THINKING ABOUT AMERICA'S NATURAL TREASURES: THE CASE FOR RESOURCE ADVOCACY TO INSURE RESOURCE ADEQUACY
Last Saturday, I attended the quarterly meeting of the Santa Rosa-San Jacinto Mountains National Monument Advisory Committee, to which I was recently appointed by outgoing Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton.
Visually, it’s hard to miss the Monument. Anybody looking to the hills back of the Cathedral City Cove is looking into the Monument, and anybody who has ever driven Highway 74 out of Palm Desert into the mountains toward Highway 371 or onward to Idyllwild has driven through the Monument as well.
To become acquainted with the Sta. Rosas and the San Jacintos is to become aware that they represent a national treasure. Of course, every national treasure is unique in its own way, but it is unusual to have so many different biomes and climate zones in a relatively small area.
From the desert floor in the Coachella Valley, the mountain massif rises more than 10,000 feet to the peak of Mt. San Jacinto in less than seven horizontal miles, making it one of the steepest escarpment formations in the world. As one climbs from the floor of our Valley to the alpine reaches of the upper parts of the San Jacinto range, one passes from desert to scrub and chaparral to intermediate forest, and finally to truly alpine flora and fauna. It bears repeating that in no other part of California or the country is so much environmental diversity showcased in so relatively compact a space.
What is even more amazing, however, is that the Monument must accomplish a wide variety of goals on a shoestring. With hundreds of square miles to consider and with barely $1.5m per annum at its disposal –-and with even that relatively small amount at constant risk as Congress and the White House do their annual dance of the budget–- the resources available to the monument can be put in context by noting that the Monument could be funded twenty times over with the money the Navy or the Air Force spend to acquire a single fighter plane.
Of course this is not to suggest that we should shortchange the defense function. The old bumper sticker "wouldn’t be nice if every school had billions of dollars and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale" may play well in some quarters, but it ignores the importance of a strong and credible national defense.
Rather, pointing out that the Monument’s resources amount to about one-twentieth of a fighter plane is to suggest that this nation’s parks and monuments –which are some of the very things those fighter planes exist to defend- are being shortchanged. Congressional parsimony -and a reluctance to spend money on what are viewed as "nonessential" government functions- have tended to flow into a common channel to leave America’s national parks and monuments without truly adequate resources to do the job they were intended to do, leading to deferred maintenance, insufficient capital investment, and to increased use charges that create invidious class-accessibility barriers to what should be the common possession of all Americans, irrespective of their socio-economic status.
Clearly, resource adequacy for monuments and parks requires resource advocacy for monuments and parks. To insure that parks and monuments do not continue to be shortchanged, two things need to happen. First, the constituency for monuments and parks needs to be broadened. For too long, it has been easy to stigmatize the parks/monuments constituency as nothing more than a loose congeries of scientists, park/monument users, and "tree huggers." Given such a view of the park/monument constituency, there is an almost ineluctable tendency among the political class inside the Baltway -men and women who pride themselves on being "hardheaded realists," unburdened by any squishy, sentimental attachment to America’s natural wonders- to regard protecting such natural wonders as at best a frill, and at worst, a philosophical affront.
Developing a broader constituency for parks and monuments will require reawakening Americans at large to the importance of parks and monuments in our society. As America becomes a more crowded place, the case for preserving not only our natural wonders, but also the sites and scenes of our heritage, ought to become more compelling every year. But it is not enough to assume that simply because the clear logic of the case for resource adequacy is so compelling, the public will spontaneously do the math and arrive at the right conclusion. To the contrary, experience demonstrates that the constituency -or the potential constituency- must be educated and guided to an understanding of the integral role parks and monuments play in our national life. In short, we must change the tenor of the national conversation about parks and monuments.
Of course, the national conversation being what it is -in which scientists, government officials, politicians, and environmentalists all excite some measure of popular suspicion- a considerable part of the impetus for positive change will need to come from change drivers from outside such groups. It is for this reason that broadening the constituency is a crucial step in creating a climate in which broad-based, transpartisan resource advocacy targeted toward establishing long-term resource adequacy can take place.
