Parks as gyms? Recreational paradigms and public health in the national parks.

I. INTRODUCTION When scholars and policymakers think about the relationship between public health and environmental law and policy, they likely think first about controlling pollution and other toxic substances. As other articles have amply demonstrated, water pollution, air pollution, and other environmental toxins can have significant deleterious effects on the public's health.1 Scholars rightly pay serious attention to these relationships, and policymakers wisely devise methods and strategies to ameliorate the public health risks posed by these polluting substances. Although pollution control might be the most obvious and important intersection between environmental policy and public health, legal and policy decisions regarding the management and preservation of the nation's natural resources potentially also significantly affect the public's health.2 Preserving plant and animal species, allocating water resources, and managing the nation's public lands, just to name a few examples, all potentially bear on matters of public health and safety.3 For instance, some plant species have the potential to be turned into helpful and perhaps life-saving pharmaceuticals.4 Forest fires pose significant human health risks in addition to harming the environment itself.5 Risky activities on the public lands can imperil both participants and bystanders.6 And prohibiting extractive activities such as mining or oil drilling on the public lands may result in lost jobs, in turn causing negative health effects on those who become unemployed.7 With respect to the public lands,8 management policies intended to protect or promote public health might roughly be divided into what I call "preventative" or "proactive" measures. By "preventative" measures, I refer to regulations and policies implemented to prevent harmful things from happening to people on the public lands. These measures predominantly consist of safety regulations that impose limits on what kinds of activities can be engaged in on the public lands or standards on the types of facilities that may be provided for guests.9 By "proactive" measures, on the other hand, I refer to policies that affirmatively encourage activities that are good for the public's health, adopted for the purpose of promoting public health.10 Examples might include contracting with vendors to sell health food in the national forests for the purpose of improving visitors' health or designing a system of federally supported and controlled trails for the purpose of improving the nation's collective cardiac fitness.11 As for the national parks-the focus of this Article-the National Park Service ("NPS" or "Service") has long been committed to preventative public health and safety policies.12 These are certainly authorized by the Service's organic statute,13 and the Service's regulations and policy documents are filled with them.14 Although safety-motivated limits on certain kinds of risky activities in the parks, such as hunting and platform jumping, can sometimes be controversial,15 for the most part regulations meant to safeguard the safety of park users are sound and rarely raise the ire of politicians or the public. In the past two years, however, the Administration of President George W. Bush has moved beyond preventative measures and taken a series of proactive steps designed to promote public health, exercise, and fitness on the public lands, including the national parks. In June of 2002, President Bush signed an executive order outlining steps for promoting fitness in the nation as a whole, including on the public lands.16 The Director of the NPS praised this effort and pledged her support for it,17 and soon thereafter, the Secretary of the Interior, who is ultimately responsible for the national parks, entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with a number of other agencies to take a variety of steps to promote fitness and public health on the public lands and elsewhere. …