On August 25, the National Park Service, or NPS, celebrated its 108-year anniversary. In just over a century, the agency has managed some of the most famous natural sites in the country. Places like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone have become staple images in the American cultural canon. However, the agency has some serious issues it needs to address.
As of September, there are 431 units managed by the NPS, the most recent being the Springfield 1908 Race Riot memorial, having just been designated as a national monument on August 16. Of those 431 sites, 63 are national parks.
Among the ranks of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Great Smokies, are some questionable places with the national park title: Gateway Arch and Dry Tortugas, just to name a couple. Those sites, although culturally and historically significant, should not be national parks.
National monuments are under the purview of the NPS. For many, even former deputy director of the NPS Robert Vogel, Gateway Arch in Saint Louis should fall under that classification. At only 91 acres, it is the smallest and arguably the most controversial national park.
The 63 current sites are not the only ones to have the park designation throughout history. In fact, the second national park, Mackinac National Park in Michigan was stripped of its name after just 20 years in 1895. The same goes for other more naturally significant places than Gateway Arch, including General Grant in California and Platt in Oklahoma. If those places can have their titles taken away, less naturally significant sites that are parks now should too.
Unfortunately, if a private landowner or even if another government agency (Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc.), wanted to transfer its land to the NPS, it would be an arduous process. Although the process may not be as long as it once was, it took John Rockefeller over three decades to give pieces of his land to Glacier National Park.
Another major issue the Park Service needs to address, especially post-Covid, is overcrowding. In a 2022 statement from Zion NP Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh, “in 2021, the National Park Service received 297 million recreation visits, comparable to pre-2016 numbers.” That was across all 423 sites at the time. In the 2023 visitation report from the NPS, 393 park sites experienced over 325 million total visits, with the top ten most visited sites accounting for nearly 30% of total visits.
Another major issue the NPS needs to bring up is that of the Native peoples of the land they inhabit, as many visitors do not know the history of the land they come to. To little surprise, the government has been pushing Indigenous Americans off their land for their own uses since the very beginning, starting with Yellowstone.
Many NPS sites no longer use the traditional names, but rather a westernized name. Although some places throughout the country, such as Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, was renamed Mount Denali in 2015, many areas have not had that luck. By reverting place names back to the names given by the Indigenous peoples of the land, their histories and stories can be told while also pushing the way to give tribes more ownership of the land they once inhabited.
Those who plan to visit an NPS site in the future should go at a less popular time to reduce overcrowding, acknowledge whose land they are on and respect the environment around them, even if that environment is a 630-foot arch.
Ethan Herx is a sophomore studying photojournalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to share your thoughts? Let Ethan know by emailing or tweeting them at eh481422@ohio.edu or @ethanherx.
