Counterpoint Guest Column
Former National Parks Director: Valles Caldera Bill a Step Forward
Roger G. Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service makes the case for the bill that would make the Valles Caldera National Preserve the Valles Caldera National Park.By Roger G. Kennedy, Guest Writer, 6-15-10
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| Photo by Jayjay P and used here under Creative Commons. Click here for more of this photographer's work. | |
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The Valles Caldera is a saucer-shaped high altitude valley, containing meadows at 8,000 feet punctuated and rimmed by volcanic mountains, including Redondo Peak, which is 3,000 feet higher. Beneath these meadows and forested mountains the geothermal world slumbers fitfully—steaming, bubbling, and heating springs. A million years ago its great eruptions sent so much lava and ash flowing out and down the slopes of the massif that the mountain collapsed into itself and produced a plain into which silt eroded from the hillsides, creating fertile soil as deep as a thousand feet. Volcanic dust had settled over the nearby countryside—two hundred times more particulate matter than that exploded from Mount St. Helens. Some of the lava spewing directly to the surface from the deep interior hardened into obsidian—volcanic glass – which has been used by humans for several thousand years, for points for darts, spears and arrows, and for surgical instruments.
Today the Valles Caldera is prowled by eagles and peregrine falcons and grazed by as many as 3,500 elk—about ten times the famous herd at Point Reyes, California, and about the same number as in Rocky Mountain National Park. Despite overgrazing and clear-cutting in the 19th and 20th centuries, it still provides habitat for fish, song birds, and animals, including several rare and endangered species.
Humans have known this wondrous place for at least 11,000 years, worshipping there, hunting there, finding and harvesting edible plants, and, later, cultivating crops. After the U.S. cavalry came into it, it became grazing land for European sheep, who ate everything that was green, befouled the streams, and rutted the shores. Then came the cattlemen and the clear-cutting lumbermen – that story can be told there –along with demonstration of the redemptive practices of recent years. As a National Park it can serve as the nucleus of a teaching landscape – in cooperation with the neighboring pueblos and villages, with the National Laboratory and city of Los Alamos, the National Forests, and Bandelier National Monument. What a place to learn about geothermal science, agricultural and grazing history, archaeology, geopolitics, ethnography, and conservation! Park status would consummate the efforts begun in 1899 when the United States House of Representatives solicited views on how to best create a “Pajarito National Park” including the Valles Caldera.
Under the Udall-Bingaman Bill, this landscape will finally be re-united for coherent public purposes, including honoring the religious observances of six pueblos, recalling the period in which the Pajarito Plateau, of which the Caldera is the core, was densely populated. Along its western and southeastern flanges are at least twenty ancient pueblo sites larger than any in Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde. Some are now in “outlier units” of Bandelier, but most are not protected adequately. The Udall-Bingaman Bill would bring focus to a magnificent picture of ancient life – as statesmen (such as Albert Gallatin), scholars around the world, and local people have hoped since 1848. It’s not just a ranch.
By becoming a park, the Caldera can be finally redeemed from over-grazing and promiscuous lumbering – as Yellowstone and Yosemite have been. The Caldera Trust was a good holding pattern – that’s all. The Congress created the Trust to give time for the public to learn enough about the Caldera to protect it from further predation or the “development” into the ranchettes and condos that were the threatened alternative.
Courtney White, who wrote in opposition to the bill last week on New West, may consider the Caldera Trust an “audacious and visionary experiment” – but it was a stopgap—the best we – including Stewart Udall—could get. Stewart’s enthusiasm for the park concept never wavered, maybe because he, unlike Mr. White, understood what is and isn’t “inimical” to the mission of the National Park Service”: ranching is done on National Park land, rarely and carefully, as it can be done in the Caldera. The national parks aren’t all big remote western places – its mission since the New Deal has also been to serve urban populations – and New Mexico is urbanizing fast.
Mr. White asserts that “the national park idea, whose roots extend back to the 19th century, is not well-suited the [sic] onrushing, global challenges of the 21st century.” Wrong. That idea is about protecting special places for learning – and since the 20th century about places as accessible to cities as possible. Northern New Mexico is becoming like Colorado, where in the Front Range megalopolis Rocky Mountain National Park is Central Park --- as the Santa Monicas are to Los Angeles. Nostalgia for cattle ranches is not a substitute for recognition of the need for nature close at hand – or for places where we can learn about each other and about nature.
