Park Service Approves Proposal To Allow Ads Inside National Parks

While we were all snoozing in between Christmas and the new year, the National Park Service went ahead and approved revisions to its policy that will allow some corporate logos and signage within park boundaries in the country’s public places, despite public backlash against the idea. Some critics think this is a very bad, terrible, no good idea.

On Dec. 28, NPS announced that Director Jonathan Jarvis had signed and finalized revisions to Director’s Order #21, which lets parks recognize donors with labels on certain things, but would not let corporations or anyone else rename parks like Yellowstone or features like Old Faithful. No logos or ad language will be allowed either.

Advocacy group Public Citizen says this move is “disgraceful,” and allows our national parks to the sold to “the highest bidder.”

“Now that this policy has been finalized, park visitors soon could be greeted with various forms of advertisements, like a sign reading ‘brought to you by McDonald’s’ within a new visitor’s center at Yosemite, or ‘Budweiser’ in script on a park bench at Acadia,” says Kristen Strader, program coordinator for Public Citizen’s Commercial Alert program.

Strader points out that we as a society are constantly inundated with advertising everywhere we go, but that national parks offered a beautiful, valuable respite from all of that.

“The finalization of Director’s Order #21 signals a dangerous shift toward opening our parks up to an unprecedented amount of commercial influence,” Strader says in a statement.

In September, Public Citizen and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood published the public’s comments on the proposal after NPS failed to do so, and said that 78% of commenters opposed changes to the policy. At the time, NPS said that it “greatly values the deep interest Americans have in preserving and protecting their national parks,” and would “carefully consider public feedback as we finalize updates to policies guiding the longstanding tradition of philanthropic support for national parks.”