National parks in the USA - Иностранные языки и языкознание курсовая работа

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National parks in the USA

Geographical position of The United States of America. Distribution of the National parks. History of the National Parks in the country. Major and Minor parks. Tourist trades and campings. The Grand Canyon is awe inspiring and the Grand Canyon KOA.


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No human being can stand apart from the environment because each of us is a part of a natural world. We all depend upon our environment and our environment is depending upon us. Our survival and survival of the future generations depend upon a healthy world.
One of the major problems is the destruction of the rainforests. Traditionally there are three major causes of it: farming, ranching, and logging.
Farmers in rainforest countries are often poor and can't afford to buy land. Instead, these farmers clear rainforest land to grow their crops. Because tropical rainforest soil is so poor in nutrients, farmers cannot reuse the same land year after year. In following years, farmers just clear more land, destroying the forest piece by piece.
The continued increase in human population is having negative effect on our planet's biodiversity. The equation is pretty simple - more people need more space to build houses and industries and this means reduced habitats for many plant and animal species.
Animals and plants need more protected areas where they can live in peace without human interference. National Parks all over the world help to protect our ecosystem.
Topicality of the theme lies in that the United States of America is a country of beautiful views and natural sights. This country is famous for it National Parks. A National Parks is a reserve of natural or semi-natural land, declared or owned by a government, set aside for human recreation and enjoyment, animal and environmental protection, and restricted from most development. While ideas for national parks has been suggested previously, the United States of America established the first National Park in the world. That is why a word «national park» is closely connected with the United States of America. Nowadays National Park is a Part of ecological politics. Only in these parks, you can find untouched nature in their real view. All existing National Parks are a good idea to save not only nature and animals, but the whole our planet. Today, we have a lot of different and difficult problems, and the most serious is the ecological problem. The creation of National Parks all over the world is the first solution of this big problem.
During the nineteenth-twentieth centuries National Parks had been created in the United States of America, and now there are fifty eight National Parks in the country. All American Parks are the best examples of how to save our nature. Americans were one of the first people who had tried to save the planet, and creation of National Parks are theirs great achievement. Besides, National parks are a prominent tourists' attraction which fulfills important learning, recreational and economic functions.
1. Geographical position of the USA
The United States of America occupies the central part of the North American continent. It borders on Canada in the north and Mexico in the south. It is washed by the Atlantic Ocean in the east, by the Pacific Ocean in the west and by the Gulf of Mexico in the south.
The present territory of the United States of America consists of three separate parts. The USA proper and Alaska are situated in North America. The Hawaii are situated in the central part of the Pacific Ocean.
The area of the country is about nine million four hundred thousand square km. Its population is about two hundred and fifty six million people.
No general statement can be made about the landscape of the United States of America. It is a country of mountains and prairies, valleys and deserts. About one half of the territory in the west is occupied by the Cordilleras. In the east there are the Appalachian Mountains. Between these great mountain chains central and large valleys lie.
The Rocky Mountains extend from Alaska through Canada and the United States of America to Mexico. Together with the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California they have snow-capped peaks and clear mountain lakes.
The Great Lakes are situated in the north-east of the country. They are Lake Ontario, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Superior, Lake Michigan. The largest rivers of the United States of America are the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Yukon. American rivers have very expressive names: the Snake River, the Milk River, the Green River, the Sweetwater River, the White River.
The United States of America has rich deposits of coal, oil, iron, zinc, copper, silver, phosphate rock, natural gas, uranium and nonferrous metals. The country has one fourth of the world's coal deposits.
The United States is a country in the Western Hemisphere. It consists of forty-eight contiguous states in North America, Alaska, a peninsula which forms the northwestern most part of North America, and Hawaii, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. There are several United States territories in the Pacific and Caribbean. The term «United States», when used in the geographical sense, means the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands of the United States. The country shares land borders with Canada and Mexico and maritime (water) borders with Russia, Cuba, and The Bahamas in addition to Canada and Mexico. [5]
A satellite composite image of the contiguous United States. Deciduous vegetation and grasslands prevail in the east, transitioning to prairies, boreal forests, and the Rockies in the west, and deserts in the southwest. In the northeast, the coasts of the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard host much of the country's population.
