As Americans flock to national parks this summer, we can learn a lot from national parks around the world. Field biologists the world over uniformly confirm the woeful conditions of national parks. The Nature Conservancy found many national parks in Latin America are at great risk. Even closer to home, Canada's experiments with national parks hold important lessons for parks lovers.

Canadian parks are now suffering from their reliance on fickle politics. The Canadian analog of the U.S. National Park Service, Parks Canada, just lost $100 million dollars from its budget to operate 38 parks. The U.S. park system has ten times as many parks and a budget of only $1.3 billion.

U.S. park managers, already short funding, cut popular services such as the Norris Campground in Yellowstone. Let's consider alternative managerial arrangements in the U.S. before mounting financial pressures in Washington, D.C. force a repeat of Canada's predicament.

Public, nongovernment endowment boards, one for each park, hold great promise. They successfully manage private schools, nonprofit hospitals, and museums. Board members have trustee and fiduciary responsibility for their organization's specific mission. The boards would be charged to manage for highest values: habitat, preservation, primitive recreation, scenery. An endowment board with regional and national members could ensure sensitive stewardship and freedom from shortsighted Congressional politics.

Petty politics puts national parks at risk. The 104th Congress is considering eliminating unworthy parks. Although park budgets rose every year from 1955 to 1977, Congress has cut funding in one out of every three years since. A quarter of park ranger jobs have disappeared since 1987, and there is a $3 billion maintenance backlog. Our parks are in terrbile shape, ecologically and operationally.

While not providing adequate funding for existing parks, Congress creates new parks of highly questionable value, like Presidio and Steamtown. This political trap has caught Canada, which just combined massive budget reductions for Parks Canada with the creation of the Tuktut Nogait National Park, now Canada's fifth largest.

Government support for parks is problematic for many reasons. Politicizing national parks leads to "park" barrel projects and poor management incentives. Sound science loses out when special interests can order the Park Service to eliminate Yellowstone's wolves in the 1920s and fires since 1900. Fuel loads build ever higher and dangers rise. We can soon expect huge, destructive fires rather than many small, natural ones.

Making park budgets dependent on politics rather than the parks' net revenues also distorts decisions and encourages bureaucratic inefficiencies. Park Service construction budgets routinely include 50% extra for overhead and overruns. Parks' user fees and concessionaire fees go to Washington. The resulting underpriced or free access encourages overuse of our parks. Increasingly, the park system is characterized by low quality new parks and degraded old ones.

Supporters of legislation now before Congress believe corporate sponsorship of national parks holds the solution. The proposal's main stumbling block is public apprehension about commercialization of our parks. It's understandable that, as the Olympics draw near, we guard against "Disney-fied" parks, like a Timex Old Faithful or a Ranier Beer Ranier National Park.

How do we guard against such crass commercialization? Endowment boards, with their membership, drawn from environmental, community, business, and science leaders have incentives to seek subtle, tasteful sponsorship and public support. If trustees fail to honor a binding mandate to foster values specific to each park, then they suffer reputational and other losses.

As with other environmnetal issues, we face trade-offs not perfect solutions. Even cynical observers note that the threat of commercialization is less serious than the current slide in services and sustainability. Independence Hall is in desperate need of roof repairs and modern fire sprinklers. Should we let 20th Century Fox put "Official Sponsor of Independence Hall National Park" on its "Independence Day" movie billboards? What if the alternative is to let this park go up in smoke?

Corporate sponsorship could make a huge difference. Ford Motor Company recently purchased 20 pages in Newsweek dedicated to the national park system. Ten were Ford ads, ten were travel brochures for various national parks like Crater Lake and Big Bend. The ad space alone cost around $1.5 million. While pocket change to Ford, this sum equals the operating budget of the average U.S. National Park.

Corporate sponsorship of the national park system is part of a larger movement to separate Park Service funding from Congress. Only when park budgets are depoliticized will America have a vibrant and long-lasting park system. Creating mechanisms for collecting payment from various park beneficiaries is an important step in this direction. User fees, gifts from membership organizations, concessionaire contracts, and corporate sponsorships all have potential. Instituting endowment boards to generate and manage these funds will foster the necessary trust, sensitivity, and responsibility.

National parks are failing to deliver the quality or stability park-lovers demand. Support and management of our national heritage must come from the people who appreciate and benefit from those parks. When parks must pay their own way through fees and friends, we'll see more responsible stewardship. The parks are too precious for a precarious dependency on politics.