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Three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service abruptly quit Monday night out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan

Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.

The resignation of nine out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration. In May 2017, Zinke suspended all outside committees while his staff reviewed their composition and work.

In a letter to the secretary, departing board chairman Tony Knowles, a former Alaska governor, wrote that he and eight other members "have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership . . . as prescribed by law." All of the signatories had terms set to expire in May.



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/n...r-AAuMYDi?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp


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Poor Tony Know-less. Ha Ha.


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Anything that gets Tony out of the picture is a great thing. If given the chance to save either Tony or Lisa from drowning I would throw them both a purse seine lead line...


Mark Begich, Joaquin Jackson, and Heller resistance... Three huge reasons to worry about the NRA.
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Are these salaried advisors? In state/federal agencies I've worked with, advisory committees are just that. Offer opinion and advice, but in no way make policy. Might get their way paid to a gathering, but usually no pay.

Can they really "designate national historic or natural landmarks?" If so, they are a truly powerful bunch.

Have served on some, and it can be frustrating when suggestions are essentially ignored. In many instances those committees are established simply to give the impression that an organization is listening. Such committees can have some real value, however, if members are well connected or willing to communicate with Washington. Federal folks are essentially half citizens as they can not lobby or politic for their agencies or causes. Supportive advisors, however, can make things happen. Similarly, they can cause a lot of grief if an agency is not worthy of support.

Last edited by 1minute; 01/16/18.

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There is a new sheriff in town and these quitters are pouting. They were scheduled for replacement on schedule apparently, but wanted to make a political statement by resigning. So much for an impartial advisory group.

It would be very interesting to know by whom these folk were appointed.


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Originally Posted by ironbender

There is a new sheriff in town and these quitters are pouting. They were scheduled for replacement on schedule apparently, but wanted to make a political statement by resigning. So much for an impartial advisory group.

It would be very interesting to know by whom these folk were appointed.



I guarantee Tony POS Knowles was not appointed by Trump... and would not have done what Donald would have wanted...


Mark Begich, Joaquin Jackson, and Heller resistance... Three huge reasons to worry about the NRA.
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Son of a liberal: " What did you do in the War On Terror, Daddy?"

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I used to like Medred and have spent quite a bit of time around him in time long gone by. Anymore he runs very erratic in his thought processes (and this is one of his few tolerable dribbles in years, IMO) and often crosses into the Land of Serious Confusion. He has grown more arrogant all the time and long ago he was plenty haughty.

At least in this case he laid out the issues in a relatively balanced way, but as a hunter he should have done a better job of blasting the hands-off asses at NPS for what they obviously are, but made it very clear it was his opinion. Keep it real...

But Knowles Is, Was, and Always Shall Be a disgusting putz that did more grievous injury to all Alaskans than any other man, alive or dead. Reprehensible is far too kind.


Mark Begich, Joaquin Jackson, and Heller resistance... Three huge reasons to worry about the NRA.
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I hate it when articles are linked and the poster is too lazy to quote them so folks can read them at the same time and place...


Wild divide
BY CRAIGMEDRED ON JANUARY 18, 2018 • ( 39 COMMENTS )
NPSFormer Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles this week led an exodus from the National Park Service advisory board, and some Alaskans were celebrating.

Welcome to the 21st Century of divisiveness on all fronts.

The Department of the Interior under Secretary Ryan Zinke “showed no interest in learning about or continuing to use the forward-thinking agenda of science, the effect of climate change, protections of the ecosystems, education,” Knowles told Alaska Public Media, the voice of the Public Broadcasting System in Alaska. “And it has rescinded NPS regulations of resource stewardship concerning those very things: biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change.”

So Knowles quit and convinced eight other board members to leave with him.

“Knowles and his ilk are pie-eyed optimists,” Rod Arno, the director of the Alaska Outdoor Council, said Wednesday. The group sent the Department of the Interior a thank you note for convincing Knowles to leave. Arno believes it a waste of time, energy and money for the Park Service to devote much time to the subjects on which Knowles had helped focus the advisory panel.

“The nation won’t preserve wildlife habitat at ecosystem levels, like we were able to do in Alaska with ANILCA 1980, by turning those postage-stamp size national parks Outside into ‘hands off’ laboratories with designs of acquiring more adjacent land jurisdiction just for the chosen scientists collecting data on climate change,” Arno said.

As for climate change itself, Arno didn’t think the Park Service needed much more data.

“We sure as hell don’t need National Park rangers to inform us that something is askew with the climate,” he said. “Look outdoors.”

The temperature in Anchorage on Wednesday was 36 degrees, and much of the state’s largest city was coated in ice after days of rain and the melting of what little snow had fallen earlier in the winter.

The Anchorage norm for the date is 17 degrees with a high of 23 and a low of 11. The National Weather Service forecast suggested the overnight low might possibly get down as low as the normal high.

The Outdoor Council – a hunting, fishing and outdoor-recreation group – has been regularly at odds with the Park Service, which took over management of a huge swath of the north after passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980. Almost 55 million acres of land, about two-thirds of the land under Park Service authority, is now in the 49th state.

