Environment: They Will Come, and Destroy It
Some of our most cherished landscapes are being sacrificed to partisan brinksmanship in the ongoing shutdown of parts of the federal government – especially elimination of services designed to protect our national parks. They're being trashed.
It’s a nightmarish scenario critics of Bears Ears National Monument have envisioned for several years now: designate it, promote it, leave it unprotected and they will come … and destroy it.
In wake of national publicity generated by the political controversy and Utah Office of Tourism's multimillion dollar "Mighty Five" campaign to promote the state's national parks, southeast Utah is seeing tremendous growth in the number of visitors without additional resources to protect its priceless artifacts of early human habitation, unique geological formations, fragile ecosystem and wildlife habitat or ensure public safety.
The process is abetted by marketing strategies of environmental groups and their allies in the outdoor recreation- and tourist-oriented business; news media blind to damage caused by those tourists; wealthy nonprofits with national, even global, agendas that are unaccountable to democratic processes and insensitive, if not openly hostile, to rural cultures they spend millions to reorder; activists who say they speak for Native Americans in a national campaign to expand tribal sovereignty beyond reservations (the assistant director of Salt Lake City-based Utah Dine Bikeyah called it "reindigenization" at an event held at the University of Utah on Dec. 4); and state government doling out generous subsidies.
Meanwhile, exploding urban population growth along the Wasatch Front and Back is producing a similar, seemingly unstoppable scenario. Prospects for preservation of even a sliver of relatively pristine backcountry seem unlikely against enormously powerful, entrenched political and commercial forces.
However, several Native American tribes offer models of success.
The Truckee River cuts an alpine canyon from Lake Tahoe to Reno, Nevada, then through the desert to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation (Cui-ui Ticutta), where it feeds the lake. The river has been a source of agricultural irrigation and at-home culinary water under unrelenting stress since the heyday of the Gold Rush in northern California and silver mining in nearby Virginia City. Vandals more recently have defaced some of the rock formations along the lake’s shoreline. Yet, Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River inside the reservation would still be recognizable to Paiute elders across time.
The tribe’s relative success at defending their land against tourists, miners and farmers is not unique. Taos (N.M.) Pueblo, the Navajo Nation and other tribes also have recognized the downside of tourism and commercial development: overloaded infrastructure, damage to nature and threats to their culture and heritage.
Each tribe, given their unique circumstances, found the means to fend off a bit of the onslaught by using several tactics suggested by Gloria Guevara Manzo, president and CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council, in the 2017 book “Coping with Success: Managing Overcrowding in Tourism Destinations”: namely, limiting or even banning tourism and related commercial activities, regulating the supply of accommodations and preventing infrastructure development.
Pyramid Lake Paiutes closed off much of their lake’s shoreline.
Taos Pueblo sealed their sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo range of northern New Mexico from non-tribal recreationists.
The Navajo Nation banned unescorted hiking in Canyon de Chelley National Monument and, most recently, voted down the multimillion dollar Escalade development located above the sacred confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers that would’ve shuttled up to 10,000 visitors a day to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
The tribes acted with undisputed sovereignty over tribal lands. Each invoked spiritual values over commercial.
Some governments across the globe – in Peru, Thailand, Spain, Italy, Iceland, France and the Netherlands, to name a few – are taking the problem of tourism overcrowding seriously. There’s a growing perception that it can threaten what they hold dear. In Utah, it's "come on down."
Bill Keshlear is a resident of Salt Lake City and a longtime newspaper journalist, having worked at the Missoulian (in Montana), Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Diego Union-Tribune and The Salt Lake Tribune. He was communication director of the Utah Democratic Party during the 2007-2008 cycle that led to the election of Barack Obama as president.