As you approach the Grand Canyon, driving north from Phoenix and Flagstaff, you pass through the town of Tusayan, just five miles south of the national park boundary. Tusayan's 558 residents live in 313 households, clustered in an area of a quarter square mile. Its voters first voted to incorporate as a town in 2010.
The vote to incorporate followed strong lobbying from developers, businessmen who hoped to construct their proposed development with minimal governmental interference. The newly elected town council -- whose members now face a recall election next month -- obediently approved the requested development.
What kind of development did the council of this small town approve? How about 3 million square feet of hotels, spas and retail outlets -- in a town with a population of 558? According to a story in today's New York Times, the council's approval of the development faces a referendum vote in May, a referendum that the developers are fighting in court to prevent.
The town itself has only two wells, a water source that barely provides for the existing population. The impact of such a massive development on the national park itself is even more worrisome.
... it pushes up against the limits of what we can provide,” said David Uberuaga, the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. “Everything is getting maxed out. They’re just doing it for the almighty dollar. It’s a gold mine they’re trying to exploit.”
It's schemes like this that turn me against the wave of support for "libertarianism," at least libertarianism in its purist form and taken to its logical conclusion.
Ron Paul, as Wikipedia notes, is "a free-market environmentalist, he asserts private property rights in relation to environmental protection and pollution prevention." According to the SourceWatch wikipedia:
Paul's stand on the environment is well-known. He is for the dissolution of the EPA, FDA, Department of the Interior and other government agencies whose overt mission is to protect citizens and the environment. Paul has also called for the privatizing of the National Park system .... Republicans for Environmental Protection gave him a score of 17 out of 100.
Libertarians, at least in their purist form, believe that property rights are absolute, and that every landowner has the absolute right to use his land as he pleases. They ignore what economists call externalities -- the fact that using your land as you please may impose costs on neighboring landowners and on the public in general.
Just as a steel mill built in downtown Beverly Hills would cause an enormous decrease in property values for miles around, so a 3 million square foot mega-mall on the border of Grand Canyon National Park may well destroy or damage the values for which the park was created, values that visitors travel from all over the world to experience.
This doesn't mean that nothing should ever be built within five miles of a national park. It does mean that values are at stake in addition to the developer's right to develop the property that he has acquired for development. Those values include the integrity of the neighboring national park, as well as the effects on residents of the small town itself in which the project is to be constructed.
Various land use regulatory agencies -- at the city or town, county, state and federal level -- protect these interests. The process for gaining regulatory approvals may seem cumbersome, and at times could well be improved. But libertarianism would strike down all regulatory protection for the public, and leave national parks and other environmental treasures to the mercy of developers and the free market.
We're not that kind of country. Nor should we be.
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