08 Jul 2003 | Randy said...

I've heard of rumor that some Russia national parks are considered "sealed-off". No one is allowed in or out...it's a nature preserve that really is a preserve. Does anyone know if this is the truth or not?

Also, Scott, I believe that the places that are worth seeing are still adverse to the risk-wary.

08 Jul 2003 | suppafly said...

Amen. Leave exploring the national parks to the people who are willing to take a few risks..

08 Jul 2003 | p8 said...

"We need to plant more poison ivy, more poison oak. Import mosquitoes. Post warnings about wolves and mountain lions."

This planned wildness reminds me of Disney's Celebration Florida, the first fully branded town. Where you can live in the 'imagineered' ad free towns of yesterday.

Or the travellers that all use the same "Lonely Planet" to go 'off the beaten path'.

Although I don't think that is what the author meant.

08 Jul 2003 | Brand said...

I think this is really egotistical, actually. Why should only serious outdoorsy people be able to enjoy the National Parks? Why scare people away with fake warning signs and poisonous plants? So you, the 1% who really "gets it" can enjoy it your way?

08 Jul 2003 | Mathew said...

You need to balance preserving absolute wildness with allowing access to those people who are not peak physical specimens for whatever reason.

Not to mention educating people about why they should care about national parks. If people can't get in them and see it, what hope have you got of convincing them it is important to preserve them....

08 Jul 2003 | Tibloto said...

Unfortunately, making parks less accessible is not a smart idea. The reality is, we live in America where the dollar is king. If a park's access was limited to only the "hardcore" few, people wouldn't feel the need to care about the park. And it wouldn't be long before Bush would claim that the park was a good place to log, drill, or mine to help alleviate America's dependence on foreign countries.

I'm certainly not for allowing people to snowmobile across wildlife preserves, but parks need to gain in popularity not decline if we are to have any left in 20 years.

Plus, I'm a lazy dumbass, and I still want to be able to go to the occasional park now and then without taking a class on poison ivy salves and grizzly bear defense. ;)

09 Jul 2003 | SU said...

It is a balance, but the balance has been tipped in favor of road building, logging, and concession stands for far too long. For instance, the US Forest Service has built a network of roads that is 8 times the size of the US Interstate Highway System. Most of those roads have been used for logging access, the rest being left for public use in various forms.

I'm not saying ALL access should be cut off, but huge portions of these parks should be left WILD. The way things are going now, public paved roads are reaching more deeply into the wilderness, often to the point of making once contemplative spaces something more akin to a 4th of July picnic area.

How do we give people a better appreciation for "nature" without removing nature's wildness? It seems to me that is the bigger question.

09 Jul 2003 | hurley#1 said...

Good-sized portions of the Adirondack Park in New York State (the largest park in the lower 48, bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky, and Everglades National Parks combined) are set aside as "forever wild" wilderness areas where nothing motorized is allowed. No motorbikes, jet skis, off-road vehicles, or chain saws (we had to use two-person crosscut saws and axes when I did trail maintenance there, and we had to lug around all our tools on our backs, in addition to all our camping gear, for 25-30 miles). I would hope that cellphones, GPS units, and other electronics would be outlawed there as well but that's harder to enforce.

The rest of the park is a hodgepodge of various uses, including homes, villages, camps, resorts, etc., and the blend seems to work: people who just want to get away from the city and breathe some fresh air can do the "Adirondack Lite" thing, while those who want a true wilderness experience can delve deep into the forest for weeks and donate lots of blood to mosquitoes and blackflies or brave the 30-below-zero temperatures in winter.

09 Jul 2003 | Toby said...

I'm all for it. People are too wussy anyway. In fact, I'd prefer there to be giant predators roaming the streets, living off of the weak and unwise. We can genetically engineer them, a combination of velociraptor, spider, and monkey (not spidermonkey, mind you)!

09 Jul 2003 | Toby said...

Actually, I'm not all for it, but I can see the concern.

