On Promoting Our National Parks

Toward an appreciation of Half Dome. Yosemite LocalIt will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn. Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will he forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. For my own part I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF THE NATIONAL PARKS PROMOTION COUNCIL. I hadn’t either, until the other day, just a few weeks before National Parks Week, when I received a press release, ostensibly from Washington D.C. (but sent from the email address of a California-based independent P.R. professional, the "Interim Executive Director"), proclaiming the formation of a “new organization to promote America’s National Parks.”

In anticipation of the busiest summer in the history of the national parks, read on at The Traveler's Notebook...