Uneasy neighbors
Parks in the north are wild, undeveloped and of ecosystem scale. The 13.2-million-acre Wrangell St. Elias National Park in Eastern Alaska covers an area the size of Switzerland plus Yellowstone National Park, plus Yosemite Park, and it abuts Glacier Bay National Park, Canada’s Kluane National Park and Reserve, and British Columbia’s Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that covers more than 24 million-square-miles.

The Kluane / Wrangell–St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek reserve is bigger than Austria. With so much land protected in Alaska, the Outdoor council doesn’t see the park issues of importance as biodiversity, pollution or climate change, but access.

The organization has been a big supporter of moose hunter John Sturgeon in an expensive, long-running dispute with the Park Service over the use of a 10-foot-long hovercraft on the Kandik River in the seldom-visited Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in Northeast Alaska.

The Park Service reports only 1,146 visitors to that 2.5-million-acre park in 2016, the last year for which data is available. According to the Park Service, only 122,320 people have visited the park in all the years since 1982.

Most of them never leave the Yukon. Sturgeon was the rare oddball who had for years ventured up a Yukon tributary to hunt.

He ran afoul of the Park Service not because his hovercraft was causing environmental damage (it wasn’t), or disturbing others (it wasn’t), but because the use of a hovercraft in the preserve violated an arbitrary rule that long ago banned hovercraft in all the nation’s parks.

Sturgeon went to court with the agency, arguing the state – not the Park Service – has authority over the Kandik, a navigable river. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States and won, only to have the case sent back to the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he again lost. He is now appealing once more to the Supreme Court.

The Ninth Circuit is viewed by many as the nation’s most “liberal” court. Some in Alaska view Knowles as a liberal as well, and thus this story – like almost every other today – ends up tangled in politics.

Listen up
San Franciscan Milton Chen, a former assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education now a fellow at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, told E&E News that he abandoned the 12-member board along with Knowles and seven others because the panel was denied the opportunity to explain its important work on education to the Trump administration.

The panel had advocated for something called the “National Park Service Director’s Order #100. A lengthy, bureaucratic game plan for the management of the country’s national parks going forward, DO #100 defined an educational role for the agency and stipulated it henceforth follow the “Precautionary Principle.”

The PP could be explained simply this way: When in doubt, keep people out.

Former Parks Director Jonathon Jarvis told E&E that recommendations from the advisory board’s science committee “became the basis of DO #100.” Gary Machlis, Jarvis’s former science adviser, added that the advisory board was “absolutely essential to DO #100” and expressed his confidence “Secretary Zinke’s determined effort to weaken the National Park Service and those that support it will ultimately fail.

“Long after he is forgotten, the innovative, smart and strong women of the NPS will be working to protect the national parks for all Americans.”

Park Service protection has not always gone down well in Alaska.

Park rangers in the fall of 2010 threatened to shoot 72-year-old Jim Wilde after he refused to stop so they could inspect his boat in the middle of the Yukon River in the Yukon-Charley Preserve. Wilde, instead, took off, and what happened next became the subject of much debate.

Wilde testified at trial that he was only motoring away to get to shore where it would be safe for everyone to meet on dry land. The rangers suggested he was trying to flee for the Canadian border, more than 150 miles upriver and beyond the range of his boat without more gas.
The only place to get gas would have been in Eagle, where the Park Service happens to have a ranger station. Whatever the case, it didn’t go that far because everyone met on the beach, where rangers said Wilde charged them.
So they took him down, handcuffed him and hauled him nearly 200 miles away to the nearest jail in Fairbanks where the case eventually went to trial.
In the end, a federal magistrate concluded that it might have been “unwise” for Wilde to follow the orders of the rangers and shut his boat down in the middle of the fast-moving Yukon, but he was legally obligated to do so anyway.
The magistrate then found Wilde guilty of a trio of misdemeanors – interfering with a government agency function, disobeying a Park Service order, and running an unregistered boat – and people in Fairbanks, the largest city in Central Alaska, pretty much exploded.
Nazi Germany
After Wilde’s wife, Hannalore, who grew up in Nazi Germany, compared the behavior of the park rangers to Gestapo thugs she encountered as a child, a whole lot of people jumped on that theme, there to be joined by then Alaska Republican Gov. Sean Parnell and the Alaska Congressional delegation.
Relations have improved only a little since then, and the Outdoor Council, and more than a few other Alaskans, sees “federal over-reach” in almost everything the Park Service does in Alaska.
What looks like a great idea to Knowles, a Yale-educated Democrat who served as governor from 1994 to 2002, looks like an over-reach hammer to the council. They are not alone. Some other organizations have expressed similar concerns.
“This ‘ban first, ask questions later’ principle would allow decision-makers to prohibit lesser-understood activities until future studies shed light on issues of concern,” charged the Access Fund. “Rock climbers are a relatively small minority of National Park visitors, and climbing management is typically lower priority….As we see frequently, rock climbing studies and inventories are constantly postponed or never conducted due to funding challenges, staffing shortages, and land manager attrition.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, led a House-Senate push to block the Obama administration from approving DO #100 because of congressional concerns about the PP.
“Under such a precautionary approach, I am concerned that many of the
roads and allowable activities in our parks today would be under assault,” she wrote the Park Service. “Traditional lifestyles and tourism economies do not deserve to be put at risk due to management philosophies developed in Washington.”
The National Parks Hospitality Association charged that in following the advice of its advisory committee the Park Service violated the law that outlines “its dual missions of promotion and conservation, and has instead embraced a policy of no change, exemplified by the new Director’s Order. No change has meant a decline in real use of the national parks.
“Visitation to the same units that existed in 1987 is actually down by 1 million visits in 2015, despite the hype of the centennial. Consider marvelous Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky – down 75 percent in visitation! The often-cited growth in visitation is mostly from four major additions on the National Mall – the World War II memorial, the FDR memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, and the Korean War Veterans memorial. All of those were changes. We need more change, not no change.”
No right answer
At the heart of the issue is the Organic Act of 1916 which set up the Park Service to “promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments and reservations…by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

