Nature Out of Balance

CLARK C.VAN FLEET

THE devastating popularity of our national parks has brought the management of these areas face to face with the problem of how to let every eager visitor in and still keep the wilderness intact. But the question of admission is only one of the problems that must be solved.

The giant redwood tree (Sequoia gigantea) is the largest member of the vegetable kingdom extant. One of its major distinctions is that it has a very shallow root system. Under natural conditions these roots spread out almost on the surface in every direction from the tree, and the feeder roots, fine slender tentacles, reach right up into the humus to feed and suck up water. These rootlets are very tender and are easily damaged. Sequoia National Park was established to preserve and maintain groves of these trees, which are found nowhere in the world except along the west side of the Sierra Range in California. Every year thousands come from all over the world to admire the giant redwoods, wander around amongst them, and marvel at their size and beauty.

A few years ago the park naturalists noticed that some of the trees were showing signs of sickness and that fewer and fewer young trees were in evidence. A careful study revealed that the earth and humus were being heavily impacted around the trees and in the groves by the hordes of people that visited the park, with resulting injury to the rootlets. Furthermore, the tender seeds dropping on impacted soil were unable to take root and died a-borning.

The upland meadows in the high country offer solace and peace after many miles of weary traveling. They are the mecca of every pack wandering in the fastnesses of the mountains. They make travel possible and practical just below the treeline. Even so these meadows must be gently dealt with if they are to survive. Most of them consist of a bare skin of soil and humus over a rocky or unkindly base. Although the sweet grasses that constitute their cover flourish and survive in abundance under normal conditions, it takes very little overuse, either grazing or hoof pounding, to cause radical changes in their soil stability or their survival.

In the last few years, with the marked increase in travel through the high country in all the Western national parks, many of these meadows have suffered serious erosion and damage from overgrazing. In Olympic, Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon national parks, many of the trails into the upper zones should be temporarily closed to entry, and travel on others should be sharply curtailed. Yet, admittedly, the parks are for the people, for their recreation and pleasure.

Mount McKinley National Park, nearly two million acres in extent, contains the highest mountain on the North American continent, large glaciers of the Alaska Range, and a concourse of North Country wildlife scarcely to be found anywhere else from Newfoundland to the Aleutians. Wolves are the commonest predators here. Within the bounds of the park these animals wreaked the most havoc amongst the ungulates — mountain sheep, moose, and, most spectacularly, the caribou herds. Congress passed a law making it mandatory to destroy the wolves in the park. Although this law has not as yet been fully complied with, we today find the caribou herds so numerous that they are seriously reducing the available forage, and we are threatened with large losses from starvation.

In Yosemite. the deer have been unmolested for years. As a consequence, the oak-grass park lands in the floor of the valley are producing no young oaks at all to replace those older ones that suffer the usual vicissitudes of age. The deer have simply eaten these young saplings as soon as they appeared. Bears have become so numerous as to be an absolute nuisance in many spots within the park.

Yellowstone is faced with much the same trouble regarding bears as Yosemite. It is true that their antics are both intriguing and comical to the transient visitor, but the bears can be extremely destructive, and occasionally quite dangerous to persons not familiar with their quirks.

There are many more problems that beset the administrators of our National Park System. Poaching within the confines of the parks is increasing. Engineers interested in water storage programs are constantly striving to inundate large areas within the parks. Mining promoters press to obtain franchises inside the limits. Grazing and use permits for other activities are consistently sought. Skirmishes for these and other encroachments are yearly occurrences. Most of them are defeated, but just enough sneak by to cause trouble. Artillery ranges, testing grounds, grazing permits, access roads, utilily lines — all bring about a never-ceasing attrition of the true purpose of the park.

In the eleven Western states of the National Park System, and particularly in the Far West, the threat of fire is the most fearful enemy. The attack is much more likely to come from without than within. One of the first cautions with which guests of the Park Service are indoctrinated by the rangers and party leaders and guides upon their arrival in the park is a detailed series of don’ts about campfires, smoking, and disposal of other lighted material during their visit.

1 lie parks are surrounded by vast holdings of land, both public and private, to which access is frequently granted to hunting parties, campers, fishermen, pack expeditions, and the like. Furthermore, with the extension of roads and highways, with logging penetrating further and further into remote areas, chances of man-started fires are markedly greater. These, coupled with occasional lightning storms that strike in the tinder-dry, brush-covered mountain areas, make the long summer drought a period of watchful anxiety. And the hazard is increasing year by year.

Within my lifetime, California’s population has grown from three million to fifteen million, and this vast inflow of people, with their natural demands for wood and water, has affected the balance of nature. Actually, the western third of the United States is a vast desert, with a thin fringe of greenery encompassing its northern sector and with a narrow strip of green along the Pacific Ocean as far south as Monterey in California. The balance is an area of semidesert, with thirty inches or less annual rainfall, or true desert, with ten inches or less of rain.

In its pristine state, the northern sector and the narrow coast strip were covered by some of the finest forests to be found in the world: fir, spruce, hemlock, and white pine in the moister areas; ponderosa pine and associated evergreens in the drier sections. These have been logged off at an accelerated rate as the population has grown. This conversion of timber into logs and lumber has gradually denuded the slopes, benches, and ridges of their natural cover. They have been exposed to the pitiless rays of the sun throughout the dry season; they have been beaten into gullies and washes and have been denuded of the topsoil during the floods of winter. Brush and chaparral, jack pine and deciduous trees have filled in the slopes that once supported great stands of conifers. Uncooled masses of moisture-laden air which formerly precipitated as rain now pass beyond those naked hills and ridges. Droughts are of longer duration. Hence the danger from wildfire.

Last year, up to July 31, the National Forest Service fought 1077 fires on forest lands within its jurisdiction alone that finally burned over 91,000 acres. In the process, three fives were lost, all those of trained firefighters. The Magic Mountain, Johnstone, and Polecat fires in the Angeles Forest alone burned 68,000 acres, and there were smaller blazes in the Los Padres and San Bernardino national forests. All these occurred before the fire season really started.

For the management and protection of the areas under its control, the National Park Service expended a fraction more than seventy cents an acre during 1959. The smallest of these plots is the house where Abraham Lincoln died in Washington, D.C., comprising .05 of an acre. The largest is Yellowstone Park, with a total of 2,221,772 acres, one of the world’s greatest wildlife sanctuaries. Seventy cents an acre seems a niggardly price to pay lor governing and protecting an irreplaceable heritage of nearly 23 million acres.