks;
- define private inholders’ right of access to their lands without requiring a host of new roads or railroads through the parks;
- adopt permanent regulations to decide highway right-of-way claims, under federal law, that recognize valid, existing roads but preclude development of trails and footpaths into thousands of miles of new roads through parks and wilderness;
- adopt regulations that permanently close the pre-ANILCA, wilderness portion of Denali to snowmachine use;
- adopt a special Alaska provision in pending national legislation on commercial air tours over national parks that allows reasonable regulation while accommodating both Alaska’s unique access requirements and the need for natural quiet and solitude in Alaska parks and wilderness; and
- ban use of personal water craft in all the Alaska park units as a motorized form of recreation incompatible with preservation of wilderness values and related recreation opportunities.
Finally, ANILCA required the National Park Service to study additional potential wilderness areas in Alaskan national parks and offer recommendations to Congress on areas suitable for federal wilderness designation. The Park Service conducted these studies and recommended designation for 19 million acres in the 1980s, but action was stalled. The Department of the Interior should formalize these recommendations and have them forwarded to Congress by the President for action this year.
