DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Our National Parks

Experience and opinion go hand in hand. Both can apply.

I was only speaking for myself. Are people not allowed to speak for themselves now? You're the one that keeps trying to talk for everyone else.

Your mom did one thing. That doesn't mean it applies to everyone. I didn't say that it applied to all consumption oriented tourists, I mentioned the tendency that I have witnessed.

If we were restricted to talking about specific cases your argument would suck a bit less. The topic is "Our National Parks." Eminent domain was involved in parks. It's still possible. How is that unrelated? The only craziness in here is the insanity of my expecting a different result when trying to have a productive conversation when you're involved.

Eminent domain is not involved in any of the portions of these stories. None. Are you now going to post the entire history of our national parks and claim it is relevant to the discussion that we were having? Bait and switch con games are obvious to thinking people. So is seeing people trying to to veer the conversation away from the actual topic to derail it from its intent. It's not the masterful craft you obviously think it is.

It's unrelated to what we were discussing. And actually you know that and seem to be playing the role of a troll at this point.

Bringing up, "Yeah but eminent domain happened several decades ago so let's talk about that" isn't any sort of attempt at trying to have a productive conversation.

How many hikers do you know? You know, those people who buy T-Shirts to commemorate their travels to the places they hike to commemorate their journeys. They too must be out their just trampling up the forests and polluting them. You've been hopping from place to place like a rabbit trying to evade a fox since this thing started and it's not getting any better for you.

The National Parks are one of the last areas of government funding that need to be touched, IMO. I love visiting them. My family's last trip with my husband before he passed was to several National Parks (Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands), I live about 5 minutes crom Cuyahoga Valley National Park and visit regularly. My kids and I, along with my sister and her kids, are taking a family trip to a number of National Parks this summer (using life insurance money from my husband, doing something he would have LOVED!). Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands again, and adding Brice, Zion, Capitol Reef, Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree. I have decor in my house tracking our travels over the years. The trips to the National Parks have been our favorite trips.

To lose funding for them lacks the forsight or intelligence. This is an area we could/should expand. Our parks bring in tourism, jobs, money. They provide beauty, nature, memories, history. Once those lands are mined/pipelined etc., they will never be the same again. They're no longer a natural resource for all to enjoy (the founding point of the National Parks).

All I can do is sit here and shake my damn head.

Protect Our National Parks!!

You along with millions and millions of others across generations.

The National Parks are wonderlands of nature.

They are also sanctuaries for wildlife that need protection.

Common sense and logic is all that is needed to understand.

So you going on a tangent on HAMAS and Israel is fine, but my talking about something that actually is related to National Parks is somehow out of bounds?

When one's family has had land taken through eminent domain for a park and one goes back to visit and it is a mess, it gives one a different perspective.

The idea of the National Parks is great. The actual execution is hit or miss.

Just because something is a good idea, doesn't mean you should ignore the actual specifics of how that idea is executed.

I know good hikers and I know bad hikers. You're the one that keeps trying to overgeneralize into some all or nothing narrative.

I understand this is your opinion. But I'd be interested to know if you can site another institution or organization consisting of 400+ sites and experience 323+ million visitors annually that is run more efficiently or in your view executed more efficiently? Just like any organization including, in my opinion, both government and private enterprise - with enormous scale comes some inefficiency. And a little inefficiency in execution while providing access to the wonders of the national parks AND raising a net profit in the Billions is not a bad thing. jmo

I'm not a big fan of agglomeration in general. I think the bigger an entity gets, the more it is responsible for, generally speaking, the worse it gets. Proper attention can't be given to everything. The more there is to pay attention to, the less attention each piece gets, often to the point of being overlooked altogether. I'd rather have good oversight of a 100k acre park, than poor oversight of a 1.36M acre park.

I'm also not a big fan of using profits as a measure of success. Too often, profits seem to come at the expense of other considerations. How much money the parks make is very low on my list of priorities. I don't care if they operate "in the red" if they are carrying out the mission of preservation. Yet, I'd still like to limit costs where it makes sense. How commercialized and profitable we can make the parks is not the goal for me.

Well the bigger something gets the more difficult it is to manage. Yes. That's fact.

But that doesn't answer the question - can you name something as big as the National Park Service that is run more efficiently? Just because something is large and has some inherent inefficiency due to it's scale, does not seem like a solid basis for supporting something that can potentially do much harm to natural resources that so many currently enjoy AND a service that makes money. The point of the profit isn't that it is making a large margin - it is the fact that it is not costing the tax payer to finance it.

We do not know for sure that irreversible harm is going to be done. [1] Why take the risk for a saving that is essentially pennies. [2] Does anyone think Trump and Project 2025 is about making ordinary US citizens enriched and have better lives? ... or is this purely about allowing companies to profit from looser regulations. . . which sort of brings us full circle. I can't comprehend thinking this is a good bet to make.