– Doug McConnell

Photo: Big Basin Scenery by Dylan Duverge

California’s first state park was Big Basin established in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1902. In the 106 years since, California has assembled an extraordinary collection of parks, recreational areas, historic sites and open spaces of all kinds. We feature many of California’s State Parks right here (for example, Bodie and the Wild West, Glen Ellen’s Heart and Wine, Mt. Tamalpais’ Land and Legends, Hearst Castle and Ranch) and we’ll add many more in the weeks to come.

When I was growing up in California in the decades right after World War II, Californians seemed to me to be united on a couple of major issues almost regardless of their political affiliations. Time-after-time Republicans and Democrats alike voted to add new parks to California’s growing system and take good care of the ones we had. My parents, for instance, were very conservative Republicans, but they were proud of our world-class public park system and our best-in-the-nation public schools.

Now, unfortunately, California finds its public schools far from the top of the national heap and its parks in deep financial trouble. Some parks face imminent closure while most others cling to survival and remain woefully underfunded.

As California’s population continues to push towards 50 million (there were about eight million Californians when I was born) our parks will become more precious than ever. As California seeks to promote tourism in state and around the world, our parks will become increasingly important destinations and economic assets. Our parks are significant to us in many ways, but they are easily forgotten and taken for granted when budgets get crunched. We need to protect and defend them for ourselves and for future generations, or they will continue to whither at the precise moment when we need them to flourish.

I’m a big fan of the California State Parks Foundation. Elizabeth Goldstein and her strong team work very hard to advocate for the parks. I urge you to visit their website and to do what you can to support their efforts and to secure and enhance California’s state park legacy for the next 106 years.

Finally, one of our terrific OpenRoad.TV forum moderators, Rick Deutsch, has written about all of this on his own website. Take a look.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Doug McConnell's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.