Mr. White asserts that “the reason public land existed in the first place [was] to protect it from the profit motive.” No --our federal public lands were assembled in 1789. The public realm preceded the private, not the other way around. As for the “national park idea” – it isn’t a 19th century invention. It too goes back to George Washington, who insisted that the District of Columbia include open space and preserved wildness – that is why there is old growth in Rock Creek National Park. As for “challenges” – ours are severe, and so were Abraham Lincoln’s. He had a civil war to fight, but he coupled the Homestead Act, for purposeful privatization, with the encouragement of purposeful public protection of Yosemite. Challenges? President Franklin Roosevelt created the modern, comprehensive National Park System in the darkest days of the Depression – a System that almost included the Valles Caldera.
The Udall-Bingaman Bill accords with Stewart Udall’s aspirations for the Caldera, and with Theodore Roosevelt’s hopes for protection of American antiquity through the Antiquities Act of 1906. These traditions – of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries – are worthy of respect, as is the “noble experiment” in self-government that even in difficult times, does its duty to the land, and to the needs of our people.
Roger Kennedy was the Director of the National Park Service under President Clinton, and is Director Emeritus of the National Museum of American History. He was Vice President, Finance, and VP the Arts for the Ford Foundation, Vice President of the University of Minnesota, banker, lawyer, and broadcaster (PBS, BBC, NBC). He is the author of 18 books, most recently “When Art Worked, the New Deal, the Arts and Democracy,” dozens of articles ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New Republic, was Special Assistant to the US Attorney General and the Secretaries of HEW and Labor in the Eisenhower Administration. He is an Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects, has received honorary degrees from many colleges including the College of Santa Fe. His “Wildfire and Americans” dealt with the Bandelier-Los Alamos Fire — he was for several years a resident of Santa Fe.
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Comments
Kennedy is quick to condemn "overgrazing" and "lumbering" but the private stewardship of the last 150 years is the reason the property is so attractive. Courtney White was absolutely correct in his assessment: the National Park Service is ill-prepared and fundamentally incapable of maintaining that stewardship, as Kennedy admits in so many words.
Kennedy also failed to note the South Fork Fire -- as of one hour ago 9,275 acres in size and only 25% contained. Over 500 USFS firefighters are deployed because of imminent danger to the Santa Fe National Forest, the Santa Clara Indian Reservation, and private ranches in the vicinity. The NPS has proven that they cannot fight fire, and indeed are a huge fire hazard to their neighbors, as evidenced by the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire that originated as a prescribed fire in Bandolier National Monument, burned all the way to Los Alamos, and caused over 1 $billion in damages.
The National Park Service pursues irresponsible policies. They do not maintain heritage stewardship, they allow fuel hazards to build up, they are inept at fire control, and they pose a threat to the land and their neighbors. Kennedy is critical of the very activities necessary to preserve, protect, and maintain the traditions of the landscape at Valles Caldera. The NPS will not be a suitable landowner -- Valles Caldera should not be handed to them for assured destruction.
Frankly, I'm surprised that New West moderators allow that kind of thing, since it only diminishes the debate. But if that's the style here...
No Cheeseball, it's you who are floundering in a swamp of ignorance and confusion. You are captive to Victorian myth and clouded judgment. Your rah rah team spirit is no substitute for rational clarity, or rational discourse for that matter.
That's a big problem with the NPS. They cannot self-examine with any sort of clarity. Every issue is flowered up with reference to Victorian heroes and claptrapian patriotism, which only obfuscates and, quite frankly, is puerile. The myriad failures to "protect" resources within National Parks are glossed over with goggle-eyed alarmism and circle-the-wagons mentality.
Read what Kennedy says (it hurts me to even write that statement, because you had your chance to do that, Cheeseball, and failed, so why would you on my recommendation?). Anyway, he decries grazing and and calls the existing Caldera Trust a "stopgap" and a "holding pattern". To me that implies that Kennedy and the NPS have no intention of honoring the trust agreement, not in the long-run at any rate.