The United States shares land borders with Canada (to the north) and Mexico (to the south), and a territorial water border with Russia in the northwest. The contiguous forty-eight states are otherwise bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast. Alaska borders the Pacific Ocean to the south, the Bering Strait to the west, and the Arctic Ocean to the north, while Hawaii lies far to the southwest of the mainland in the Pacific Ocean.
Forty-eight of the states are in the single region between Canada and Mexico; this group is referred to, with varying precision and formality, as the continental or contiguous United States, and as the Lower forty eight. Alaska, which is not included in the term contiguous United States, is at the northwestern end of North America, separated from the Lower forty eight by Canada. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The capital city, Washington, District of Columbia, is a federal district located on land donated by the state of Maryland. (Virginia had also donated land, but it was returned in 1847.) The United States also has overseas territories with varying levels of independence and organization.
The continental United States contains two harbor indented coasts of several thousand miles from which well watered coastal plains rise to two mountain ranges between which is an arable plain overlaid by thousands of miles of interconnected and navigable rivers. The Texas continental crossroads, the southerly deserts, and the basin and range country of Utah and Nevada complete the picture. The combination of rivers navigable thousands of miles inland, running throughout virtually all of the largest contiguous area of farm land in the world, has helped to make the United States the world's breadbasket and wealthiest nation by far. Considering both the natural features and the political unity of the states of the region of the Great Plains, contrasted with the river systems and political disunity of Europe as an example, nothing quite like it exists anywhere else in the world. New Orleans-purchased along with the French territory of Louisiana in 1803-is the key to the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Red river system of North America. In turn, Texas, with its own, unnavigable rivers, but productive land, acts as a buffer to protect New Orleans from the south and west.
Distribution of the National parks. [3]
The probability of a park being created in a state in a given year should depend on the distribution of its costs and benefits. Some states may have a greater endowment of potential parkland - thereby making park creation there of greater benefit or lower cost. States that were settled earliest might be expected to have accumulated more cultural capital and therefore host more parks. Likewise, natural beauty may attract early settlement. The year of entry into the union is also controlled for, possibly capturing development pressures or historical resources. Whether the state joined the Confederacy during the Civil War may also reflect an endowment of war memorials and battlefield sites. States with larger land areas may have a greater supply of parks to declare. The opportunity cost of park designation is not evenly distributed across states. A measure of the amount of vacant (unreserved or «unappropriated») land in a state may capture the local costs of park creation. Population is also controlled for, although it might be related to both benefits (more people to enjoy the park) and costs (greater opportunity costs from development pressures). The percentage of the state population that is urban should influence park creation. More urban states, all else equal, may not have much local resistance to rural park creation. Moreover, park benefits rise in more urbanized areas. The stat e's geographic region may also capture its potential park endowment or development pressures. Limited political variables are al so included in the model. First, whether or not the state has congressional representation may factor in park creation. For states that had, at the time, only territory status, the local costs and benefits may be overlooked for more national interests. Membership on relevant congressional committees, in the modern congressional era (since 1947), may also directly influence where parks are created. A state's representation on certain committees may make park creation more or less likely, depending on local and national interests in park creation. Committee representation should make parks that serve local interests more likely, while parks in the national interest (with high local opportunity cost) will be less likely. Thus, committee representation may make parks more likely generally, although representatives may use committees to block locally costly park creation. [13]
2 . History of the National Parks in the country
In 1835, the English poet William Wordsworth described the Lake District as a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.
The painter George Catlin, in his travels through the American West, wrote during the 1830s that the Native Americans in the United States might be preserved (by some great protecting policy of government)… in a magnificent park…A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!
The first effort by any government to set aside such protected lands was in the United States, on April twenty, 1832, when President Andrew Jackson signed legislation that the twenty second United States Congress had enacted to set aside four sections of land around what is now Hot Springs, Arkansas to protect the natural, thermal springs and adjoining mountainsides for the future disposal of the US government. It was known as the Hot Springs Reservation. However no legal authority was established and federal control of the area was not clearly established until 1877.
The next effort by any government to set aside such protected lands was, again, in the United States, when President Abraham Lincoln signed an Act of Congress on June 30, 1864, ceding the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias (later becoming the Yosemite National Park) to the state of California:
…. the said State shall accept this grant upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation; shall be inalienable for all time;…. - thirty eight's United States Congress, Session 1, 1864.
