A message from Executive Director Bill Hedden

BY BILL HEDDEN

In December 2016, the Johnson family from Las Vegas made their first trip to the Grand Canyon. As their car entered the park, they were heralded as the 6 millionth visitors for the year. Although that milestone turned out to be slightly off — there were 5,969,811 visitors to the park in 2016 — the number is still noteworthy because visitation had passed the 5 million mark for the first time in history just the year before, an increase of over 25 percent in those two years alone.

Imagine that you had Grand Canyon Superintendent Chris Lehnertz’s job, tasked with accommodating the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations of Johnson families while preserving the natural and cultural resources unimpaired. And imagine doing all that as the flow of pilgrims to the canyon turns into a cataract and budgets stay flat. This is the daunting challenge faced by managers throughout the National Park Service and other land management agencies.

The surprise of our anthill lives in the modern technological world seems to be that natural wonders, like the Grand Canyon, or humbler urban parks, are ever more important for respite and inspiration. We need more such protected places, with adequate budgets, as investments in our sanity. Seen in this context, President Trump’s action ordering a review of 27 national monuments for potential diminishment or outright rescission is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, we should be reconsidering our parks and monuments to ask whether they will still be manageable and still be serviceable arks for the native wildlife when visitation is far higher than today and when they are truly islands within lands given over to other uses. Many politically compromised boundaries doubtless should be expanded to encompass entire watersheds or other functional geographic units.

This issue of The Advocate considers the way these issues are playing out at the Grand Canyon. President Obama considered and rejected the idea of creating a monument to encompass the watersheds around the canyon, kicking the can down the road. The integrity of this utterly priceless treasure is threatened from nearly every side. Some questions, like whether we should mine uranium on the brink of the canyon, ought to be no-brainers. Others, like how we will accommodate the legitimate desire of millions and millions of humans to experience the place without ruining it, are deep posers that take us to further questions about what kind of a people we want to be and what kind of world we want to live in.

Sincerely,

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