The indirect environmental impacts of National Parks visits that I'll be looking at refers to the attitudes and behaviors these parks foster. When we visit, what kinds of ideas do these National Parks promote? And do these ideas parallel environmentally sustainable initiatives or contradict them?
Two studies have shown that National Parks have the potential to undercut pro-environmental behavior and I've outlined them below.
First, Jack Coburn Isaacs states that many individuals are more prone to partake in riskier (in terms of environmental) behavior at National Parks because its protected status provide a false sense of security as it acts as a form of insurance against the complete loss of the ecosystem. People assume that straying off a trail path won't impact the ecosystem because park rangers will make sure that the parks stay ecologically healthy and will take measures to safeguard the park if it does become damaged. Thus, National Parks have the potential to encourage greater environmental ignorance of the land.
Second, what is even more unfortunate is the fact that parks inherently create a boundary separating what areas require protection and what does not. So, not only may the protected status of National Parks promote a false sense of security within them, but it may further promote a false sense of ecological importance to the areas surrounding the park. The boundaries of the parks have the tendency to convey that only the areas within the park boundaries are ecologically important enough for protection. This presents us with another two problems.
First and foremost, it creates ambivalence toward non-protected ecosystems by conveying the idea that it does not require protection and therefore, can be exploited. This ambivalence has the potential to not only foster environmentally unsustainable behavior but also has the potential to indirectly harm the environment within the park as pollution does not abide by the boundaries set forth by the NPS.
In the Everglades National Park, citizens have planted invasive species upriver and which have traveled down to the marshland outcompeting the natural fauna and triggering eutrophication within the park. Moreover, the National Resource and Defense Council revealed that smog from neighboring cities have contributed to dangerous air day alerts being issued in 9 National Parks, including the Rocky Mountain National Park and Arcadia National Park this year. In a recent 2011 press release by the NPS, they revealed that the
majority of threats to natural resources stemmed from human activities, including development on lands adjacent to national parks that is negatively impacting resources inside park boundaries
Tom Kiernan, President of the National Parks Conservation Association reaffirms this problem.
"From Grand Canyon to the Great Smoky Mountains, mining, energy production, roads, and housing projects on adjacent lands are fragmenting wildlife habitat, diminishing air quality, disrupting cultural landscapes, and contaminating water resources"
Additionally, research by Susan Clark of Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and David Cherney of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative showed that wildlife requires a greater boundary than what the National Parks currently have and thus, a viable wildlife population cannot be maintained. Yellowstone exemplifies this problem as the future of wolves and bears in Yellowstone depends not only on the maintenance of the wilderness within the park but also on the maintenance of the 18 million acres surrounding it. Because no sustainability initiatives have taken place across the park boundaries, there has been a 75% loss of large mammal migrations within the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Thus, our ambivalence to environmental protection in the surrounding areas end up harming the ecosystem within the parks themselves.
So then, enough with the negatives for now, what are some benefits of visiting National Parks?
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