In 1872, Yellowstone National Park was established as the world's first truly national park. When news of the natural wonders of the Yellowstone were first promulgated, the land was part of a federally governed territory. Unlike Yosemite, there was no state government that could assume stewardship of the land, so the federal government took on direct responsibility for the park, the official first national park of the United States. It took the combined effort and interest of conservationists, politicians and especially businesses-namely, the Northern Pacific Railroad, whose route through Montana would greatly benefit by the creation of this new tourist attraction-to ensure the passage of that landmark enabling legislation by the United States Congress to create Yellowstone National Park. Theodore Roosevelt, already an active campaigner and so influential as good stump speakers were highly necessary in the pre-telecommunications era, was highly influential in convincing fellow Republicans and big business to back the bill.
The United States in 1872. When Yellowstone was established, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho were territories, not states. For this reason, the federal government had to assume responsibility for the land, hence the creation of the national park.
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
Even with the creation of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and nearly thirty seven other national parks and monuments, another forty four years passed before an agency was created in the United States to administer these units in a comprehensive way - the U.S. National Park Service. Businessman Stephen Mather and his journalist partner Robert Sterling Yard pushed hardest for the creation of the NPS, writing then-Secretary of the Interior Franklin Knight Lane about such a need and spearheading a large publicity campaign for their movement. Lane invited Mather to come to Washington, DC to work with him to draft and see passage of the National Park Service Organic Act, which the 64th United States Congress enacted and which President Woodrow Wilson signed into law on August twenty five, 1916. Of the three hundred ninety seven sites managed by the National Park Service of the United States, only fifty eight carry the designation of National Park. [19]
Following the idea established in Yellowstone there soon followed parks in other nations. In Australia, the Royal National Park was established just south of Sydney in 1879. Rocky Mountain National Park became Canada's first national park in 1885. New Zealand established Tongariro National Park in 1887. In Europe the first national parks were a set of nine parks in Sweden in 1909; Europe has some three hundred and fifty nine national parks as of 2010. Africa's first national park was established in 1925 when Albert I of Belgium designated an area of what is now Democratic Republic of Congo centred around the Virunga Mountains as the Albert National Park (since renamed Virunga National Park). In 1973, Mount Kilimanjaro was classified as a National Park and was opened to public access in 1977. In 1926, the government of South Africa designated Kruger National Park as the nation's first national park. After World War II, national parks were founded all over the world. The Vanoise National Park in the Alps was the first French national park, created in 1963 after public mobilization against a touristic project.
One of the first people generally credited with conceptualizing a «national park» was George Catlin (1796-1872), a self-taught artist who traveled extensively among the native peoples of North America, while sketching and painting portraits, landscapes, and scenes from daily Indian life. On a trip to the Dakotas in 1832, he worried about the impact of America's westward expansion on Indian civilization, wildlife, and wilderness. They might be preserved, he wrote, «by some great protecting policy of government… in a magnificent park…. A nation's park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty!»
In the years that followed, additional national parks and monuments (mostly in the western states) were administered by the National Park System, while other monuments and natural and historical areas were administered as separate units by the War Department and the Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture. No single agency provided unified management of the varied federal parklands. An Executive Order in 1933 transferred sixty three national monuments and military sites from the Forest Service and the War Department to the National Park Service. This action was a major step in the development of today's truly national system of parks-a system that includes areas of historical, cultural, scientific, and scenic importance.
In 1970, Congress declared in the General Authorities Act that all units of the system have equal legal standing in a national system. Areas of the National Park System, the act states,
«though distinct in character, are united through their inter-related purposes and resources into one national park system as cumulative expressions of a single national heritage; that, individually and collectively, these areas derive increased national dignity and recognition of their superb environmental quality through their inclusion jointly with each other in one national park system preserved and managed for the benefit and inspiration of all people of the United States…»
Additions to the National Park System are now generally made through acts of Congress, and national parks can be created only through such acts. But the President has authority, under the Antiquities Act of 1906, to proclaim national monuments on lands already under federal jurisdiction. The Secretary of the Interior is usually asked by Congress for recommendations on proposed additions to the System. The Secretary is counseled by the National Park System Advisory Board, composed of private citizens, which advises on possible additions to the System and policies for its management. [2]
Though we use the term «national park» in a general sense when referring to the individual units within the National Park System, the classification system used by NPS actually encompasses nineteen separate designations. Some are descriptive listings, such as lakeshores, seashores, and battlefields, but others also include titles that can't be neatly categorized because of the diversity of resources within them. The National Park System today comprises three hundred seventy six areas covering more than eight three million acres in forty nine States, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Saipan, and the Virgin Islands. These areas are of such national significance as to justify special recognition and protection in accordance with various acts of Congress.
