Enjoy your national parks — while you can
by digby
If the Kochs have their way, your grandkids won’t be able to:
In an op-ed published in Tuesday’s New York Times, Reed Watson, the executive director at the Koch-backed Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), along with a research associate at the Center, call for no more national parks, citing the backlog in maintenance for existing parks.
“True conservation is taking care of the land and water you already have, not insatiably acquiring more and hoping it manages itself,” the op-ed reads. “Let’s maintain what we’ve already got, so we can protect it properly,” it concludes.
That doesn’t sound so bad does it? We have plenty of them already. We should just take care of those and stop making new ones. No biggie. Except that isn’t their agenda at all. This is just a first step:
While the authors seem to push for “true conservation” from the federal government, in reality, PERC has a long history of advocating for the privatization of America’s national parks and other public lands, and has significant ties to the Koch brothers and fossil fuel industries.
It’s nice of the New York Times to give them space to lie about what they’re doing though.