OCR Text |
Show Off-road vehicle use is becoming a threat to the physical environment in many public land areas. Valley floor. This kind of pressure destroys natural environment and reduces the quality of a park visit for most of the people caught in the traffic jams. Similarly, the impact of concentrated uses, carelessness, and littering are destroying the undisturbed character and the fragile ecosystems of some portions of units in the Wilderness System. Current attempts to reduce use pressures by adopting a policy of relocating accommodations and concession facilities outside the national parks may hold some promise for reducing the overcrowding, but increasing rates of national outdoor recreation activity, combined with population growth, may overwhelm these areas in spite of the accommodations relocation policies. Problems of a similar nature occur on public land areas that do not have national significance. Although the threat is not to a unique area, the seriousness of deterioration of the resource is merely a matter of degree. In a sense the regulation and control of users is a greater problem on multiple-use lands because the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management do not have adequate staffing and funding to control the activities of the increasing number of people who use the public lands. The need to regulate authorized use of the public lands underscores our recommendation in Chapter Seventeen to provide land management agencies generally with police authority in order to control unauthorized use. In the absence of trained personnel such as those employed by the National Park Service, increased use of public lands places disproportionate burdens on local police authorities. When the Federal Government, through the development of recreation facilities attracts additional people to an area, it should assume the responsibility of regulating and controlling them. A fair and equitable rationing system, in line with the carrying capacity of parks and wilderness areas, should be adopted now to assure adequate controls over visitor use. Pricing should not be employed as a rationing method because that type of pricing would exclude all those unable to pay high fees. Parks and wilderness areas must be kept available to people regardless of their ability to pay. We prefer a first-come, first-serve reservation system administered by mail. Although this may appear to be an extreme and 207 |