America needs more 'crown jewels'

The 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch, between Los Angeles and Bakersfield in the Tehachapis, features extraordinary ecological resources: ancient oak groves, Joshua tree and pinyon pine forests, and 80 imperiled species, including the California condor. Its owners and some environmentalists have cut a deal to put 90% of the ranchland into a private conservancy in exchange for allowing intense development on the other 10%. But here's what hasn't been seriously considered: Protecting this precious area as a national park for the benefit of creatures and people in one of the nation's most densely populated regions.

National parks have been deemed "America's best idea," in writer Wallace Stegner's phrase, and they are justly celebrated as that in a Ken Burns' documentary series that starts tonight on PBS. Yet, oddly, America's national park system is largely perceived as a fait accompli, like the great Gothic cathedrals in Europe. But national parks should be as much a part of our future as they are of our past.

Americans invented the national park well over a century ago, with Yellowstone, Yosemite and other outstanding natural areas protected as America's "crown jewels." The 1916 act establishing the National Park Service summed up its mission: "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same ... as will leave them unimpaired for future generations." No other federal land management agency has such populist, preservationist and visionary goals; for example, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management allow recreation on the lands they oversee, but they also allow activities generally prohibited in parks -- logging, mining, grazing and drilling.

The nearly 400 park system "units," including 58 national parks as well as national monuments, preserves, battlefields, recreation areas, historic sites and seashores, cover 84 million acres of land, or about 3.5% of America's land mass. Every citizen holds title to them. Their success has inspired nearly 100 other countries to designate 1,200 national parks of their own.

Despite their universal popularity, Congress, the Park Service and park advocates working at the national level focus almost exclusively on existing parks. New park designation has stalled. Since 1980, only 35 new park units of any kind have been created, fewer than one a year on average, with the overwhelming majority of those being small historic sites as opposed to expansive natural areas. Between 1929 and 1980, in contrast, about 230 units, or on average almost four a year, were added to the system.