Harvard University affirms skin color racism ideology! 77% of National Park visitors are white! Only 77%!

Harvard University provides an email news letter titled The Harvard Gazette.

This ideological obsession with racism is racism itself! This skin color racism ideology is disgusting!

In today's newsletter I found this:

It appears the title of the underlying article was changed, because the title now reads "How did ‘the great outdoors’ get so exclusive?"

"“Spring is here. It’s warm. We want to be outside, but we also know for some groups of us, being outdoors is a little bit more complicated,” said Harvard lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow Marya T. Mtshali, kicking off a recent Ash Center talk on structural racism in America’s national parks. ...
highlighting Park Service statistics from 2020 showing that 77 percent of park visitors and 78 percent of staff members are white. ..."

‘America’s best idea,’ but not for all – Harvard Gazette Millions visit our national parks each year. Most are white. Panelists explore why ‘America’s best idea’ isn’t winning over people of color.

Purveyors of structural racism!

NPS Ruins The Casa Grande Ruins National Monument

Posted: 12/27/2015

Trigger

We have recently visited the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Arizona for the first time. I had very mixed impressions of this site managed by the National Park Service!

This is not the first time that I thought that the National Park Service is doing a rather mediocre job managing various sites. Big Government agencies are often underperforming or should not be in business at all!

Notes

1. The Casa Grande Ruins became the first prehistoric and cultural reserve in the U.S. by order of President Harrison in 1892. “It was then re-designated a national monument by President Woodrow Wilson on August 3, 1918.”
2. For several decades now only the main building is covered by a large shelter roof to protect it from rain and sunshine, but the other buildings surrounding the main ruin of the same settlement are not protected by shelter roofs or anything. Thus, the other buildings are allowed to be washed away over time. This is simply unacceptable!
3. There are dozens of pigeons living and nesting inside the Casa Grande Ruins. There are large areas thickly covered in bird poop throughout the main ruin. This is truly disgusting and probably detrimental to the ruins. When I asked the NPS staff at the entrance about this and why there is not a net over the ruins to prevent these pigeons from living there, they kind of shrugged their shoulders and hinted that there were also owls living under the sheltered roof. So to protect these owls, the NPS allows pigeons to ruin the ruins? How stupid and inept is that?
4. It was also not clear to me or might be mistaken, but it appears there are no archeological work done at this site anymore. If true, why?
5. Perhaps, had these ruins be left to the state of Arizona or the native peoples they would have been preserved much better

BLM - Why Is The Wave In Arizona So Inaccessible?

Bureau Of Land Management

This federal agency like several others are involved in managing the outlandish large land owned by the federal government, including national parks and national monuments.

Vermilion Cliffs National Monument In Arizona

See e.g. here and here.

To quote from the BLM website: “This remote and unspoiled, 280,000-acre Monument is a geologic treasure, containing a variety of diverse landscapes from the Paria Plateau, Vermilion Cliffs, Coyote Buttes, and Paria Canyon.”

The Wave

The Wave is one of the spectacular attractions of the Vermilion Cliffs NM and beyond. You can search the Internet for photos of it.

Outrageous Access Policies

As can be expected from a big federal government, the access policy is such that it severely restricts access to the people of this country.

The website of the BLM hides the information about the permits required, thus I will quote from Wikipedia here: “BLM limits access to the North Coyote Buttes Wilderness Area to just 20 permits per day. Ten of the permits are available in advance by an on-line lottery conducted four months before the month for which the permit is sought. The remaining ten permits are made available by lottery the day before one's intended hike.”

The Wave can only be accessed via a dirt road of 5-10 miles length, which may not be suitable for regular vehicles. Once you reach the trailhead, one has to hike another 3 miles across desert to get to the Wave.

Thus, effectively a large majority of the people of the U.S. will probably never in their lifetime be able to see the Wave thanks to these outrageous measures imposed by the federal government.

Wilderness For Wilderness’s Sake

I am personally opposed to such extreme nature conservation.

We The People should ask big federal government:

1. To return such federal lands to the respective states
2. To develop attractions like the Wave by private businesses for more tourism

Previous, Related Blog Posts

See here and here.

U.S. National Park Service Hostile To Individual Freedom

Trigger

My recent visit to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park (SR). This is the second of a series of blog posts about the U.S. National Park Service (first one here).

Toll Trail

Nearby are three photos I took from displays at the SR created by the National Park Service. When I read them on location I was stunned. Expressions of hostility towards individual freedom and free enterprise. The propaganda of the NPS here is that thanks to the federal government’s land grab we are now all much better off.

