Threats to National Parks

Robert Pahre, professor and head of the Political Science Department at the University of Illinois, on threats to national parks. He argued that the famous "crown jewel" parks are atypical: of 417 National Park Service units, only 59 are national parks, and more than half are historic sites. He surveyed threats from outside the parks (climate change, as at Exit Glacier; ecosystems broken by wolf eradication; development in gateway towns; heavy recreation) and from the politics of the park system itself (agency culture, suppressed dissent, concessioners, Congress and changes of administration), and held up small Midwestern units such as Indiana Dunes and Grand Portage as models of working with their neighbors. Questions covered tribal lands, the review of national monument boundaries, wolves in the upper Midwest and the power of concessioners. Fall 2017 series "Building a Better Environmental Movement," co-hosted with DiversityEd and the Student Sustainability Committee.