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Alaska: Extraordinary Parks, Extraordinarily Complicated, Julie Lurman Joly

Akron Law Review

In many ways, national parks in Alaska face the same difficulties as other parks nationwide: pockets of strong anti-federal sentiment, increasingly high usage rates (at least in a couple of Alaska parks) leading to resource degradation, decreasing funding, and increasing maintenance costs. On the other hand, Alaska parks are completely unique in their circumstances. Many parks in Alaska receive few to no visitors each year, and Alaska parks contain vast tracts of land and resources but are managed by the barest minimum number of employees. Furthermore, Alaska’s national parks operate in a more complex legal environment than most other national …