CNPSR Letter to World Heritage Committee on Yellowstone and Everglades NPs

February 14, 2008
Christina Cameron, Chairperson, World Heritage Committee
World Heritage Centre
UNESCO 7, Place de Fontenoy
75015 Paris 07 SP
France

Dear Chairperson Cameron:
The World Heritage Committee will soon be receiving, if it has not already received it, a report from Yellowstone National Park related to the Committee’s 2003 decision to remove Yellowstone from its list of World Heritage Sites in Danger. This will be the fourth in a series of reports that the park says “includes plans and actions currently planned or underway to redress the 1995 threats and dangers.” The U.S. Coalition of National Park Service Retirees believes that some of what Yellowstone reports is misleading. The Committee should also be mindful of the Bush Administration’s reduced emphasis on resources protection in Yellowstone and its papering over of that shift in priority through deceptively bland site reports to the international community.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this trend is the report’s discussion of winter use in Yellowstone.

But first, what is the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees? In May, 2003, three former high-ranking National Park Service employees spoke at a press conference in Washington DC against actions being taken by political leaders that were having detrimental effects on the National Park Service and the National Park System. At the same time, a letter was sent to President Bush and Interior Secretary Norton, signed by 20 NPS retirees, voicing similar concerns. Since that time, more than 640 additional former NPS employees, many of whom were senior managers of the agency, have joined the Coalition to monitor and respond to the decisions and actions of the political leadership of the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. In a number of ways, the Coalition is also working to support the mission of the National Park System and the employees who carry it out. It is the first time in the 91-year history of the National Park Service that its retirees have ever come together to voice their concerns about legislative and policy decisions and their related activities that they feel diminish the values and purposes for which the National Park System was established and to help educate the American public about its values and benefits. In commenting on Yellowstone’s latest report to the Committee, the Coalition is applying the knowledge gained by more than 19,000 years of protected area management experience among its members.

Winter Use

In the section entitled “Visitor Use Impacts”, the park leadership states that it believes that the recently-approved winter use plan “addresses winter use issues and the park’s goals of protecting park resources, protecting employee and visitor health and safety and improving the quality of the visitor experience. Under similar rules the last three winters, the park’s air quality improved to the point that the park easily met federal air quality standards. The park was also considerably quieter, there was little wildlife harassment, and visitors enjoyed themselves.” What the report fails to mention is that the air quality improved because an average of 250 snowmobiles entered the park per day during that period. The new rules will permit the entry of more than double the number of snowmobiles and will degrade the quality of the air. The park’s own announced noise standards were exceeded on a regular basis during the previous three years even at the lower number of daily entries. The park’s own scientists stated that park wildlife would be less stressed were the number of permitted entries to be maintained at levels of the last three years or even lower. The park also claims that the limit of 540 snowmobiles per day is “responding to public comment, two thirds of which supported reduced snowmobile numbers.” This is disingenuous to say the least. What the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people who have commented on the winter use plans over the last 6 years really said was that they favored a phase out of snowmobile use in the park.

In March 2007, seven former Directors of the US National Park Service who served presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton wrote to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne specifically cautioning: “The latest National Park Service study illuminates in detail that allowing Yellowstone’s current average of 250 snowmobiles per day to increase—to as many as 720 snowmobiles (the then-target figure for the park)—would undercut the park’s resurgent natural conditions.” An eighth former Director, who served under the current administration and thus prohibited from commenting until a year following her resignation, has subsequently indicated that she too would have signed the letter and that decisions about snowmobile use in the park during her time in office, 2001-2006, were not made by the National Park Service but by political appointees in the Department of the Interior.

The reason for this unprecedented level of concern about what the Bush Administration is doing in Yellowstone, alarm shared by the leaders of the U.S. National Park System during the previous seven administrations, is that this Administration's blurring of information about Yellowstone's health is aiding and abetting a retreat from resource protection standards and if this happens in the world's first national park -- without being duly noted and commented upon by the international community that values and seeks to protect sites of worldwide significance -- it would set a dangerous precedent, across protected lands everywhere.

We urge the international conservation community and this Committee to express concern about the status of Yellowstone’s resources and the bland reports that it is receiving from the park. We also would point out that the resources of Everglades National Park are more at risk now than they were when the Committee voted to remove the park from the Endangered list. This is another example of this Administration’s attempt to deceive the international community into thinking that all is well in the US World Heritage Sites. It’s not.
Sincerely,

JW Wade
Chair, Executive Council
Coalition of National Park Service Retirees

cc: Kishore Rao
Deputy Director
World Heritage Centre
7 Place de Fontenoy
75015 Paris 07 SP
France

Dr. Mechtild Rossler, Head
North American Unit
World Heritage Centre
UNESCO 7, Place de Fontenoy
75015 Paris 07 SP
France

Allen Putney
Vice Chair, World Heritage
World Commission on Protected Areas
IUCN
Box 4046
Incline Village
NV 89450

David Sheppard
Head, Programme on Protected Areas
World Conservation Union - IUCN
Rue Mauverney 28 CH 1196 Gland
Switzerland

Dave Harmon
Vice Chair North America IUCN
George Wright Society
PO Box 65
Hancock, Michigan 49930

The Honorable Russell E. Train
President Emeritus,
World Wildlife Fund US
1801 Kalorama Square, NW
Washington DC 20008

Mary Bomar, Director
National Park Service
1849 C Street NW
Washington DC 20240