Fun, Destruction, Virtue: Treating National Parks Ethically

National parks, we like to think, speak for themselves. The beauty and majesty of Yellowstone and Yosemite is universally acknowledged, yet these places that are both wild and public still require strong advocacy. For roughly one century, the National Park Service has been the advocate for this now beloved feature of our democracy. The National Park Service tackles issues that you and I cannot imagine, but in an institution it is necessary to continuously discuss what that institution ought to be. The NPS finds itself in such a moment. 

On December 22nd, 2018, at midnight, Capitol Hill went dark. Budget disagreements shut down the federal government—the lights would remain off for another 35 days and nights, the longest government shutdown in United States history. Every corner of American society was affected by the interruption, but perhaps nowhere was it felt more than within our National Park System. 

Of the current 24,681 active NPS employees, 21,383 were deemed ‘unessential’. They stayed home, without pay, for 35 days while our nation’s greatest parks remained open to visitors, and vulnerable to whatever action was privately deemed acceptable. Of the 3,000 parks employees deemed essential, some two-thirds were law enforcement, park police, fire and EMS personnel. In February, when this draft started, the federal government remained in a kind of stasis, with the threat of unresolved budget conflicts throwing the nation and its public lands back into disarray. But as the dust settles on the longest government shutdown in history, officials are just now beginning to understand the damage that was done while America’s parks were left unprotected. 

Parks employees are returning to America’s natural sanctuaries and finding evidence of gross misuse. Piles of trash, graffiti, usage of unauthorized trails, damaged landmarks, and human waste pepper our most iconic landscapes, with conservationists estimating public lands could take decades to recover from the damage. Outside of Moab, Utah, visitors cut out half-a-dozen trails in permit-only areas of Arches National Park, areas that were closed during the shutdown. An entrance gate was damaged in order for vehicles to drive on snow-covered roads following a storm, the park was closed during this time as well. 

There are Joshua trees in Southern California over 500 years in age. When park officials at Joshua Tree National Park returned to work, they found a gnarled-limbed Joshua run over by an off-road vehicle. They found juniper trees sawed and cut down. They found trees that had been kicked, presumably to see how strong they were. They even found one Joshua that had been spray painted. Park officials have been forced to pick up countless empty champagne bottles (and even prom dresses) left over from unchecked New Year’s celebrations, all while determining the extent of the damage to its stock. Wheel marks were found nearly a foot deep in some parts of the park’s deserts, with a litany of unauthorized trails carved into the earth by off-road vehicles. 

Visitors at Death Valley National Park attempted to kick in locked restroom doors, leaving no shortage of waste and toilet paper to dot the rustic landscape. In Rocky Mountain, people drove around locked gates and through wildflower meadows. Some $5,000 worth of maintenance tools were stolen from Great Smoky Mountains National Park, while locks were cut and closed roads were abused by motorists.

On Christmas day, some seventy-two hours into the shutdown, a man hiking in California’s Yosemite National Park fell to his death. He was hiking in an area that was, in fact, open during the closure. And while Yosemite typically staffs roughly 800 Parks employees during the winter season, at the time of accident there were less than fifty employees entrusted to maintain a park that encompasses some 1,200 square miles. The incident went unreported for ten days. 

With some 330 million recorded visitors attending national parks in 2017, there is no question that, quantifiably, national parks have never been more popular. Attendance records at parks have been broken every year for the last five years. Strategic marketing campaigns and an increased interest in the outdoors has pushed America’s national parks back into the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, and imagination. There is a newfound prominence in the ability of the parks to represent the boundless possibility seen in America’s greatest landscapes. 

As the federal government closed, and the functional operative abilities of our national parks were stalled for over a month, a new, and admittedly dark, realm of possibility was opened to the public eye. We have been given an insight, in real time, into the destructive power that lies within any enjoyment of nature on a scale so great.

Witnessing the damage and impact wrought on our nation’s most valued natural resources puts us in a unique perspective. National parks provide us with a certain set of moral standards that function in theory, but they are also provided with a structure of authority that acts as a practical applicator. The past 35 days, however, have given us a window into the treatment of these parks when stripped of their authoritative structure. It has been a grim picture. Rarely are we, the people, provided with such a visceral image of the reality that institutions lacking a unified message, a unified ethic, are highly vulnerable institutions indeed. 

Historically, the ethical approach taken within national parks has been founded in utilitarian ideals. The worth of the parks has been tied to the perceived good that they can, and that they ought to, produce. It is clear to us now that what has not been an ethical priority within the parks system has been a focus on the individual who derives a good, or goods, from the parks. In that sense, we have viewed these spaces less as sanctuaries of nature than as theme parks. The recent shutdown has shown us what happens when consumers are let loose, and unchecked, in these, albeit grand, theme parks. 

Never before has there been a stronger need for a unified ethical theory in relation to our national parks. We need not only an ethical theory concerned with the parks, but a culture that highlights the importance of personal responsibility and accountability within those structures. Parks cannot protect themselves, and under the current model excess recreation is placing an unnecessary strain on our wilderness spaces, a strain that can only be borne for so long.

Shifting the ethical focus of national parks away from individual rapture and utilitarian promotion, virtue ethics allow park-goers to foster personal responsibility and character within a society. If we can encourage moderation, wisdom, and courage in our approach to the environment we can protect our lands from their greatest enemy: carelessness.

