Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Just yesterday, a 23 year old man was confirmed dead after he fell into a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park. In order to get to the hot springs, one has to actively leave the boardwalk.

This incident, along with two other high profile incidents over the past couple of months has had me thinking: Is it reasonable to restrict access to national parks in order to protect the sensitive ecosystems that the National Park Service stewards? I personally do feel that people who willfully break the rules that put themselves, others, and the ecosystem in danger should be rightfully banned. However, I also recognize that Yellowstone, averaging about 4 million visitors a year, is quite possibly the most popular national park in the US national park system and that making sure banned visitors never reenter would be extremely difficult, especially considering that the park is part of three different states. What does everyone else think?

I live in a country where national parks (and some other protected areas) have 3 zones. First one where access is forbidden except science etc. work. Second where access is allowed at least certain times of year but usually has lots of restrictions. Third where there are least restrictions.

That system seems to work well.

National Parks have guidelines and restrictions. You're supposed to stay on marked trails/etc for the most part and there are no-go areas where wildlife is especially active, certain areas are closed during certain times of the year when conditions are dangerous, etc etc. It's not just free access.

National Parks, as is shown recently, are more likely to fuck you up recreationally than you are to damage them in the long term. Bears, geysers, cliffs and ledge collapses, you can just accidentally walk the wrong way in the middle of Yellowstone and never see civilization again. That hot spring is not any worse off having literally boiled that guy to death. Dude is thermophilic bacteria food now Circle of Life plays dramatically in the distance.

When should access be restricted? Is the area a niche habitat for a specifically adapted species, like many caves? If yes, we can discuss restricting it. Would allowing recreational activities disturb that habitat? A lot of times the habitat isn't sensitive enough to be disturbed by cavers who know how to look and not touch, for example. So much of wildlife/land management can be common sense compromises that work out for both sides pretty well so I don't understand why people in my field can be such vapid environmentalists about it.

You really can trust that most people are not going to act like retards in public, but rangers typically get to the ones who do before anything can truly be harmed. Even people who accidentally set major fires, which happens every other day in the Sierra Nevada here, aren't doing irreparable damage or even particularly long term damage. What we would lose culturally in being able to interact with the environment outweighs sparing a few dumbasses from their deaths tbh.

The thing is, the tourism is much of what pays for the place to be protected. You can't completely restrict access to places just on the off chance that someone might be an idiot and not follow instructions. Bridges and high buildings are dangerous too, if you ignore warning signs and put yourself at risk.

Former and future park ranger here.

As far as visitor safety goes rangers place an emphasis is on preventative education, but we know there are going to be people making poor decisions and that at a certain point there's nothing that can be done. I worked in a park where we knew between 9-12 people were going to die each summer. We educated visitors about the environmental risks, tried to teach them how to avoid danger and self rescue if they found themselves in trouble, but ultimately that's all we can do. It is ultimately an individual's responsibility to follow the rules and keep his or her self out of danger. Rangers are there to enforce the rules, help people enjoy their parks, and do what they can to help people when something goes wrong, but in the end there are only so many of us and only so much we can do.

I think there have been a couple people banned from parks over their behavior, but enforcing such a ban is impossible and stands on wobbly legal grounds. If a violation is serious enough to warrant a ban, it is usually a criminal case which would involve jail time on conviction, so a ban would be a bit redundant. The people who really deserve a ban are the types who get rescued three times by helicopter in a six week span (this happened a few years ago, but I can't remember in which park). What these people are doing usually isn't criminal, but it costs tens of thousands of dollars and puts the lives of others in danger. Once is an accident. Twice might be bad luck. Three times is unrepentant poor decision making.

As for protecting stuff in the parks, US National parks have a very difficult and somewhat contradictory set of missions. The root of this can be found in the Organic Act of 1916, which created the USNPS, but came several decades after the earliest parks were established. I won't quote the whole thing, but the most important sentence is this:

The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

Now the difficulty here is that the law commands the park service to allow for access and use of parks, but without substantially disrupting them or anything in them. This is extremely hard to do, especially since "unimpaired" is completely open to interpretation. This is why issues like snowmachines in Yellowstone, beach access in North Carolina, and backcountry camping in Yosemite often wind up spending decades in court. There is no clear legal definition of what impairment means, and the recreational and preservation sides often dispute how much recreational activities impact the natural, and historical resources.

Further complicating the matter is the fact the public thinks of only national parks, but there about two dozen different designations of NPS units: Parks, Seashores, Lakeshores, Historical Sites, Monuments, Historical Parks, Scenic Rivers, Wild and Scenic Rivers, Military Parks, National Battlefields, Recreation Areas, Memorials, Preserves, Battlefield Sites, Parkways, etc.

