United States expands park system Last week, the United States Congress passed a large bill that funded the Defense Department for the next year. Without getting too much into the politics of either that bill or why this was stuck inside it…that bill did something great. The US Congress just passed the largest expansion of the National Park system since 1978. As soon as the President signs the bill, it will create 7 new areas managed by the National Parks system. Several are historic sites, including locations involved in the Manhattan Project and the World War 1 memorial in Washington DC. These photos show a couple of the natural locations, two from an enormous ancient volcanic complex in New Mexico called the Valles Caldera and a tusk from a mammoth from Tule Springs Fossil Beds outside of Las Vegas Nevada. Tule Springs in particular is important to preserve now due to continuing growth of the nearby city. In addition to creating these new parks, 9 other park service properties will be expanded, resources will be targeted to investigate the possibility of adding 8 other parks in the future, and several large areas including areas close to Glacier National Park are declared wilderness areas and put off limits to mining. The process of creating a new national park is not a simple one. It involves justifying the historic or natural value of the area, planning the facilities of the park, coming up with preservation plans to keep the area in tact while allowing public access to the land, and dealing with the property rights of landowners in the area in a fair manner. Getting to this point means a lot of things have gone right. The US Park Service is a small portion of the US budget but its returns are huge. The National Park system had nearly 300 million visitors in 2013. The presence of a park drives tourism and economic activity to an area and almost always produces a long-term boost for an area. A strong park system benefits both the area around parks and the country as a whole. -JBB Image credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/barclaynix/7729827848 https://www.flickr.com/photos/docbadger1/9700175881 http://www.tulespringslv.com/IceAgeFossils.aspx Read more: http://parkadvocate.org/historic-parks-package-passes-congress/