By the early 1990s, the U.S. national park system reached an average of 250 million visitors per year with no sign of decline. The increased public interest in the national park system was worthy of celebration, but according to professor and author Robert E. Manning, the visits also presented a serious threat to the integrity of the parks. ?The quality of the visitor experience was being threatened through crowding and congestion, conflicting uses, and the aesthetic consequences of resource degradation,? Manning states in the introduction to Parks and Carrying Capacity: Commons Without Tragedy (Island Press, February 9, Cloth: $70.00, ISBN: 978-1-55963-104-4; Paper: $35.00, ISBN: 978-1-55963-105-1). Parks are intended to be protected as well as used, which raises the most fundamental question in environmental thought: how much can we use the environment without spoiling it?

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