Your Opinion Is Wrong

National Park Service may ignore public opinion on snowmobiles in parks

Posted at 5:08 PM on 04 Sep 2007

Speaking of things we've been over and over, there's the issue of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park. (It's another controversy Grist has covered since the early days while managing to not repeat a headline. Can we have a medal? Maybe a cookie?) Enough with the snowmobiles already? Not bloody likely! Today brings the news that 73 percent of the 122,190 public comments on the National Park Service's winter-use plan for Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks favor booting 'mobiles from the parks entirely. Less than 0.2 percent of commenters favored the NPS plan of allowing 720 four-stroke snowmobiles into the parks per day. Which sounds like good news, except that the NPS responded by declaring that public opinion would not necessarily guide their final decision. Says a representative of the National Parks Conservation Association, "Americans cared enough to send in their comments on this issue. It's a shame that one would take that and say it's not good enough."

source: Associated Press

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Comments: (2 comments)

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too easy to click that button

Not only is our opinion wrong, but even worse, it's lopsided, according to Jack Welch, one of the snowmobiling advocates, who claims "environmental groups with more power and resources [than the snowmobile lobby?] bombarded the park service with comments. "

"It's not hard if you don't know anything about the issue, if you've never been in Yellowstone in the winter, to click a button and vote against us," Welch says. "It's pretty simple."

Source: Wyoming Public Radio News, http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wpr/news.newsmain?actio ...

by zhornbill at 7:41 PM on 05 Sep 2007

That's strange

It's so weird that a snowmobile promoter would come to that conclusion.

Seriously, WHY is it necessary to run f'ing snowmobiles in Yellowstone? We have the same crap ever other year here in Minnesota, where all terrain vehicle advocates try to wedge their machines into the Boundary Waters. These people run their machines everywhere - public land, private land, sensitive land, any place they like. I know landowners who are threatened with violence if they attempt to keep snowmobiles off of their property. But it's not enough that they have hundreds of square miles to tear up. They need more.

It's disheartening and probably indicative of the human condition that it's never really enough. We always want more, and we always take more until we break it. Then we discard it and move on.

by PBrazelton at 8:18 PM on 05 Sep 2007

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