Jim Tumbls.

Acadia National Park, Maine. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit this national treasure several weeks ago while on vacation. While visiting, I observed the scene above; one I had thought would have been wiped from the operating budget of the National Park Service in recent years. I was pleasantly surprised to see these two rangers educating a group of children on the generalities of the park itself and the specifics of local wildlife.

Fiscal Year 2011 requested budget for the National Park Service was $3.14 billion. That’s actually a bit higher than I was expecting, but in researching this post I learned that the National Park Service was MUCH bigger than I had originally thought. For instance, the NPS doesn’t only operate the “natural” parks, of which there are 58 distinct locations. They also operate monuments and memorials (over 100 together), historic and military parks (almost 150 of these), and 20 other designations for a total of 392 areas under the management of the NPS. So $3 billion probably doesn’t go as far with all of those sites.

Contrast this with the FY2011 Department of Defense budget request of $708 billion, which includes $159 billion to support “overseas contingency operations,” or “Iraq and Afghanistan” as it’s more commonly described. Iraq and Afghanistan incurred direct costs of $900 billion by themselves through 2008. Indirect costs (care for the scores of thousands of wounded soldiers) could eventually exceed the direct costs.

The 2011 budget for the National Park Service is less than one half of one percent of the 2011 budget for the Department of Defense. We spend immensely more money blowing people up than we do educating children about geological formations. We spend more money bringing democracy to people who don’t particularly want it (and therefore won’t really fight for it themselves), than we do preserving and sharing our natural history and geographical treasures with future generations.

I think we need to refocus our priorities…