I'd prefer national parks to ban RVs, cars, snowmobiles, and other motorized non-essentials. It would keep out the riffraff and cut back on damage.

and P8, what exactly is wrong with a planned community like Celebration? Is it any less crass or fake than the average tract-mansion community? Nobody expects a utopia, but Celebration is a new urbanist sucess story. It featured walkable streets, a town center, and a range of affordability (127K to 700+K -- which isn't bad for new construction in Orlando). It ain't a resort town, either, but a working community.

Admittedly, I haven't read anything about it recently.

09 Jul 2003 | Mike said...

Nice comment Hurley #1, I'm glad somebody appreciates the Adirondacks.

I've lived in Upstate NY all my life (real Upstate, not twenty minutes north of the city), and camping in the Adirondacks is what people do in the summertime... getting lost is the fun part!

Anyone ever been to the Enchanted Forest in Old Forge, NY?

09 Jul 2003 | hurley #1 said...

OT: Perhaps the best introduction to the Adirondacks, at least the High Peaks area, is through Carl Heilman's great online virtual panoramas:

http://www.carlheilman.com/virtual.html

He's an excellent photographer, although even better known for his snowshoes (I own a pair!)

09 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

You need both. More specifically, we need MORE of both.

09 Jul 2003 | Eamon said...

This is a terrible idea. Think of the children! Won't somebody please think of the children?

09 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

what exactly is wrong with a planned community like Celebration? Is it any less crass or fake than the average tract-mansion community?

They're both bad. ;o)

A well planned community, which is planned in conjunction with the surrounding communities, is a necessity. However, most communities are either poorly planned, or planned with little to no consideration of the surroundings. Granted, parts of new urbanism are good, so celebration, if anything, is a good experiment.

That said, Disney is just plain evil. But that's another discussion. ;o)

09 Jul 2003 | Don Schenck said...

They're stealing my ideas!!!

I've long held the belief that we should put a diving board up at Niagara Falls with a sign that reads "Go Ahead!".

09 Jul 2003 | p8 said...

"what exactly is wrong with a planned community like Celebration?"

The whole town is ad-free. There are no billboards or signage. And yet everything in Celebration is, in effect, an ad for Disney. The cleanliness, the architecture, the ponds, mailboxes, whatever. It manages to be the most branded place you can be. You can actually send your kids to the Disney school, and you can vote for political representatives who will represent you in the Disney Town Council. You're living the brand.
See also: Naomi Klein

The solution seems worse/faker than the problem.

This feels the same as 'creating' a national park more like nature by planting poison ivy and re-introducing some animals so people can enjoy what 'real' nature is really like.
When you see a map with the notation You are here, you know it isn't part of nature, but when you are planting trees it get's to be a bit blurry: What part of the park is real nature and what is not?

Although I believe the Denver Post columnist was using a hyperbole. I'm all for leaving the parks as natural as possible.

09 Jul 2003 | pb said...

Totally disagree. There are plenty of places for the non-wusses to go. I much favor the parks being accessible so they can, uh, be accessed.

09 Jul 2003 | Eccentric Gardener said...

What about putting the outdoors back in the outdoors?

Monday night, I attended a talk at the local Borders by William R. Jordan III, author of The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature. His ecological restoration-based approach to the parks might not be to leave them "as wild as possible so that future generations can experience them as they always have been," since the parks already aren't as they always have been. Jordan and the ecological restoration gang would attempt to reintroduce native plant and animal species (maybe even poison ivy), eliminate invasive exotics, and restore the ecosystem to something that becomes a healthier, more natural habitat...

It's human intervention to reverse or erase the effects of human intervention.

09 Jul 2003 | Toby said...

The whole town is ad-free. There are no billboards or signage. And yet everything in Celebration is, in effect, an ad for Disney.

I don't quite see the harm. People aren't being duped into living there -- I'm sure they aware that the community is owned by Disney and it is probably the reason they moved there. The city of Hershey, Pennsylvania is one giant chocolate ad and nobody seems to mind. (At least the Disney company didn't name the town Disney.)

