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Intrinsic Values of National Parks
What does it mean for a National Park to be intrinsically good? It means that National Parks are good in it of themselves. National Parks and their conservation efforts generate benefits even if someone does not visit the park directly. These benefits of conservation are the intrinsic value of the parks. Intrinsic value of National Parks can be considered in different ways such as environmental ethics, maintaining biodiversity and wilderness.

Economic Value of National Park Services and Programs
A recent research carried out by Harvard and Colorado State University estimated a total value of National Park services and programs. Their total estimation of economic value to the American public is 92 billion dollars. For National Park services such as land, water, and historic sites, their economic value is worth approximately 62 billion dollars, and other National Park service programs are worth approximately 30 billion dollars.

Environmental Ethics
Marx's human centered ethics states that using science and technology to produce food, clothing, shelter, and energy is not a problem as long as it improves the human condition. Homo-centric ethics, like Marx's, is based on Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill's utilitarian ethics: the greatest good for the greatest number of people. When applied to National Parks, their preservation can be seen as moral because they provide the social good of nature. However, it can be argued on the same ground that National Parks, at least in part, do not need to be conserved if another use for the land yields a greater good such as economic gain. Thus, anthropocentric ethics do not always explain the continued moral good of protecting National Parks.

On the other hand, eco-centric ethics such as deep ecology states that resources should be preserved for every living thing, not necessarily for human needs. From the environmental-centered ethics perspective, National Parks should be preserved to maintain biodiversity and their ecosystem.

Maintaining Biodiversity
National Parks promote biodiversity as they protect the habitats of a variety of organisms. This diversity is achieved by the maintenance of ecosystems both in the preservation of habitat and the explicit protection of wildlife. To keep and improve an intrinsic value of nature, however, the National Park service focuses on maintaining biodiversity not only for habitats in National Parks but for how biodiversity contributes to overall preservation.

Rangeland management is also very important in the biodiversity project. According to the EPA, rangeland is a vegetation type that has annual precipitation ranges from less than 5 to 60 centimeters, and an air temperature range from -40 to 50 degrees centigrade which includes grassland, savanna, shrubland, desert, forest, tundra, and so on. Thus, many of the United States' National Parks are considered as rangeland, which is uncultivated land that provides the necessities of life for grazing and browsing animals. Managing rangeland is crucial to keep the biodiversity of ecosystems at National Parks.

Wilderness
Wilderness is a human created space, not naturally occurring, and this space is not the same for every person. Though, for National Parks, the conservation goal is often to preserve the natural ecosystem, the way they go about doing this requires human intervention. In their early history, creating the wilderness of National Parks meant reclaiming frontiers and pushing people off of the land.

People section off sets of lands by using rectangular survey systems, and then exploit large swaths of land. States and government are assigning parts of land as wilderness, such as with the case of National Parks, in order to create the illusion of the wild for people to come and visit it. People have this idea of pristine wilderness and untouched by human, and it took a long time for swamplands to become a park because of this preconceived conception. Mountains were more quickly said to be worthy enough to preserve, and preserving wilderness is important to keep intrinsic value of nature in national parks.

Related Wiki Article
Intrinsic Value

Wilderness

Biodiversity

Environmental Ethics

National Parks