3 . The future of the National Parks in the country
There are seven main areas of environmental problems that face the U.S. National Park System: overuse, insufficient funds for park operation, threats to wildlife, the concession systems, energy and mineral development, atmospheric pollution, and activities on adjacent lands. The popularity of National Parks especially the crown jewel parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, have overwhelmed some national parks with visitors. In fact, the amount of visitors to national parks has steadily increased by ten percent each year. This massive increase in pedestrian and vehicle traffic has caused trails to become eroded from overuse, vegetation surrounding trails around popular attraction to be trampled by visitors, and litter, noise, water pollution, and smog have all impeded the enjoyability of national parks. This increase in visitors and the need for the few rangers employed by the park to meet the needs of more and more visitors have created a safety issue. Rangers can't monitor the entire park for criminal activity, and this impacts the safety of national parks.
Like other environmental organizations and agencies, insufficient funding is a major concern. The increase in visitors to national parks has increased the amount of wear an tear that park facilities sustain each year, and this increases the amount of repair requests and new structures that need to built annually. However, with a limited fund, these repairs and improvements often have to take a back seat to more pressing issues. While improvements to roads, trails, and facilities are important to the enjoyment of the park, the amount of park rangers available helps to protect the safety of park visitors. With shortages in funding the number of rangers at these parks is declining which impairs public safety. [27]
Wildlife at national parks is also threatened by the increasing popularity of these areas. More visitors means that there are more people approaching wild animals to take pictures and watch their «natural behaviors.» While these observations don't necessarily harm the animals if done discretely from a distance, there are a few irresponsible individuals who take risks to get close to animals. They harass the animals and provoke them in order to get an action shot or to prove their «manhood.» This practice not only puts the human at risk for injury or death, but it could also stress the animal and cause it to be injured. As funding is lost, private landowners may buy portions of land that once belonged to the park and set up cattle grazing areas, or put the land to some other use. The sale of national land depletes vital habitat for a wide variety of animals and increases the chances that diseases will be spread from domesticated animals to wildlife, or from wildlife to domesticated animals.
The concession system is another issue that is plaguing the national park system. In this case, private companies bid to sell their products in the park to visitors. While they are able to monopolize a market, and they are allowed to operate on national park property, they only return twenty five percent of the money earned to the government. This percentage doesn't make up for the amount of pollution they create from the tourists littering, or from the environmental impacts of their concession stand and sales.
One big concern is the potential exercising of mining claims on national parks. For example in the Grand Basin National Park in Nevada there are two hundred forty seven mining claims that still exist. If any of these claims were to be developed, it could dramatically impact the health of the ecosystems within the park, and it could threaten the health and sustainability of the park.
Atmospheric pollution is yet another issue that national parks face. Acid rain caused by industrial and automobile exhaust impacts the health of water systems within national parks, and harms delicate organisms like amphibians and fish. Smog is also a problem that impacts the health and enjoyability of national parks. With more people visiting parks, vehicle traffic has increased and so has auto emissions near and in parks. This creates smog which can obscure the visitors' views and impede their ability to breathe comfortably within the park.