Dishonoring agreements is old hat to the NPS. But what's the point of explaining that to a neo-Victorian fanatic without calm discernment or rationality. Tell me, Cheeseball, are you a Congressman by any chance?
In reading the bill, I see no mention that it would become a "Park," but a Preserve where grazing and hunting are permitted as in Big Cypress, Katmai, etc. Did I miss something in the legislation that would make it a park and not simply a unit of the Park Service?
The Forest Reserves were put into being by Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 and they went on to become our National Forests and the US Forest Service came into being. Next the left over, unwanted, lower quality lands that weren't homesteaded were assembled into the Bureau of Land Management. This has become the basis as most citizens know today as the federally managed lands or so called public land or public domain, or as many in the commons proclaim as their own piece of the pie.
The constitution clearly states that the federal government is very limited in the land it can acquire and legally hold not barring the many pieces of legislation that gives it a foot in the door. The commoners have rallied into the progressive socialist movement to take over private property especially in the name of eco salvation. The Valles Caldera is but another big chunk of land carved from the free enterprise and capitalist society so that it can be basically re-distributed to the commons. So much of the West is rapidly sliding into the abyss of the federal domain.
Up until a few years ago the federal domain seemed to satisfy both sides of the equation with adequate mixes of National Parks, Wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and a huge chunk of the west in Forest Service and BLM multiple use lands. As the population grows and more and more people move into the west the demands for more public lands opportunity is at a feverish, hotly debated battle for everyone's special interests. Much of this is at the expense of the brave and hardy souls who settled the west and established their custom, culture and economies. It goes much deeper than just the last century and a half. The native Americans had established their way of life (albeit constantly changing) and it eventually gave way to the Spanish settlement starting in the 1500's. We see a hodge podge of land ownership from the Spanish land grants which took in vast swaths of mountains and plains, huge portions of the western US into Territories, then huge areas were set aside as Indian Reservations and then the west was settled with the Homestead Acts which in turn with the later Forest Reserve lands and the BLM lands plus a huge swath of lands granted to the builders of the railroads, then as the States were federated into the Union, state lands came into being and now we have a checker board of land ownership that makes up the Western United States.
Kennedy is probably a great person and sounds like a very educated and experienced man in some respects but it sounds like he is lacking in some of the basic roots, grit and common sense that is needed to grasp the whole of what really made this nation great. Our natural resources whether it be grass, timber, water, gold, coal, oil, minerals and on and on, brought this nation into the forefront of the World powers. Wise use of our natural resources is important as well as wise conservation practices. Many extractive industries have made huge strides in conservation measures to help mitigate environmental damage concerns and as modern science has brought these industries into the modern age, they still receive a big black eye from the liberal eco jaundiced Kennedy's of the world.
In fact the land has been occupied and resided in by human beings for millennia. The aboriginal residents altered vegetation patterns and wildlife populations to satisfy their survival needs. Some of the features they created, like the prairies and open, park-like forests of Valles Caldera, are the very features that most people today value. They are beautiful, productive of diverse biota, and they are resilient to fire, insects, climate change, etc.
If the NPS could shed themselves of their Victorian (and arguably racist) myths, and see what is valuable on the landscape, and understand scientifically how those features came to be there, and the utility of traditional ecological knowledge and practices, then maybe they could be good land stewards.
Restoration is about restoring people to the landscape and reconnecting people to traditional values and practices. That was the mission of the Trust. The NPS has not demonstrated that they understand any of that or can advance beyond their adopted mythos. Maybe they will someday, but haven't yet as far as I can tell.
Extremist lawsuits have absolutely stifled the management of the Federal Agencies. The NPS has been mostly shielded from this, having as their primary mission being an aesthetic one.
To bring the Valles Cladera under NPS management will mean an eventual end to all consumptive uses. Grazing and hunting will be targeted almost immediately as the NPS doesn't allow any of those uses.
The battle here is pretty plain. We have the traditionalists versus the greens over the control of the land and it's uses. There can be a good balance struck and the Valles Caldera Trust has been such an attempt and now it is under huge political pressure by Senators Udall and Bingaman to bring it under the Green tent.