[Market Economy Guide] From Nature to Parks

U.S.

Yellowstone

The Great

Fire dragged on because of environmentalists...

Nature grows in value only when people cultivate and manage it well

Yellowstone National Park, located in the northwestern United States, is the world’s first and largest national park. Its area is about 9,300 million km², roughly 10% of South Korea’s land area, which is enormous. It takes three or four days just to skim through it, and more than a week to see it properly. Naturally, it is out of the question to explore it on foot; you have to travel by car.

The First National Park, Yellowstone

Translated literally, Yellowstone means “yellow stone.” The name comes from the stones and rocks in the park having turned yellow because of water containing sulfur. The reason the water contains so much sulfur is that Yellowstone is a volcanic region. In fact, Yellowstone itself is a park built on top of a massive caldera measuring 50 to 70 km in diameter. It is said that, unlikely as it may be, if the Yellowstone crater were to erupt, it would become a global disaster.

Given its vast size and significance in so many respects, Americans take tremendous pride in Yellowstone. Promotional booklets for the park invariably include the phrase “The world first national park.” This commemorates the fact that Yellowstone was designated in 1871 as the world’s first national park.

Initial response to the 1988 Great Fire was delayed, causing firefighting efforts to fail

Even Yellowstone, which carries the title of the world’s first and largest national park, faced an unexpected ordeal. The Yellowstone Great Fire of 1988 is the representative example. A forest fire that began with spring drought kept burning and scorched the park for more than half a year. At its worst, the flames reportedly spread by more than 10 km a day.

It was not as though the U.S. government did nothing at the time. To extinguish the fire, it deployed more than 20,000 firefighting personnel and spent over $100 million. Nevertheless, the initial response came far too late, and firefighting failed; as a result, the blaze dragged on for half a year. The fire died out naturally only around the time of the first snowfall at the end of that year. By then, however, nearly 40% of the entire park had already been damaged by the flames.

Environmentalists always treat nature as sacred and worthy of reverence. But to fragile human beings, nature is also something fearful and terrifying. Think of the force of water and fire, wind and earthquakes. Before the power of untamed nature, human beings can only be weak.

What human life requires, therefore, is not nature in its raw state. What people need is not nature left as it is, but nature carefully selected and arranged so that only what is beneficial to humans remains.

Parks, which we can easily see around us, are a representative example of nature transformed to be human-friendly. A park is not a space left in its natural state, but a space carefully organized by human hands. A park is created when people invest time and money into land and water, mountains and lakes, thereby increasing their value.

Some people feel uneasy when one suggests transforming nature into parks. Such people believe that nature is best when untouched by human hands. But enhancing the value of nature is no different from producing goods. Consider iron ore just extracted from a mine. Iron ore is simply rock containing a small amount of iron. By itself, it has little value. But if iron is separated from the ore and made into pig iron and steel, its value increases. If that steel is then used to make cars, the original value of the iron ore increases dramatically. No one would oppose adding value to iron ore and turning it into automobiles.

The same is true of developing nature and turning it into parks. If Seoraksan is left as it is, it is merely a fine mountain. But if Seoraksan is designated and developed as a national park, it becomes a natural resource beneficial to people. The Dadohae of the South Sea is, as its name suggests, a sea with many islands. Left alone, it is merely thousands of islands floating in the vast sea. But if it is designated as Dadohaehaesang National Park and invested in, the islands of Dadohae may one day come to be called the Venice of Northeast Asia. Nature depends on what humans make of it. How we shape our national land depends entirely on our own choices.

Leave it alone if it starts naturally?

The forest fire that broke out in Yellowstone some 20 years ago ended as an irreversible environmental disaster because of the concerns of certain environmentalists who argued that humans must not interfere in nature’s affairs. At the time, U.S. wildfire response policy was to first determine whether a fire in a park had been caused by humans or had started naturally, and if it was natural, not to intervene.

The investigation concluded that the 1988 fire had started naturally because of prolonged drought and lightning. So the U.S. government refrained from fighting the fire in its early stages. This was why the initial response to the Yellowstone fire failed. But because of that complacent policy, Yellowstone suffered enormous damage, and in response, U.S. park management policy was changed so that if a naturally caused fire exceeds a certain scale, people directly take part in extinguishing it. Only after paying a heavy price did people realize that, in order to preserve and enhance the value of natural resources, nature must never simply be left alone in its natural state, but must be developed into a condition favorable to human beings.

To human beings, nature in its raw state is always dangerous and frightening. Nature always requires careful human management. This must also be the starting point for how we think about developing our national land.

■ Please remember

U.S. wildfire response policy was to first determine whether a fire in a park had been caused by humans or had started naturally, and if it was natural, not to intervene. The investigation concluded that the 1988 Yellowstone fire had started naturally because of lightning. The U.S. government refrained from fighting the fire in its early stages.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 자연에서 공원으로

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2020-01-06

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=11&idx=22251