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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

The balance is that if the park doesn't let enough people in, the people stop supporting the park. America is democratic. Parks are not protected by royal proclamation. If the park is inaccessible then people don't visit. Then they don't care about it. Then one day someone wants to drill for oil in the park, and nobody cares enough to vote that down.

I really don't mind the car-camping crowd. They stay inside their gravel circles and don't impact the real wilderness much. But come time to vote they will always far outnumber the dedicated rock climbers. I want the car campers on my side. If that means giving them their parking spots then so be it.

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>Parks are not protected by royal proclamation.

That's exactly how they're protected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lands_protected_by_The...

that is something that can be reversed if the public doesn’t want it enough.

ok, but you can make that point for any law.

Which is exactly the point. To ensure the national parks stay national parks in a democracy like the US it’s necessary for the parks to have widespread public support.

well, no. lack of support should never overturn a law. work needs to occur for removing them.

That work is being done constantly by companies that want access to the land or resources. The only reason it doesn't succeed is that people like parks and use them enough that it's not politically viable.

Re: your democracy comment, note that Trump and Biden have both converted public land reserves and in cases near/impacting national parks into private oil drilling sites. Not to the point of drilling inside national parks yet, but expanding and encroaching. Given the bipartisan efforts to convert public land and the reversals on campaign promises without perceptible consequence, I'm skeptical of relying on the "voting and waiting" strategy to protect our undeveloped lands. You are overstating how democratic this process is.

>> relying on the "voting and waiting" strategy

I don't know where you get that. Parks are old. Older than petty debates between recent presidents. They rely on support from the population over decades, even centuries. This isn't about the ebb and flow of current voting patterns. This is about keeping people on the pro-park side intergenerationally. It is about making sure that people know what a park means, even if they only visited it as a kid decades previous. Current political personalities are irrelevant to that longer perspective.

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