Beyond the “Pine Pig”

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (137) ◽  
pp. 96-118
Author(s):  
Toby Beauchamp

Abstract This article shows how the US national park ranger comes to function simultaneously as friendly, educational caretaker and as policing authority forged through and upholding state violence. It argues that long-standing government and popular discourse distinguishing rangers from “real” police naturalizes and actively supports the ranger’s authoritative role in hierarchies of power. This framework further obscures the violent mechanisms of social and environmental control that underwrite the national parks as such. At the same time, however, the article suggests that persistent efforts to distinguish rangers from law enforcement create an opportunity to practice collaborative and anti-authoritarian forms of protection.

Author(s):  
Terence Young ◽  
Alan MacEachern ◽  
Lary Dilsaver

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073401682110157
Author(s):  
William Andrew Stadler ◽  
Cheryl Lero Jonson ◽  
Brooke Miller Gialopsos

Despite a recent surge of visitation and frequent media accounts of lawlessness in America’s national parks, little empirical research has been dedicated to crime and law enforcement in the U.S. national park system. The absence of systematic crime and justice research within these protected spaces should raise concern, as recent park service data and intra-agency reports suggest visitor growth, funding and personnel declines, operational shortcomings, and technology constraints may endanger the capacity of the National Park Service (NPS) to adequately address anticipated crime threats in the 21st century. This call for research aims to raise awareness of the contemporary law enforcement challenges facing this federal agency and encourage the study of crime and justice issues within the U.S. national park system. We briefly examine the evolution and current state of NPS law enforcement and its associated challenges and conclude with a conceptual road map for future research occurring in these protected spaces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-237
Author(s):  
Sami Shrestha ◽  
Jiban Shrestha

Wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are one of the most endangered wildlife species in Nepal. Currently, there are approximately 200 to 250 wild elephants counted in Nepal. Of  them, 15-20 are in Jhapa district, 17 are in KoshiTappu Wildlife Reserve, eight in Sindhuli, and 45-50 in Parsa National Park andChitwan National Park. More  than 100 elephants are in Bardiya National Parks and adjoining municipalities, and 25-30 are in Suklaphanta National Park and adjoining municipalities.Elephant conservation is challenged by habitat fragmentation, obstruction of migratory routes and human-elephant conflict. The governments of Nepal, law enforcement, NGOs, and local communities have made various initiatives to conserve elephants. In the paper, we have outlined the current status of the elephant population, and its conservative efforts. This study may be a useful tool for the scientific communities and ecologists to protect elephants from extinction.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Hostetler ◽  
◽  
Cathy Whitlock ◽  
Bryan Shuman ◽  
David Liefert ◽  
...  

The Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) is one of the last remaining large and nearly intact temperate ecosystems on Earth (Reese 1984; NPSa undated). GYA was originally defined in the 1970s as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompassed the minimum range of the grizzly bear (Schullery 1992). The boundary was enlarged through time and now includes about 22 million acres (8.9 million ha) in northwestern Wyoming, south central Montana, and eastern Idaho. Two national parks, five national forests, three wildlife refuges, 20 counties, and state and private lands lie within the GYA boundary. GYA also includes the Wind River Indian Reservation, but the region is the historical home to several Tribal Nations. Federal lands managed by the US Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service amount to about 64% (15.5 million acres [6.27 million ha] or 24,200 square miles [62,700 km2]) of the land within the GYA. The federal lands and their associated wildlife, geologic wonders, and recreational opportunities are considered the GYA’s most valuable economic asset. GYA, and especially the national parks, have long been a place for important scientific discoveries, an inspiration for creativity, and an important national and international stage for fundamental discussions about the interactions of humans and nature (e.g., Keiter and Boyce 1991; Pritchard 1999; Schullery 2004; Quammen 2016). Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, is the heart of the GYA. Grand Teton National Park, created in 1929 and expanded to its present size in 1950, is located south of Yellowstone National Park1 and is dominated by the rugged Teton Range rising from the valley of Jackson Hole. The Gallatin-Custer, Shoshone, Bridger-Teton, Caribou-Targhee, and Beaverhead-Deerlodge national forests encircle the two national parks and include the highest mountain ranges in the region. The National Elk Refuge, Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, and Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge also lie within GYA.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Daniel Solis

This essay explores symbolic annihilation in the context of state violence, including policing, incarceration, and the death penalty in the US. Using auto-ethnography to reflect on the work of the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) and other community-based documentation and archival projects, I argue that the personal stories and experiences of victims and survivors of state violence are critical counter-narratives to dominant discourses on violence, criminality, and the purported efficacy of retributive law enforcement and criminal justice policies and practices. They also compel us to engage with complex questions about victimhood, disposability, and accountability. Building on the work of activists and archivists engaged in liberatory memory work, I also argue that counter-narratives of state violence confront and challenge the social, cultural, and ideological power of symbolic annihilation. Because these counter-narratives are under constant threat of being suppressed, co-opted, or silenced, they are forms of endangered knowledge that must be protected and preserved. Finally, I reflect on ‘archives of survival,’ repositories of stories and other ephemera of tragedy that contribute to envisioning and achieving transformative justice.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
OCTO

While national parks in the US are intended to conserve natural resources for the public to enjoy, those visitors pose some of the greatest threats to the ecosystem: vehicles may collide with and kill wildlife; traffic can contribute to noise, water, and air pollution; human waste must be removed, etc. Conflicting incentives like this can make decision-making difficult for park managers. The authors use the example of cruise-ship strikes with humpback whales in Glacier Bay National Park as a case study for how use-impact trade-offs can be used as part of the decision-making and stakeholder communication processes.


