Inspired by this vision, the government did more or less nothing over the next 16 years, while the 2.5 million visitors of 1980 turned into 4.1 million by 1996. Then came this January’s torrential storm, compounded by a premature warm spell, which sent a half-mile-wide torrent sweeping down the valley. Without even a draft environmental-impact statement, the flood wiped out bridges, roads, $55 campsites and 266 motel rooms and cabins. Left behind are the ghostly remains of campgrounds and of cabins tethered by their utility lines, and a new opportunity to correct the mistakes of a century–or to make them all over again.
If park planners have their way, Yosemite will be a very different place in a few years, more like the park envisioned back in 1980. This summer visitors will notice that campsites, always booked to capacity, will be even harder to come by. A plan to require reservations for day visits was rescinded when local businesses complained, meaning it will probably be necessary again to swing the entrance gates shut without notice when the park simply can’t take another car (as happened on nine days last summer). In the long term, what happens in Yosemite will be watched closely at the other national parks, where traffic and commercial development have increasingly blurred their difference from theme parks. Nationally, visits to the $75 Park Service sites have declined slightly in the last four years, after peaking at 275 million in 1992. But the parks everyone wants to see, including Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, are as crowded as ever. At 4 in the atternoon on Memorial Day, Superintendent Don Falvy of Zion National Park in southwestern Utah took an auto census of the narrow Zion Valley and counted 800 ears, twice what the parking lots could hold; of the remainder, $00 had been left by roadsides, and there were “100 ears driving around looking for a parking space.” That, of course, would barely register as traffic by Grand Canyon standards, where on busy summer days as many as 6,000 drivers (backed up as far as two miles at the entrance) compete for 2,400 parking spots. Most of them wind up at Grand Canyon Village, a three-square-mile settlement of hotels, gift shops and restaurants that sprawls to within a quarter-mile of the majestic South Rim. In search of refuge for what the great naturalist John Muir called America’s “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people,” you could do about as well on the interstate.
Change is coming, however, spurred in part by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who told NEWSWEEK last week that he continues to be “distressed by the Times Square quality of the Grand Canyon.” A new environmental-impact statement proposes building a huge parking lot at the edge of the park and letting people bicycle, walk or ride mass transit to near the canyon rim. Construction is set to begin next year on a similar, smaller project at Zion. “They’re not out of their cars yet, but we’re going to force them out,” promises Falvy. “Then the whole canyon experience will change dramatically.”
One change already in effect is a hike in entrance fees of as much as 300 percent, to $20 per car at Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Grand Teton. (The other parks charge fees ranging from zero to $10.) But that’s good for a whole week, and in voting the increase Congress allotted most of the added revenue toward improvements in the parks themselves. Hardly anyone among the visitors touring Yosemite earlier this month minded the price hike. Looking across the valley at a rocky cliff rising half a mile straight up behind the trees, Tom Michiels of Sacramento, Calif., said he didn’t mind paying a fee that amounts to a little more than it would cost to see a movie with his wife. “Where else can you go in the United States to see this?
But in national parks, as in any community, change is always controversial. What the Sierra Club calls a traffic jam looks like a line of customers to the proprietor of a gas station. Many Americans, obviously, believe in their God-given right to look at the marvels of nature through their own windshields. And it turns out that campsites have a preservationist lobby. “I’ve literally had people tell me we can’t take away a campsite because they were conceived on that spot,” says Chip Jenkins, chief of strategic planning at Yosemite.
So officials are moving cautiously. Babbitt is careful to say that limiting car access is not meant to restrict the number of visitors; on the contrary, it’s a way of avoiding that step. “The problem is not people,” he insists. “It’s cars.” The deeper problem is the American imperative to plant saloons and T-shirt shops at the very gates of the sublime. There are roads on both sides of the Grand Canyon, but the crowds on the more isolated North Rim are only a fraction of what they are across the chasm, and there, says Park Superintendent Robert Arnberger, “people still talk in whispers as they approach the rim.” Arnberger hopes–but it may be a long shot-that the new plan will restore the whispers to the South Him as well.
title: “On The Brink” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Jeanne Martin”
While residents in the capital waited for a constantly-postponed presidential address to the nation, the grapevine whispered of yet another demonstration, planned for exactly 24 hours after thousands of protesters stormed Parliament to demand Trajkovski’s resignation. “He forgot something important,” said one man at Monday night’s protest as several people jumped up and down on the President’s ruined car,” [The European Union ] does not run this country, we do."