The Redwoods Act of 1978 attempted to clarify the problem by stating:

The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

Meaning that all sites are to be treated equally under the law, and the resources are supposed to be protected by one, high standard. Which doesn't necessarily mean that you can't hunt in a preserve, or that you can't take your Jeep off road in certain parks. These activities can be permitted, indeed should be if part of the park's enabling legislation, but they have to be regulated to preserve the natural and historical systems as much as possible.

Within this larger framerwork, each park unit has its aforementioned enabling legislation. This basically says why the land is being set aside. The reasons are called "significances" and can vary widely, although almost all cover a mixture of natural resources, cultural resources, recreational opportunities, and scientific study. In National Preserves, for example, there is regulated hunting. On the other end of the spectrum, there are places, such as one in Haleakala National Park, which are set aside as research areas not accessible to the public. Thus there are a large variety of local rules and regulations in each park.

But here is the big problem: what do you do when a certain "enjoyment" has itself become an historical significance but also one which impacts other resources. For example, how can a park manage historical beach driving access on beaches where endangered sea turtles and birds nest? Both the ORVs and the turtles have a legal right to their activities on the beach, but the ORVs can have significant impact on the animals nesting success. Regulating ORV access becomes necessary, but such regulation is seen as an encroachment on people's rights. Which it is. But American courts have consistently ruled resource preservation outweighs recreational access, since resource damage is often irreversible.

Park superintendents have the power to temporarily close areas that are at significant risk of resource damage or pose an elevated risk to visitor safety, but such measures are temporary and often fought in court. That's why resource closures are often done very quietly and often not even marked if the public is largely unaware that the resources are there. Closure signs tend to attract attention. (And I want to add that park staff are generally not allowed in these areas either, unless they are doing a specific job. Rangers aren't supposed to be setting aside cool stuff for themselves.)

What this all means is that it is very hard for the Park Service to manage everything. It is legally obligated to keep everything accessible, as long as the stuff isn't getting trampled to death or pilfered away. US National parks weren't created as private reserves for the nobility and scientific cliques. They belong to people and the people have a right to enjoy them, even though enjoying them has an inherent risk. But how to manage that access often results in very bitter, emotionally charged legal battles between different stakeholders which usually leaves no one happy in the end.

They're a perfect microcosm of representative government..

Is it reasonable to restrict access to national parks in order to protect the sensitive ecosystems that the National Park Service stewards?

I don't think it is. You can't stop stupidity. They could fence off the whole of Yellowstone and there'd still be idiots who'd climb it to have a look around. Not only that, but that's a few hundred million dollars the NPS doesn't get. Congress likely wouldn't stand for it--especially once angry constituents start complaining about not being able to go someplace pristine and awe inducing that they're taxes payed for.

I'd also question how damaging a dead body or baby bison is to an ecosystem. The 2011 Japanese Tsunami killed 100,000 birds in the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. If it's so fragile a few corpses will throw it off balance, fencing it off won't save it for long.

In most cases carcasses are only removed when leaving them in situ would endanger humans. Carcasses attract predators and predators guard their food. This is perfectly natural but in areas with large amounts of people it could lead to problems, so in such situations the carcass is relocated. And yes, this job sucks. There is also the potential that an animal died of a criminal act or of disease, and this information is needed to help manage the park. In either scenario there are considerations which outweigh the baseline "let nature take its course" philosophy and necessitate the removal of the carcass.

I can imagine parks with higher visitation might have an unwritten policy of removing low-threat carcasses to less visited areas to avoid grisly scenes, but generally park policies revolve around the "let nature take its course."

If someone's stupid enough to do something that's liable to get them killed, let them do it. I shed no tears for anybody willing to disregard common sense for stupid gains. Plus they do the world a favor by removing themselves from the gene pool.

There are laws, the problem is enforcing them. The high visited areas the ratio of rangers to visitors is low, and in remote areas the ratio of rangers to square miles is lower.

Increasing staff isn't the easy answer. The point of visiting a NPS unit is to be in a natural or historical setting, not an armed camp. And the cost of hiring more staff goes beyond wages. It would require increasing and maintaining infrastructure such as housing (many park areas aren't close enough to communities for rangers to feasibly commute to their duty locations). The cost of maintenance and construction in these remotes areas is astronomical, and though the effort is made to minimize resource degradation such damage is unavoidable when one starts building.

The NPS takes a preventative-education approach, teaching visitors not only what the rules are but why it is important to follow them. Outside of emergency situations, the goal of every ranger-visitor contact is to foster stewardship in the public.

It is largely successful. Between 2007 and 2013, 272,000,000 to 285,000,000 million visitors enter park sites every year. In that time only about 1,200 people died in parks, total (171.4 per year out of a population of roughly 278,000,000). If that population represented a nation, this would be a very low death rate. I don't have criminal stats, but they are certainly lower than one finds in a country of that sized population.

The sensational and gruesome stories make the news, but the stats tell a different story.

The obvious answer is when it presents a danger to humans, animals, or nature itself… Sorta what rules and guard rails tend to be for…