A Stitch in Haste

If the creationists (I'm tempted to start abbreviating that down to "cretinists") can't get to the kids in the schools, then they'll get 'em while they're on vacation:

[S]ome four million people annually visit Grand Canyon National Park, marveling at the awesome view. In National Park Service (NPS) affiliated bookstores, they can find literature informing them that the great chasm runs for 277 miles along the bed of the Colorado River. It descends more than a mile into the earth, and along one stretch, is some 18 miles wide, its walls displaying impressive layers of limestone, sandstone, shale, schist and granite.

And, oh yes, it was formed about 4,500 years ago, a direct consequence of Noah’s Flood.

How's that? Yes, this is the ill-informed premise of "Grand Canyon, a Different View," a handsomely-illustrated volume also on sale at the bookstores.
...
[The] book attracted little notice when it first appeared in the NPS stores in 2003, until a critical review by Wilfred Elders, a respected University of California geologist, brought it to light and took apart its pseudoscientific claims. That led David Shaver, who heads the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service, to send a memo to headquarters urging that the book be removed from the NPS stores.
...
But when Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale of [the] book at canyon bookstores, he was overruled by NPS headquarters, which announced that a high-level policy review of the matter would be launched and a decision made by February, 2004. So far, no official decision has been announced.

Even worse, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an organization that includes many Park employees, papers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that no review has ever taken place. Indeed, PEER claims that the Bush Administration has already decided it will stand by its approval for the book and that hundreds more have been ordered.
...
Even more troubling, PEER charges that Grand Canyon National Park no longer offers an official estimate of the age of the canyon, and that the NPS has blocked publication of guidance intended for park rangers that reminds them there is no scientific basis for creationism.

Now, if the hyper-anarcho-libertarians will allow me just a little maneuvering room before pointing out that "there really shouldn't be public parks at all," then can we all just get along and agree that this is outrageous?

Apparently it has to be said, yet again: Creationism is not an "alternative scientific theory" -- it is mythology, fun to read perhaps but as wrong and as silly as the Moon being in the Seventh House or Atlas standing on a turtle (what was the turtle standing on, by the way?).

Even given that we have government-owned parks, and given that, for whatever reason, these NPS stores also seem to be government-run, the government still therefore has a duty to run these stores responsibly. Of course, "responsibly" is an open-ended term, but some basic first principles should be self-apparent: try to operate in an output-maximizing yet break-even way, be environmentally conscious, non-discriminatory, handicapped accessible to whatever extent is possible. Oh, and don't sell books that are factually inaccurate. Religion has absolutely nothing to do with it! There can never, under any circumstances, be a justification for the government selling factually inaccurate (as in "2 + 2 = 5 is factually inaccurate") books in a government-run tourist shop.

I'd prefer not to get paranoid, but was there no one, absolutely no one, from NPS Director to Secretary of the Interior to the President, who could stop this nonsense? Or, stated differently, do President Bush and his inner circle have nothing better to do than to order this kind of counterproductive claptrap in our national parks?

Our children are already dumb enough, thank you very much. Religious mythology presented as "a viable alternative theory" doesn't help.

UPDATE: More creationist debunking at Dispatches and Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

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How Evolution is Like Economics
My Day at the Zoo
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