San Diego

A slim volume of creationist views on how the Grand Canyon formed has sparked a legal review of books on sale in US national parks.

Lawyers for the National Park Service (NPS) began the review late last year after leading scientists objected to the sale of the creationist book, Grand Canyon: A Different View, in the bookstore at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

The review is intended to help the NPS to develop a policy for the sale of such material. “The book has raised issues much broader than this book and the canyon,” explains David Barna, a spokesman for the NPS.

The Grand Canyon is a record of the six days of God's creation, this book claims. Credit: MASTER BOOKS, INC.

The beautifully photographed book was compiled by Tom Vail, a river guide with no scientific training. It features a collection of essays by 23 creationists who argue that the towering canyon walls are a record of the six days of creation which, they say, took place about 6,000 years ago. Most geologists say that the Colorado River cut out the canyon between 4 million and 6 million years ago, exposing 1.8 billion years' worth of geological formations.

Wilfred Elders, a geologist at the University of California, Riverside, who first complained about the book's sale at the park, called the volume a collection of “absurdities” that scientifically is “an extraordinary failure”.

Complaints from Elders and others caused seven leading Earth-science organizations to write to the NPS on 16 December asking for the book to be removed from the shop — or at least for it to be separated from legitimate scientific texts with which it had been placed last August.

“The book is not about geology, but rather advances a narrow religious view,” says the letter signed by presidents of the organizations, which included the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union.

The 104-page book has subsequently been moved from the science section, but remains on sale in the bookstore. Nearly 300 copies have been sold, according to the bookstore.

Vail says that an alternative to evolutionary science should be offered to members of the public visiting the canyon. “Who is to say whose material should be or shouldn't be in the bookstore?” he asks. That's the tricky question that the NPS review will seek to answer, as it weighs issues such as the display of sound science, the right to free speech and the avoidance of censorship charges.