Natural Heritage Is Grander Than Cultural Heritage

View from the rim at Bryce Canyon

View of cliffs at Zion Canyon

View from the north rim of Grand Canyon

On our recent vacation, we visited three national parks: Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyon (north rim). The three reflect the wearing away of the Colorado Plateau, a huge geological structure that occupies most of four states. The bottom strata of Bryce and the top strata of Zion are of the same age; the bottom strata of Zion is of the same age as the top strata at the Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon alone is some ten miles across where we visited it. Driving among the National Parks revealed mile after mile of wonderous landscape, in many places almost the equal of the national parks themselves.

I am a Vice President of Americans for UNESCO, and have been very interested in UNESCO's World Heritage Center, and its list of hundreds of cultural and natural sites that have been identified through an exhaustive process of expert review to be so important as to justify recognition as part of the common heritage of mankind, worthy of permanent protection. The Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon National Park) has been designated as a World Heritage site (but Bryce and Zion have not been so designated).

I have been fortunate enough to visit a number of the cultural World Heritage sites, such as the Taj Mahal, the pyramids at Giza, and Manchu Picchu. Don't get me wrong. These are wonderful places, beautiful, full of cultural significance, and worthy of our greatest efforts to assure that they are preserved for future generations.

Still, they seem small and insignificant when compared with the natural grandeur of what has been called the Grand Circle in the American Sourthwest. One might think that the Grand Circle National Parks, millions of years in formation, could not be damaged by mankind. Yet we were told that the structure of the managed forests of the north rim of Grand Canyon are quite different in structure and appearance than the isolated, unmanaged forests on mesas within the Canyon. People are trying to understand how to manage the waters of the Colorado River in such a way as to maintain the ecology within the Canyon.

When the first national parks were established in the United States, they were wilderness sites that were visited by tiny numbers of people. The people who had the foresight to create a system for the protection of the sites were indeed gifted leaders. Now, millions of people per year visit Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyon nationa parks. Not only do Americans visit them, so do people from all over the world. (We heard many languages, some we could not identify on our trip.) Still, those visitors represent only a tiny fraction of the world's population. With the advances of the Global Information Infrastructure, virtual visitors will no doubt soon outnumber in-person visitors.

I suggest that mankind is increasingly capable of destroying these sites, even as mankind is increasingly able to appreciate them. Therefore it is increasingly important that we learn how to fully protect these sites of natural wonder and conserve them for posterity.