The 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch, between Los Angeles and Bakersfield in California's Tehachapi Mountains, 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 percent of the ranchland into a private conservancy in exchange for allowing intense development on the remaining 10 percent.
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 phrasing, and they are celebrated as that in the recent Ken Burns PBS documentary. Yet, oddly, America's national park system is largely perceived as a fait accompli, like the great Gothic cathedrals in Europe.
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 percent of America's land mass.
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, with the overwhelming majority being small historic sites as opposed to expansive natural areas. Between 1929 and 1980, in contrast, about 230 units were added to the system.
Hostility to federal land ownership and spending on the part of conservative Congresses account for some of the stagnation. As significant, for the past few decades environmentalists have directed their energies not to preserving natural areas by adding parks to the system, but to battling federal agencies beholden to extractive industries and to expanding the federal wilderness system.
Wilderness - which, like national parks, only Congress can designate - offers a protective overlay for federal land regardless of the agency managing it (be it the BLM, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service or the Park Service). It's the most restrictive designation, keeping out most activities and people, except for rugged individuals hiking in the back country. Parks, on the other hand, encourage people to come in, and so they accommodate (to varying degrees) the need for parking lots and visitor centers, and for a wide range of recreational opportunities, from mountain biking and ranger talks to car camping.
Nothing beats national parks for affordable, family-friendly vacations. Despite the recession -- or more likely because of it - visitation at parks is rising. One survey found that 73 percent of Americans will vacation in a national park this year, up from 62 percent in 2008, when 275 million people visited national parks.
As we approach the national park system's centennial in 2016, Congress should launch an expansion effort by authorizing and funding the study of 100 potential new parks. What better way to celebrate the centennial than with a new generation of national parks? "America's best idea" can get even better.
Erica Rosenberg is director of the New National Parks Project and a former staffer on House and Senate natural resources committees. This first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
