Environmental News, Opinion, and Art                                                 January 3, 2007

National Parks Face New Exploitation

By Mike Bader

Lack of transparency marks “commercial bioprospecting"

Our National Parks hold a unique and lofty place in the spirit and psyche of the American people, conjuring awe-inspiring images of Yosemite, Old Faithful, giant sequoias and redwoods, pounding ocean surf, the ice-clad heights of Mt. Rainier and the scenic depths of the Grand Canyon.

Since the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, the national park ideal has been so popular with the American public that the Park System has grown to more than 400 parks and monuments covering 84 million acres, much of it remote and pristine wilderness. It has served as a model for numerous other countries as well as the state park systems across the U.S.

Yet the very integrity of this world-renowned resource is being undermined by an unlikely foe: The National Park Service. Through a program called "commercial bioprospecting," the door has been cracked open to the commercial exploitation of a wide variety of National Park resources.

At the heart of the National Parks is their mandate for preservation. The National Park Service Act states the parks' "purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."  These protected landscapes have been a key factor in the survival of several rare and endangered species, including the Yellowstone grizzly bear. They represent a national birthright and a national commons we preserve together for the future.

It is in this setting that the National Park Service has embarked on what a federal judge has termed "a dramatic shift in management policy," by allowing private companies to remove living natural resources from the Parks for commercial profit.

The controversy over bioprospecting has its roots in the thermal features and geyser basins of Yellowstone. Biotechnology companies have been removing thermophiles, tiny organisms evolved to withstand the heat and other unique features found in the pristine thermal pools. One company developed a means for advanced DNA testing that has led to millions of dollars in profits. Seeking a cut in any future biological "goldmines," in the mid-1990s Park Service officials in Yellowstone negotiated a first of its kind Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the San Diego-based Diversa Corporation. The Yellowstone-Diversa CRADA allowed the removal of microbes, soils, fungi, trees, plants, rocks, and other natural features.

The CRADA was challenged in court by several organizations, including Alliance for Wild Rockies, the Edmonds Institute, and others.  Federal Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed several of their claims, but upheld the claim that the Park Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act since NPS did not analyze the potential environmental and social impacts of what they were proposing. The judge suspended the CRADA pending completion of an environmental analysis of commercial bioprospecting.

The Judge suggested that commercial bioprospecting would have impacts on the human social environment, rejecting the NPS assertion that commercial research is no different from other research. The Judge wrote, " This ignores the reality that the commercial nature of an activity can and does affect its impact on the subject environment and particularly on people's aesthetic and recreational interests in the Park. Although parkgoers may be willing to forgive the trespass of their national parkland when the goals of that trespass are scientific and educational, commercial exploitation of that same parkland may reasonably be perceived as injurious. This commonsense notion has not even been challenged in other contexts."

Seven years after the Court Order, NPS has expanded the scope of commercial bioprospecting by applying it service-wide on all park system lands. In a Draft Environmental Impact Statement recently released for public comment, NPS claims commercial bioprospecting is consistent with the Park Service mission to promote scientific research for the parks, to better understand park ecosystems and improve resource management and visitor services.

Despite the Court's instructions to analyze impacts, NPS apparently considered commercial bioprospecting so benign in its environmental and social effects that NPS chose not to evaluate potential environmental impacts at all in the Draft EIS. This biased analysis ignores its own memorandums stating commercial bioprospecting would attract industries beyond microbiology and biotech. The DEIS also suggests a broader impact stating "Studies of park resources, including rare bacteria and unique plants and animals, expand beneficial scientific knowledge, and research results occasionally generate substantial commercial profits."

NPS believes it has found a way around the strong prohibitions on commercialization of park resources by stating that biological samples removed from the Parks and then "altered" or "improved" can be commercially developed for private commercial gain, characterizing the altered samples as "research results." NPS rationalizes this subterfuge by saying it will negotiate itself a cut of the action in the form of a percentage, or royalty payment on commercially valuable discoveries. It also makes the claim that parks like Yellowstone have legal authority to enter into CRADAs with corporations since they are "laboratories" under the definitions of the Federal Technology Transfer Act (FTTA). However, FTTA history clearly indicates that it was meant to apply to named federal laboratories, like Los Alamos, not wilderness parks like Yellowstone.

The lack of transparency in what NPS is proposing is troubling. The "benefit sharing" deals they're talking about would allow commercial partners to designate any aspect of each deal as confidential business information, or "trade secret." That means the details could be withheld from the public under Freedom of Information Act exemptions.

The vast majority of Americans take comfort from the fact the parks are a last bastion of non-commercialism, left unimpaired for future generations. Americans now have cause for deep concern that, the parks, as Beth Burrows, director of the Edmonds Institute has noted, "are being turned into corporate booty."

Comments on the DEIS are being accepted through January 29, 2007 at: NPS Benefits-Sharing EIS, P.O. Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190. For more information visit: www.parksnotforsale.org

Mike Bader, a former seasonal ranger at Yellowstone, currently works as a natural resource consultant in Missoula, Montana. He has consulted for the Edmonds Institute, among others.
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