Besides, people move into places based on "branding" all the time. I'm from Philadelphia, and right now in Bucks County (a wealthy suburban county whose western half is becoming a bedroom community for Manhattan) everyone wants a "Doylestown" zip code. The zip drives up prices and adds prestige -- so every tract-mansion community that has sprung up around the town tries to get the Doylestown ZIP. The "real" Doylestown, by the way, is exactly the sort of town-centered community that New Urbanists love -- and the reason why people with means have flocked there.

It is all about branding.

Meanwhile, Celebration is more like the sort of Doylestown communities we SHOULD be building. Don't get me wrong, I'm not shillin' for the Mouse, but if this spurs other developers into building rationally, all the better.

To paraphrase James Kunstler, in building Main Street USA, Disney's parks made fantasy what Americans were destroying like never before. Sure, Celebration, like Seaside, is an idealized version of an American town, but it doesn't make it unworthy.

The solution seems worse/faker than the problem.

That's where we'll just have to disagree. Forget Celebration, Forget Seaside. Is this DC suburb worse/faker than these because it has as a traditional design?

09 Jul 2003 | hurley #1 said...

Monday night, I attended a talk at the local Borders by William R. Jordan III, author of The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature.

Another one worth reading is Win-Win Ecology: How the Earth's Species can Survive in the Midst of Human Enterprise, by Michael Rosenzweig. He goes beyond restoration ecology to what he calls "reconciliation ecology," which in his words seeks "environmentally sound ways for us to continue to use the land for our own benefit." It's a vision for "inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play."

09 Jul 2003 | Toby said...

"inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play."

You mean more than just the larger drainage ditch you have to pass to get into the development?

09 Jul 2003 | Toby said...

Oh, and I don't endorse that swine link I had mentioned -- just that page interested me and it was quick from Google.

09 Jul 2003 | COD said...

I'm more concrned that they will shut down what few opportunites for solitude still exist. It only takes one idiot to attempt a trail out of his league, get hurt or die, and then sue to get a whole park system shut down. We've raised a generation of cry babies who expect everything spoon fed to them and all risk to be legislated out of existence.. What a miserable way to live...

09 Jul 2003 | eg said...

I'm all for less 'sanitizing' of the parks and nature. I grew up in the boonies so I got to wander around in 'natural' woods and fields.

I was in Portugal earlier this year and I was amazed at all the sightseeing spots close to cliffs and higher up in some castles that didn't have roped off edges and warning signs galore. Common sense rules and personal responsibility for all!

10 Jul 2003 | ek said...

Here here eg, totally agree. Unfortunately that wouldn't cut it here in the U.S. because the first dumbass to walk off a cliff while talking on this cell phone would sue for hundreds of millions of dollars and win. It's like this porch situation here in Chicago in the wake of the collapse. Looks like we're quickly moving towards the city requiring "maximum load" warning signs on all porches. I mean, c'mon, are we all just complete idiots? Whatever happened to common sense?

On the topic at hand, though the piece does sound kind of snotty, I agree with the concept. When I went to Starved Rock State Park here in Illinois about a year ago I was shocked by the experience. Everything is paved and there are huge walkways leading up to the top of the rock. There's was absolutely nothing wild or natural about the experience and it was an utter disappointment.

I do think that state and national parks should be accessible, but there needs to be a balance between accessibility and destroying the very thing that people are supposedly going to see. Again, it's about common sense, which, sadly, seems in all too short supply these days.

To Don, the soon to be released TypePad (from the makers of Movable Type) sounds like it would be perfect for you. It's going to be for fee to start, but I'm willing to bet that it's going to be very reasonable. They started beta testing a couple of weeks ago and I think release should be pretty soon.

12 Jul 2003 | Paul Randall said...

For what it's worth, I visited Big Bend Nat. Park (Texas) a few months ago and while it does have a gift shop and a resort area with cabins, the bulk of it is wild, unmessed-with nature in the blazing sun. I hiked one trail that had a sign warning of mountain lions, and how to act (and not act) if you meet up with one. That sure made my day more exciting!

14 Jul 2003 | Steve said...

You want an unspoiled national park? Go to Voyageurs in northern Minnesota. No cars allowed inside, not motorized boats. Just lakes, forest and canoes.

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