“Imagine if all the park trails were privately owned and every time you wanted to use them you had to pay a toll …”

Well first of all admission per vehicle to the Grand Canyon National Park is $25. Sure there are other options available like $10 lifetime pass for over 62 year old persons. However, most of us pay with our taxes for this as well whether we ever visit this park or not.

Of course Ralph Cameron had a “precarious legal” claim to the Blue Angel Trail and he dared to collect tolls for the trail all the while until finally in 1928 our savior the “National Park Service gained control”.

Unfortunately, I do not have the time to do more research into Ralph Cameron here, but this guy was among other things a U.S. Representative and a U.S. Senator from Arizona.

The above photo was taken inside the Verkamp’s Visitor Center at the South Rim at Grand Canyon Village. I believe, this used to be a private business as well until fairly recently. Perhaps, a story for another time. The official NPS story about Verkamp is here.

I believe, the “Mining For Tourist Dollars” exhibit above talks about the early days of the Grand Canyon Village. To excerpt from this chapter: “No one spent a dime on community services, however, or thought to develop sensible zoning.” This is an incredible hogwash!

The early private entrepreneurs provided a variety of community services to common people: affordable, quality lodging and meals; guided tours; jobs and other services. The NPS said about Verkamp among other things following (emphasis added): “The Verkamps built their business on service to their guests, service to their employees, and service to their community.”

To use hyperbole, because there was no “sensible zoning” the federal government was entitled to grab the land for the Grand Canyon National Park? First of all, I would assume zoning was not yet widely established anywhere in U.S., except perhaps for the Northeast, around the turn of the 20th century when the Grand Canyon began to be developed (See e.g. Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of November 1926 regarding zoning).  I would also argue that government mandated zoning is no blessing and the disadvantages may have well outweighed the benefits (a story for another blog post). Not least it is often a severe interference with private property rights and freedom of contract.

Why Are There Not More Private Hotels At The South Rim Of Grand Canyon?

Posted: 4/19/2014

Committing Heresy

I would suspect that such a question would be considered a heresy by many people without first thinking about it more thoroughly.

However, I have recently visited the South Rim (SR) of the Grand Canyon National Park for the first time.

Current Situation

There are 6-8 lodgings currently available at the SR as part of Grand Canyon Village. Some of them date back to the earliest tourist hotels available around the early 20th century. To keep it short, I will not go into details here about these hotels.

Apparently, staff working at the SR facilities are allowed to live up there in dormitories etc.

Federal Big Government Propaganda

Americans and the rest of the world have been kind of brainwashed for decades that only a powerful big central government could ensure the beauty of nature against private greed and commercialism and U.S. state ignorance.

Consequences

Government run hotels there are:

1. Affordable, but wait times for reservations can be a year perhaps longer unless you are willing to wait for a short-noticed cancellation
2. Prices for rooms do not fluctuate as would be the case if they were run by private businesses
3. Too few rooms are available at the SR to accommodate the 5 million or sor annual tourists
4. Thus, many tourists stay in William, Flagstaff, or Tuba City, which are 50 to 80 miles away from the SR
5. There appear relatively more camping accommodations available at the SR than hotel rooms. This is great for outdoor people and supposedly preserves the beauty more than hotels

When Big Government Builds Hotels At The South Rim

Apparently in the 1970s, big government allowed two more hotels to be built facing the SR close to the SR. I do not know the details of it.

However, these two hotels are so ugly 1970s (see picture nearby) that the old log-wood hotels build by Kolb brothers or Fred Harvey look like marvels compared to these eye sores.

Tune In For More

There is a lot more to say about Federal Big Government and its national parks/forrests etc., which I hope to cover in future blog posts, e.g.

1. Expulsion of private land owners and native americans
2. A land grab and expropriation on a enormous scale
3. Anti free market, anti individual liberty attitude of the National Park Service

U.S. Government Owns Too Much Land!

Socialism Is Alive In The USA

Not only is the healthcare sector totally dominated by the federal government even before ObamaCare, the feds also own considerable amounts of land.

Recently, I read that the federal government still keeps buying or acquiring significant amounts of land.

In this blog post, I focus only on land owned by the federal government with the exception of Arizona.

Facts & Figures

The National Park Service (NPS) owns a total of 84,000 acres of land. This translates almost into the size of Germany or the size of 1.7 times the average size of any of the 50 states.

Now, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) owns a total of 260,000 acres of land. This represents about 3 times the size of Germany or 5.4 times the average size of any of the 50 states. This is clearly way too much! When is the federal government finally going to sell some of it to reduce the federal debt?

Situation In Arizona

According to the “State Land Department Annual Report” of 2012 (most recent), the federal government owns a whopping 42% of Arizona’s land. The state government’s land trust owns 13%. Thus, government owned land in this state alone is 55%. Private owned land is only 17%. Indian trusts make up 28%.