High rate of return on Jimmy Carter’s investment in national parks

ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION • May 4, 2025

Jimmy Carter is widely praised as an ex-president for his Nobel-prize-winning work eradicating diseases and enhancing democracy around the world and for building thousands of homes. But Carter’s most lasting legacy is a conservation quilt in the form of the many parks and wild spaces he preserved. Carter doubled the size of our National Park System, created 39 new national parks, designated 56 million acres of wilderness for protection and perpetually protected over 150 million acres through the Alaska Lands Act. Teddy Roosevelt was the only U.S. president to protect more land than Carter. Historically, every $1 invested in our National Park System directly returns at least $10 to the federal budget. The economic output of America’s national parks is over $55 billion annually. No one even remotely serious about ferreting out government waste would lay a finger on the National Park Service. It’s one of the few federal programs that actually makes money.