The history of our national parks has been dominated primarily by two modes of thought-processing: Romantic environmental notions and Utilitarianism. Through almost a century and a half of tradition, the conversation on nature preservation within the Parks system has rarely ventured, consciously or unconsciously, outside of these two distinct realms. The purpose of this paper is, initially, to explore these environmental approaches and their impact on our current state. Following that I will argue that it is imperative that we open our discussion on national parks and public land preservation to an environmental ethical approach that has gone largely or completely unacknowledged within this tradition: the virtue ethical approach. Discussing the benefits and limitations of the dominating ethical trends in the parks system coupled with the benefits derived from adding a new approach to the discussion, we will begin to see the future of our parks system and where a virtue ethical approach falls into place.

One hoping to grasp the history of ecological thinking and discussion would do well to begin with British Ecologist Peter Marshall’s Nature’s Web. In Nature’s Web, Marshall contextualizes ecological debates that have permeated society. It becomes clear that Marshall is also defining, through the lens of ecological thinking, the history of human consciousness, its flux, and the tendencies humans have in what they perceive and experience. When the desire to understand the perceptions that led to the founding of national parks becomes apparent, Romanticism is an ideal context in which to begin.

As humanity crept into the nineteenth century, a new form of consciousness bloomed and flourished out of the emotional darkness of the scientific revolution. This form of consciousness provided a language for those who found “man’s ascendancy over nature unacceptable from a moral and aesthetic point of view.” As technology, and with it, agriculture, continued to advance, and as more and more staked their sense of identity and community in an urban context, there grew a newfound appreciation for the wilderness and countryside. From here the distant shouts for the intrinsic value of all creation, particularly in nature, can be heard echoing throughout civilization.

The new gospel, preaching the love of unspoiled nature and wild places, emerges as the Romantic sensibility. Notoriously difficult to define, Romanticism is described in Nature’s Web as “more as a mood, a manner of feeling, than as a clear set of beliefs and ideas, expressed in literary, artistic and philosophical works.” These works would come to form the basis of a “truly ecological sensibility.” 

Romantics were riding the crest of a wave of fundamental shifts in consciousness: they rejected older notions of perfect beauty in favor of personal expression. Rather than using words such as ‘rules’ and ‘imitation,’ they valued ‘genius’, ‘originality’ and ‘creation.’ Romantics rejected the mechanistic view of the world that had been posited and accepted during and following the Enlightenment. Instead, many argued for the universe as an organic whole which was subject to eternal growth and change. 

In Romanticism we see the shift from an objective portrayal of nature to the subjective feeling for nature. Nature, under the Romantic, begins to shed some of the clothes draped on it by the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment period. Nature itself begins to seem harder to define, and the purpose for understanding nature can be seen to shift: “With the Romantics the quest for ‘nature’ no longer meant following long-established aesthetic rules, but rather a pursuit of the simple, spontaneous and pristine — the authentic — as opposed to the artificial, conventional, sophisticated and false. The Romantic poets who experienced something ‘deeply infused’ in nature were only reflecting a wider change in consciousness and taste in society.” 

In order to understand the importance of Romantic notions of nature in this context it is vital to distinguish the role of a handful of Americans in contributing to Romanticism and to the American approach to nature aesthetics. Two of the most important contributors to the Romantic era, peaking in a half century period beginning in 1800, were the American thinkers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Thoreau and Emerson would come to exemplify an American brand of Romanticism that would have an enormous impact on American ecology and the individuals that would eventually be seen as the creators of our national parks system. Thoreau and others like him found value in wilderness, separate from the pragmatic connection to plants and animals as stock, but as a spiritual source of renewal. These American Romantics challenged the dominating view of nature as dead or mechanical, a perspective formulated within the Scientific Revolution. This singular perspective was supplemented with a new organic and dynamic vision of the universe, a perspective that makes the creation of national parks on the basis of intrinsic value possible.

If Romanticism was the idea that allowed the engine of a national park to be formulated, Utilitarianism was the fuel that made it run. Utilitarianism, generally, is an ethical theory stating that the ideal action is that which maximizes utility, typically understood as whatever produces the greatest well-being for the greatest number. In practice, Utilitarianism is forever linked to the movement to form a national park service and the justifications for expanding the program. 

Just prior to the formation of the NPS in 1916, Mark Daniels, first general superintendent and landscape engineer for the national parks, spoke at a convention on national parks. Daniels did not make a Romantic plea to his audience, rather he stressed the importance of tourism in the flourishing of this system. Daniels posited that the parks “can not get a sufficient appropriation at present from Congress to develop plans and put them on the ground as they should be, therefore we are working for an increase in attendance which will give us a justification for a demand upon Congress to increase the appropriations that are necessary to enable us to complete these things.” 

The arguments that Daniels made were not, at the time, novel. In fact, Mark Daniels appears to have been following a script scrawled on the history of the formation of our nation’s initial group of national parks. In forming the first national parks of America, business has most often been their initial lifeblood. The Northern Pacific Railroad Company, in the interest of monopolizing tourism, pushed for the creation of Yellowstone National Park, the first of its kind, in the early 1870s. In the following decades Utilitarianism would continue to win the day, with railroads being a key driving force, and economic benefactor, in the creation of America’s initial core of parks. It was often their business interests that produced and passed legislation that would affirm the idea of national parks. 

In fact, the word “tourism” is not simply emblematic of the Utilitarian urge to derive economic benefit from nationally protected lands, it would also become inextricably linked to the idea of a national park itself. The passing of Yellowstone legislation would be foundational in emphasizing the importance of tourism to the then budding Western economy, something that National Park historian Richard West Sellars explains well: 

“Over time, accommodation for tourism in the national parks would become truly extensive and have enormous consequences for the parks. It is a significant, underlying fact of national park history that once Yellowstone and subsequent park legislation codified the commitment to public use and enjoyment, managers of the parks would inevitably become involved in design, construction and long-range maintenance of park roads, trails, buildings, and other facilities”

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