PD Editorial: National parks in the climate change balance

More than 300 million people visited national parks in 2015, and a similar number is expected this year. The first family joined the crowds over Father’s Day weekend, visiting Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and Yosemite here in California.

President Barack Obama chose one of nature’s most spectacular backdrops - 2,400-foot Yosemite Falls - to help celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service and to conduct some serious business: marshaling public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by identifying tangible effects of climate change on one of the nation’s most treasured landscapes.

“Make no mistake,” the president said Saturday, “climate change is no longer just a threat. It’s already a reality. I was talking to some of the rangers. Here, here in Yosemite, meadows are drying out. Bird ranges are shifting farther northward. Alpine mammals like pikas are being forced farther upslope to escape higher temperatures. Yosemite’s largest glacier, once a mile wide, is now almost gone.”

Obama chose a historic setting for his remarks.

Yosemite, with its iconic waterfalls and rock formations, is the cradle of the national park system. President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation in 1864 setting aside Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias for public use and recreation - the first federal wildland preservation act. In 1890, at the urging of naturalist John Muir, Yosemite was designated a national park. It’s now one of 459 components of the national park system.

“The idea that these places that sear themselves into your memory could be marred or lost to history, that’s to be taken seriously,” Obama said. “We can’t treat these things as something that we deal with later, that it’s somebody else’s problem. It shouldn’t lead to careless suggestions that somehow we don’t get serious about the carbon emissions that are released in the atmosphere, or that we scrap an international treaty that we spent years just trying to put together to deal with this.”

Obama’s public remarks were brief and included no new proposals, befitting a holiday weekend focused on recreation - visiting the Big Room some 750 feet underground at Carlsbad Caverns and hiking the Mist and Glacier Point trails in Yosemite.

Much more could be said as the National Park Service enters its second century, which will officially begin on Aug. 25. They are, as historian Wallace Stegner said, America’s best idea. The parks offer affordable recreation, they’re repositories of American history and they’re economic engines for surrounding communities. Yet many of the parks are in need of TLC, as maintenance funding hasn’t kept pace with tourist appeal.

They’re also canaries in the climate change coal mine.