The act has been interpreted in all sort of ways over the last 100 years. It was once used to justify predator control in Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali) to maximize the number of moose and caribou there. Predator control was eventually abandoned in favor of turning the park into a research area for studying the natural fluctations in wildlife populations in hopes of understanding what drives them.

From the start of the 20th Century until the start of the Second World War, the Park Service considered feeding Yellowstone bears garbage a way to conserve the bears and provide for the enjoyment of visitors. The latter gathered around the “Lunch Counter for Bears” to watch the show.

“During its first century, Yellowstone National Park was known as the place to see and interact with bears” is how the Park Service now describes the history. “Hundreds of people gathered nightly to watch bears feed on garbage in the park’s dumps.”

As America increasingly urbanized, however, the Park Service became more and more a nature-protection agency. Year by year, it marched steadily down a nature-first, people-second path until the arrival of President Donald Trump and Zinke, a former Congressman from Montana.

Zinke grew up hunting and fishing in Whitefish, Mont., with a normal, rural Westerners discomfort with government.

”…You should not be afraid to say, ‘The government stops at the mailbox, and if you come any further, you’re going to meet my gun,’” he told Outside Online’s Elliott D. Woods last year.

Woods described Zinke, a Prius-driving former Navy Seal, as holding a “moderate-by-Montana-­standards position on guns and a handful of other issues, including climate change.”

The moderate later became what the Outside headline called “Trumps Attack Dog on the Environment.” Woods’ story is an interesting read, especially his observations on a planned Department of the Interior reorganization:

“To rectify what Zinke views as an imbalance skewed toward agency bureaucrats in D.C., he’s proposed what he’s called ‘the largest reorganization in a hundred years….Right now, all the different services report to their region, and the different agencies don’t align,” he said. “So we’re going to make them all report to their own single region, called a Joint Management Agency.’

“JMAs would be based on ecosystems, not geographic regions, and would, in theory, eliminate redundancies in staffing and allow for more streamlined decision-making. Zinke told me that the JMA idea was inspired by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, in which a mix of uniforms direct blended teams of elite operators. ‘That’s how we fight wars,’ Zinke told the Denali staff as they chewed on smoked caribou harvested by a ranger. ‘Anticipate about 13 of these JMAs in the U.S.'”

There might be no better way to scare the bejesus out of a bureaucracy than to propose such sweeping changes. And the heavily top-down DO #100 – with a “scientific literacy” requirement and a plan to back it up that sounds a little like something out of a Maoist manual for “re-education” – would be wholly out of step with those plans.

Zinke has come under a lot of criticism from Interior employees and environmentalists. He is sure to come under a lot more. The country is engaged in the mother of all political battles. Democrat President Barack Obama entered office promising change, but not much changed.

Outlaw Republican President Donald Trump entered office promising to “drain the swamp.” What exactly that means has never been exactly clear, and whether Trump is making any progress is hard to determine, but there is now most certainly water splashing everywhere.

That makes some people angry. It makes others happy.

The path forward would seem as confused as the Park Service’s mission to preserve resources while providing them for public enjoyment.


Mark Begich, Joaquin Jackson, and Heller resistance... Three huge reasons to worry about the NRA.
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It hit me as I posted the quote that Medred started it off as a "divisiveness" issue instead of an over-reach/environmental-whacko/extreme-left-wing example of tamping-lands-issues-down-Alaskans'-throats, again drama.


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Well, this is simple!

If a bunch of people walked out with Tony the Snake, that's a GOOD THING!!! Cannot help but being so. Nuff said.


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Originally Posted by las
Well, this is simple!

If a bunch of people walked out with Tony the Snake, that's a GOOD THING!!! Cannot help but being so. Nuff said.

Could never hate snakes that much!


Mark Begich, Joaquin Jackson, and Heller resistance... Three huge reasons to worry about the NRA.

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