For the moment, however, the situation continue to be one in which America’s monuments and parks will have to make do with what is available. Here in the Desert, that means leveraging resources, all the while knowing that the fighter jet that just winged its way overhead represents as big an investment of taxpayer dollars as twenty of the Monument.
Visually, it’s hard to miss the Monument. Anybody looking to the hills back of the Cathedral City Cove is looking into the Monument, and anybody who has ever driven Highway 74 out of Palm Desert into the mountains toward Highway 371 or onward to Idyllwild has driven through the Monument as well.
To become acquainted with the Sta. Rosas and the San Jacintos is to become aware that they represent a national treasure. Of course, every national treasure is unique in its own way, but it is unusual to have so many different biomes and climate zones in a relatively small area.
From the desert floor in the Coachella Valley, the mountain massif rises more than 10,000 feet to the peak of Mt. San Jacinto in less than seven horizontal miles, making it one of the steepest escarpment formations in the world. As one climbs from the floor of our Valley to the alpine reaches of the upper parts of the San Jacinto range, one passes from desert to scrub and chaparral to intermediate forest, and finally to truly alpine flora and fauna. It bears repeating that in no other part of California or the country is so much environmental diversity showcased in so relatively compact a space.
What is even more amazing, however, is that the Monument must accomplish a wide variety of goals on a shoestring. With hundreds of square miles to consider and with barely $1.5m per annum at its disposal –-and with even that relatively small amount at constant risk as Congress and the White House do their annual dance of the budget–- the resources available to the monument can be put in context by noting that the Monument could be funded twenty times over with the money the Navy or the Air Force spend to acquire a single fighter plane.
Of course this is not to suggest that we should shortchange the defense function. The old bumper sticker "wouldn’t be nice if every school had billions of dollars and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale" may play well in some quarters, but it ignores the importance of a strong and credible national defense.
Rather, pointing out that the Monument’s resources amount to about one-twentieth of a fighter plane is to suggest that this nation’s parks and monuments –which are some of the very things those fighter planes exist to defend- are being shortchanged. Congressional parsimony -and a reluctance to spend money on what are viewed as "nonessential" government functions- have tended to flow into a common channel to leave America’s national parks and monuments without truly adequate resources to do the job they were intended to do, leading to deferred maintenance, insufficient capital investment, and to increased use charges that create invidious class-accessibility barriers to what should be the common possession of all Americans, irrespective of their socio-economic status.
Clearly, resource adequacy for monuments and parks requires resource advocacy for monuments and parks. To insure that parks and monuments do not continue to be shortchanged, two things need to happen. First, the constituency for monuments and parks needs to be broadened. For too long, it has been easy to stigmatize the parks/monuments constituency as nothing more than a loose congeries of scientists, park/monument users, and "tree huggers." Given such a view of the park/monument constituency, there is an almost ineluctable tendency among the political class inside the Baltway -men and women who pride themselves on being "hardheaded realists," unburdened by any squishy, sentimental attachment to America’s natural wonders- to regard protecting such natural wonders as at best a frill, and at worst, a philosophical affront.
Developing a broader constituency for parks and monuments will require reawakening Americans at large to the importance of parks and monuments in our society. As America becomes a more crowded place, the case for preserving not only our natural wonders, but also the sites and scenes of our heritage, ought to become more compelling every year. But it is not enough to assume that simply because the clear logic of the case for resource adequacy is so compelling, the public will spontaneously do the math and arrive at the right conclusion. To the contrary, experience demonstrates that the constituency -or the potential constituency- must be educated and guided to an understanding of the integral role parks and monuments play in our national life. In short, we must change the tenor of the national conversation about parks and monuments.
Of course, the national conversation being what it is -in which scientists, government officials, politicians, and environmentalists all excite some measure of popular suspicion- a considerable part of the impetus for positive change will need to come from change drivers from outside such groups. It is for this reason that broadening the constituency is a crucial step in creating a climate in which broad-based, transpartisan resource advocacy targeted toward establishing long-term resource adequacy can take place.
For the moment, however, the situation continue to be one in which America’s monuments and parks will have to make do with what is available. Here in the Desert, that means leveraging resources, all the while knowing that the fighter jet that just winged its way overhead represents as big an investment of taxpayer dollars as twenty of the Monument.
posted by Paul S. Marchand | 3:39 PM
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