National parks are having a moment, and we’ve been part of it, visiting a total of twelve during our travels so far this year. Actually, national parks have been having a pretty long moment, as visitation has climbed back to pre-pandemic levels and reached an all-time record in 2024, with 2025 just slightly behind. National parks are amazing, and we’ve loved each and every one of them, but might increased attendance be masking some deeper issues?

I read a recent assessment in Bloomberg’s “Is it worth it?” section of their daily news blast:

“A peak-season visit to Yellowstone: Only with a strategy. Our guide to 16 US national parks shows how timing, trail choice, and a little extra effort can transform an overcrowded trip.”

While this is intended to be helpful, it sounds a lot like a review of Disney World, which then goes on to lay out strategies for skipping lines, minimizing waits, yet still riding the best rides and seeing the top shows. Is a national park now an experience to somehow win, one where you hit the highlights yet don’t commit one minute more than absolutely necessary? Is it something to check off our bucket list–”Experience Nature–DONE”–and then go back to our screens? Are we as a country satisfied with our collective connection to nature as long as we have our beloved national parks?

I love the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi.” In it she sings, “You take all the trees and put ‘em in a tree museum, charge all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.” Those lyrics scream “NATIONAL PARKS!” to me. As long as we have trees and a little nature in our national park museums, and as long as people will pay to experience them, then perhaps we don’t really have to worry about the rest of our environment. We can make land use decisions that destroy nature on a daily basis, but we can still pat ourselves on the back and point to our amazing national parks.

National parks aren’t just for people–they are for wildlife, too. The Park Service has done some incredible work restoring populations of animals that were once abundant but had been reduced almost to extinction by hunting, habitat destruction, and persecution. Bison, for example, once numbered 30 to 60 million in North America and constituted the hub of life for many Native Americans, but fewer than 1,000 remained in 1889. Yellowstone National Park, and later Wind Cave NP and Grand Teton NP, played critical roles in protecting the remaining animals and rebuilding the herds. Today, over 500,000 bison roam, and we had the opportunity to see a lot of them in Yellowstone and Grand Teton. 

Similar stories can be told about the American alligator, the gray wolf, the California condor, the sea otter, pronghorn, elk, and the bald eagle. National parks provided safe habitats and protection from hunters so that these populations could recover. 

Wildlife viewing is a very popular activity in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain National Parks, the last three parks we visited during our Mountain West trip. Somehow, one person would spot an animal, pull over to get a better view, whip out their tripod mounted with the longest lens you could imagine, connect their iPhone to it, then observe the animal on their phone, all the while recording their viewing. Then other drivers would see the stopped car, pull over, jump out and inevitably ask, “What are you seeing?” Soon there would be a crowd, a multitude of cars hugging the side of the narrow park road, with each newcomer asking the same question. We did it, and hundreds of others did it right along with us. We asked rangers where we were likely to see the most wildlife in their park, and we frequently planned our day around late afternoon/early evening excursions, when animals would be most active. And it worked! We had the opportunity to see bison, elk, moose, bear, and wolves, but sadly no bighorn sheep.

Wildlife viewing was addictive, entertaining, even social. And yet, at the end of our trip, we realized that we see almost as much wildlife at our lake property as we saw in the national parks. We regularly have deer walk our paths, wild turkeys wander through our yard, and beaver swim by our dock. We’ve had bear lumber through our meadow and even attack our bird feeder. We’ve had a fox live for a season under our front porch. Moose, bobcat, rabbits, chipmunks, hawks, heron, so many birds, even bald eagles can be seen right from our windows. No bison, at least not yet. These are animals living with us, in their relatively natural environment, and viewing them is great fun.

National parks are sanctuaries for wildlife, but are they also a “reservation” of sorts, just as white Americans tried to restrict Indigenous peoples to specific boundaries? Rather than sharing space and preserving habitat for animals to thrive, we are actually restricting their territory with environmental fences. We in America make so many bad choices about land use and development, causing much of the country to be almost uninhabitable for wildlife, yet we pride ourselves in restoring animal populations that we actually almost destroyed.

America is all about capitalism, consumption, and development, and we all too often over-develop and over-produce. Nearly every city we’ve seen thus far has an ugly commercial strip, offering too many products and services, many of which we don’t actually need. And near the strip is another group of ugly buildings, mostly empty now because they were the over-development from the last business cycle. What city is not trying to figure out what to do with shopping malls that no one visits any more? As Joni Mitchell sang, we literally paved our paradise and put up parking lots, and now those parking lots are empty cement deserts, trapping heat and sucking life out of our environment. 

National parks really are amazing, we love them, and we encourage everyone to enjoy them. But they aren’t the antidote to our environmental challenges and our bad land use decisions. Setting aside thousands, or even millions, of acres is important, but doing so doesn’t offset the problems we create on billions of other acres. We can, and should, be proud of our national parks, but a good deed can get lost among numerous bad ones. Nature can’t be limited to museums, parks, and reservations, not without dreadful consequences. After 250 years, can’t we do better?