Author(s):  
Farhan Zahid

Pakistan remains a country of vital importance for Al-Qaeda. It is primarily because of Al-Qaeda’s advent, rise and shelter and not to mention the support the terrorist organization found at the landscape of Pakistan during the last two decades. The emergence of in Pakistan can be traced back to the Afghan War (1979-89), with a brief sabbatical in Sudan the Islamist terrorist group rose to gain prominence after shifting back to Afghanistan. It then became a global ‘Islamist’ terrorist entity while based in neighboring Afghanistan and found safe havens in the erstwhile tribal areas of Pakistan in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Prior to its formation in 1988 in Peshawar (Pakistan), it had worked as Maktab al-Khidmat (Services Bureau) during the Afghan War.2 It had its roots in Pakistan, which had become a transit point of extremists en route to Afghanistan during the War. All high profile Al-Qaeda leaders, later becoming high-value targets, and members of its central Shura had lived in Pakistan at one point in their lives. That is the very reason the Al-Qaeda in Pakistan is termed as Al-Qaeda Core or Central among law enforcement practitioners and intelligence communities. Without going into details of Al-Qaeda’s past in Pakistan the aim of this article is to focus on its current state of affairs and what future lies ahead of it in Pakistan.


Author(s):  
Alan D. Roe

Into Russian Nature examines the history of the Russian national park movement. Russian biologists and geographers had been intrigued with the idea of establishing national parks before the Great October Revolution but pushed the Soviet government successfully to establish nature reserves (zapovedniki) during the USSR’s first decades. However, as the state pushed scientists to make zapovedniki more “useful” during the 1930s, some of the system’s staunchest defenders started supporting tourism in them. In the decades after World War II, the USSR experienced a tourism boom and faced a chronic shortage of tourism facilities. Also during these years, Soviet scientists took active part in Western-dominated international environmental protection organizations, where they became more familiar with national parks. In turn, they enthusiastically promoted parks for the USSR as a means to reconcile environmental protection and economic development goals, bring international respect to Soviet nature protection efforts, and help instill a love for the country’s nature and a desire to protect it in Russian/Soviet citizens. By the late 1980s, their supporters pushed transformative, and in some cases quixotic, park proposals. At the same time, national park opponents presented them as an unaffordable luxury during a time of economic struggle, especially after the USSR’s collapse. Despite unprecedented collaboration with international organizations, Russian national parks received little governmental support as they became mired in land-use conflicts with local populations. While the history of Russia’s national parks illustrates a bold attempt at reform, the state’s failure’s to support them has left Russian park supporters deeply disillusioned.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6831
Author(s):  
Rosa Marina González ◽  
Concepción Román ◽  
Ángel Simón Marrero

In this study, discrete choice models that combine different behavioural rules are estimated to study the visitors’ preferences in relation to their travel mode choices to access a national park. Using a revealed preference survey conducted on visitors of Teide National Park (Tenerife, Spain), we present a hybrid model specification—with random parameters—in which we assume that some attributes are evaluated by the individuals under conventional random utility maximization (RUM) rules, whereas others are evaluated under random regret minimization (RRM) rules. We then compare the results obtained using exclusively a conventional RUM approach to those obtained using both RUM and RRM approaches, derive monetary valuations of the different components of travel time and calculate direct elasticity measures. Our results provide useful instruments to evaluate policies that promote the use of more sustainable modes of transport in natural sites. Such policies should be considered as priorities in many national parks, where negative transport externalities such as traffic congestion, pollution, noise and accidents are causing problems that jeopardize not only the sustainability of the sites, but also the quality of the visit.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 8006
Author(s):  
Till Schmäing ◽  
Norbert Grotjohann

The Wadden Sea ecosystem is unique in many respects from a biological perspective. This is one reason why it is protected by national parks in Germany and by its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In biology didactics, there are only a few studies that focus on the Wadden Sea. This work investigates students’ word associations with the two stimulus words “national park” and “UNESCO World Heritage Site”. The survey was conducted among students living directly at the Wadden Sea and among students from the inland. The analysis of the identified associations (n = 8345) was carried out within the framework of a quantitative content analysis to be able to present and discuss the results on a group level. A statistically significant difference was found between the two groups. Overall, results showed that the students made subject-related associations as well as a large number of associations to both stimulus words that could be judged as non-subject-related. In some cases, a connection with the region of residence could be found, but this was not generally the case. Even students’ immediate residential proximity to the Wadden Sea is no guarantee that they have knowledge of the two considered protection terms.


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