National parks not only have to worry about internal factors that impact the parks health and operation, but they also have to worry about activities that are on adjacent lands. Mining, logging, and drilling for oil are all activities that produce pollution that can harm the delicate ecosystems within a national park. Air pollution from industrial and automobile exhaust, water pollution from slucebox mining, and deforestation can cause soil erosion that can contaminate the national park's water supply. Agricultural development around national parks can also impact the health and stability of a national park. Domesticated animals can catch and spread diseases from and to wild animals. Also wildlife that cross out of the park to a private piece of property risk the threat of being killed by the rancher or land owner, or even by being hit and killed by traffic. [28]
Yellowstone National Park is perhaps one of the most negatively impacted national parks by these issues. It is one of the most popular national parks and it receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. They face trail erosion, trampled vegetation, and animal harassment. Also they are near prime petroleum fields that are currently being drilled and pumped. Air pollution, soil pollution and water pollution are all real threats that this park has to face, as well as potential negative effects of natural pollutants that could cause injuries to human visitors. Yellowstone is also in the heart of cattle country, and they face an on-going border battle with beef barons. The issue over the right to shoot and kill park animals like bison, bears, and wolves if they cross out of the park and onto private property. The spread of tuberculosis is also a real threat wit bison and cattle interactions.
The term «national park» conjures up thoughts of big, natural landscapes like Grand Canyon and Yosemite. But two-thirds of the National Park Service's three hundred ninety two areas were created to protect historic or cultural resources, from colonial Boston to New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. And many of those parks lack the money and staff to use those resources to their fullest.
«We have an incredible collection of museum artifacts, and forty five percent of the Park Service collections have not even been catalogued,» says James Nations of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. «We've got stuff, and we don't even know what we've got, and we don't have places to store it. We're missing opportunities to tell the story of America through our national parks.»
National parks protect the historic buildings in which America's history was made, places like Independence Hall, Ellis Island, and the San Antonio Missions. But some of these hallowed edifices are crumbling and in desperate need of repair. They're a big part of a nine and a half billion dollars maintenance backlog that plagues the park system.
No park exists in isolation, and that fact is becoming increasingly clear as the areas surrounding parks are developed for living space, agriculture, mining, forestry, and more. The iconic species protected inside the parks don't recognize boundaries and must often move in and out of the parks to feed, mate, or migrate. If larger ecological wildlife corridors can not be maintained to include the lands outside of parks, many species may not survive within them either.
National parks are inviting places, especially for non-native species that can cause havoc once they move in. Plants and insects often hitchhike to our shores on boats or airplanes while other species, like snakes, are intentionally imported for the exotic pet trade. When turned loose with no competition, invasive species can run amok in an ecosystem and send a park's native residents toward extinction.
More than six thousand five hundred non-native invasive species have been found in U.S. national parks. Seventy percent of them are plants, which encroach on a staggering seven million acres of our national parklands. [29]
A Canadian company hopes to site North America's largest open-pit gold and copper mine right next to Alaska's remote Lake Clark National Park. Uranium prospecting is currently under way on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Sugar producers have long fouled waters with phosphorus pollution and disrupted critical flows to the Everglades.
What happens on a park's borders can dramatically impact the environment inside the park itself. Mining, petroleum prospecting, clear-cut lumbering, and other developments are generally prohibited inside parks-but they still pose serious threats to water quality, clean air, and other vital aspects of the park environment.
If Earth's climate continues to change as scientists predict it will, the national parks will be impacted like the rest of the planet. Glaciers may melt away, as indeed they are at Glacier National Park in Montana. Fire seasons may grow in length and severity, and the landscape may shift under the feet of the parks' wild residents.
«Changes in temperature and precipitation can push species out of their previous ranges towards softer temperatures, either upwards in elevation or northward,» says Nations. «But they don't recognize where the boundary is and in many cases that land is owned by someone else.»
Some parks are already feeling drier these days, as increasing human demand shrinks supplies on which aquatic species depend. In Florida's Biscayne National Park, where freshwater arrives from the highly compromised Everglades ecosystem upstream, a freshwater shortage is becoming an issue even though ninety five percent of the park remains covered with seawater.
Ten parks are touched by the Colorado River and its tributaries, which are being drained of water by the growing cities and farmlands of an increasingly thirsty West. Less reliable precipitation on a warmer, drier Earth would make this growing problem worse.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Southeast wasn't named for its smog, but it is one of many parks seriously affected by the problem. Air quality issues originate outside the parks. At Great Smoky, power plant and industrial emissions are blown by winds to the southern Appalachians and trapped there by the mountains.
Air quality problems choke off views, poison plants, and even foul water. Recent air quality data show a glimmer of hope-visibility and ozone concentrations are stable or improving in most parks. However, in too many cases, stable means simply preserving a subpar status quo. [9]
National parks are the destination
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