BY ROB ARNBERGER , JOE ALSTON , AND STEVE MARTIN
We’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service in 2016 because, a century ago, a group of visionaries had the courage and the foresight to protect some of our nation’s natural wonders.
Their foresight, however, could not predict the population and industrial growth of the intervening years. If they had seen into the future they would have set aside more land in and around the parks to protect them from incursions of overuse, pollution and resource degradation.
If national parks, which Wallace Stegner dubbed “the best idea America ever had,” are to survive a second century, we must act now to secure our national inheritance from interests threatening the integrity of our park system. There is no better place to start than the Grand Canyon...