National Parks—The Citizen's Responsibility

Abstract

America's magnificent system of national parks and monuments is a tribute to one of the salient characteristics of the American people—a consciousness of civic responsibility to each other. In a culture often accused of being dollar-mad, some twenty-four million acres of the finest primeval land available has been reserved at the insistence of the people, to be protected inviolate for the benefit of future generations. In addition, fourteen million acres in the national forests have been set aside as Wild and Wilderness Areas, where no roads may be built, seventeen and a half million acres are devoted to federal wildlife protection and management, and many millions of acres are protected as state parks and privately owned sanctuaries. This is a proud achievement, attained because the people as a whole recognize that the wisest use of these lands is the perpetuation of their aboriginal condition, as representative of the once vast wilderness that clothed the continent.