The Park Puzzle

As the population of the United States grows larger, our land area remains the same. Cities, towns, and suburbs sprawl ever faster into the surrounding semi-wilderness, where previously only a few families lived. Increasingly, farmland is converted to city streets and small urban parks where every plant did not start its life there. As this happens, more people travel outside of the cities on vacations to wilderness. This creates a conundrum; as more people vacation in the same national park, the park becomes overcrowded and like the city they came from. In addition, when the city folk come, they bring trash, noise, kids, pushy people, and disrespect for animals. However, they often leave with a respect for nature and fewer kids (lol) (though they still leave trash and are still noisy). Clearly, there must be a way to allow the most people to enjoy national parks while still keeping them wild.
One current program is “Leave no Trace.” This is actually a Boy Scout-inspired idea. The idea is for individuals to carry their trash to trash receptacles (even if they are hiking or backpacking) in order to keep the parks free of trash. This works well for hikers and backpackers, who tend to have a greater interest in and respect for nature, but has little effect on the majority of visitors who come to take pictures of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, but not actually enjoy the surrounding park. These visitors stay in hotels and apartments, and leave trash around the park (and more of those kids). “Leave no Trace” doesn’t affect these people, so it is not a great solution to keeping parks wild.
Another solution is to limit the amount of people who can enter a park. This is typically on a first-come, first-serve basis, and has been employed at Yellowstone and other popular parks. This doesn’t allow everyone to visit a park, and turns the park into a regulated human experience, instead of a wild trip through nature where you are your own master. However, the limiting system does keep the number of people down so that park staff are not overwhelmed and can effectively clean up the mess of each day.
As you can tell, there is not a clear and easy solution that allows everyone to visit national parks while keeping them wild, but I leave it open to the reader to come up with a better solution.