America's national parks face the same essential problem as every other public institution--funding is inadequate for the entire system, and decisions have to made as to how to allocate the resources that do exist. Such decisions will always have a degree of subjectivity about them, with one park or part of the country given precedence over another. The public perception that the park service is favoring the West to the exclusion of the urban parks of the East may be true when a comparison of money spent is made, but critics need to consider the long-term need of the nation and the underlying reasons why these decisions are made. Decisions regarding the forest service, the wilderness areas of the nation, and the national park system, as with other decisions in a democratic government, should promote the interests of the people as a whole. In terms of making such decisions, however, a controversy has long raged over whether elected officials should do what their constituents want, whether the elected officials see that as the right thing to do or not, or should they do what they know is right even if that goes against what their constituents might express as the prevailing view. Answering this question can be as difficult as determining what really is right as an action.
A comparison of the large number of people served by the urban park spaces compared to the smaller number of people served by the much larger but more remote national parks shows one aspect of the problem with the national parks system today: Increasingly, they question the essential fairness of spending far more on a spectacular dream most people will never see, than on a patch of green they could use every day (Specter A14).
What is the alternative? We could spend more on the urban spaces, but then the wilderness areas would deteriorate. What is ignored in this issue is the long-term need we have for these spaces for far more than recreational uses. ...