When Trajkovski did eventually make his appearance, he appealed for calm and help from ordinary Macedonians as well as the government and security forces to restore calm. “We cannot afford discord,” he said. “I am offering peace and asking for your support.”
That, however, may be easier said than done. Monday’s protest-turned-riot erupted after NATO troops help evacuate ethnic Albanian rebels from the strategic village of Aracinovo, on Skopje’s outskirts. As part of a cease-fire brokered by Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Macedonian police and army personnel were forced to stand by as American and French troops convoyed heavily-armed rebels past their checkpoints to the screams and jeers of Macedonians and Serbs still living in the area.
“Albanians to the gas chambers! Give us weapons!” chanted the crowd in a terrifying exhibition of how the rebels’ self-proclaimed fight for ethnic Albanian equality has polarized the two communities.
Albanians in the capital spent Tuesday reviewing the damage done during the previous night’s rampage. “I’m terrified, but I am going to try and stay. This has been my family’s home for over 300 years,” said Sahip Abdurrahman, examining the bullets holes in his accessories store in Skopje’s Bit Bazaar. An ethnic Turk, Abdurrahman added: “They are doing this solely because we are Muslims, and they want us to leave.”
Foreign governments are now stepping up their efforts to prevent the violence from spreading still further in a country that, ironically, was the only republic to leave the former Yugoslav Federation without a war. A European Union statement issued Tuesday “strongly condemned” Monday’s riot and called on Macedonians “to stand back now from the brink and to seize the remaining chance of peace, based on dialogue.”
“Conflict brings no winners, only suffering and sorrow,” said the EU statement.
That’s probably not news to Macedonia’s ethnically-mixed population, whose 10-year-old struggle to find an equitable accommodation for their Slav majority and Albanian minority led to the eruption of hostilities in February.
At the vanguard of this violence was the shadowy National Liberation Army (NLA), an Albanian group initially dismissed as a large gang of thugs. But the rebels have since gained significant popularity amongst the country’s Albanian minority for their cause and out of sympathy for an estimated 15,000 civilians still trapped in the conflict zones after seven weeks of shelling by Macedonian forces.
While the NLA contends they are fighting for better rights, Macedonians perceive them as terrorists bent on carving up the country. And as casualties have mounted on both sides, so has the anger and mistrust.
“We don’t want a war, but if the politicians can do nothing, then we will feed them war until they vomit,” promised Shevket Ademi, an ethnic Albanian, as he watched houses ignite under a tank barrage near the northwestern city of Tetovo on Monday afternoon. “And it seems pretty plain to me, … they want war.”
Neither side appeared in the mood to compromise on Tuesday as fighting continued in the north. Macedonian civilians set up roadblocks around the route used by the NLA and its NATO escort as to prevent any further passage. Several shops and cars were badly damaged during Monday night’s chaos, and the army stepped up its shelling of three rebel-held villages while Trajkovski considered his next move.
“This is, quite frankly, a lose-lose situation for the president and there is no easy way out,” says one Skopje-based Western diplomat. For Trajkovski, the disheartening choice is either abandoning the deal brokered by Solana or facing the growing fury of his own people. Either way, the stage is set for further violence. “No one could ever possibly want to have to face such a choice, because any decision will anger one group or the other,” notes the diplomat.
Throughout the conflict the West has urged restraint against the rebels and dialogue with mainstream Albanian politicians towards finding a solution. But the policy has produced little in terms of political progress and the violence has spread across the entire north of the country.
“Our sons and husbands are dying, our villages burning, and all the politicians do is talk about what we have to give to the Albanians. Well, now they have to make a choice, wipe out the terrorists or we will do it ourselves,” said one woman to the encouraging shouts of her fellow protesters.
Over 100,000 people have already been displaced or fled the growing violence. And with the kind of thinking expressed by civilians on both sides of the ethnic divide, that number seems set to grow still further in the weeks ahead.
