How strong is the National Park Service's science mission, and is it being used to guide the agency in all it does?
For many, the National Park Service is seen as an agency of friendly rangers tasked with helping them get the most out of their national park vacation. But the agency is much more complex than that. Indeed, it could be seen as one of the country’s most science-focused agencies, as it deals with all sorts of "ologies" – biology, paleontology, archaeology, sociology, ecology, cetology, bioecology, and, in light of the popularity of dark night skies, even planetology.
With such a role in both the federal government and society, is the National Park Service living up to that role? Is it able to? Is the agency properly using science to guide its mission? Two veterans who during their careers with the National Park Service were closely tied to the agency's science mission are now concerned that the mission has gotten off track and needs to be refocused.
"One of the things that I noticed over the years was a lot of good people with a lot of experience gathered over decades, once they walked out the door, the new people had to reset, start it all over again. And that accumulated knowledge was really lost," Michael Soukup, who rose to be the agency's associate director for natural resource stewardship and science, told theTraveler for a podcast.
"Sometimes you could tap that later on with retirees organizations or something like global parks," he added. "But by and large, there was a big tremendous drain of experience, hard won experience, and some knowledge and maybe even some wisdom that came out of those years."
Sharing Soukup's concerns is Gary Machlis, who served as the visiting social scientist for the National Park Service and as former Park Service Director Jon Jarvis's science advisor. The two expressed their concerns in a new book they co-authored, American Covenant: National Parks, Their Promise In Our Nation's Future.
"I think partly it's human nature that each generation of leaders wants to establish their own identity," replied Machlis when asked why there has been a loss of institutional knowledge in the Park Service. "And part of it was the Park Service is extraordinarily good at telling stories to the public, but not so good as telling our stories to each other. There wasn't a lot of listening that went on among the different generations of Park Service folk. Each generation thought the generations before it didn't do it quite right, and now they were going to do it. And then they made their mistakes, and then the next generation did it."
"The mission of the Park Service is such a long-term protracted, focused kind of requirement," added Soukup. "What the Park Service is asked to do is something that requires a continuous period of success, generation after generation. And how do you really make sure that happens with each new political administration and each new generation of employees. How do you make sure that the adherence to that covenant makes sense to each new generation and is adhered to by each new generation of employees, but also the public and Congress and everyone else? It's a very difficult mission, and it's really not something that the Park Service, because it's a federal agency, is really geared for and it could be improved."
To determine how well the Park Service's science mission has been embraced, we can look back to 2012 and Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks, the 23-page report Director Jarvis requested in a move to, as the Traveler noted at the time, reinvent how the Park Service approaches scientific study and management of natural resources. The report cast the National Park Service as the agency that could best rescue, protect, and preserve America's natural resources. But has the agency lived up to the promise of that report?
"My observation from the distance of retirement is no. And in fact, it worries me that I see signs that, of the progress that has been made since the turn of the 20th century, some of that's being lost and in the Park Service is going back to its default mode of really focusing on the things that they're most comfortable with, which is visitor services," said Soukup.
Machlis, who had a hand in writing that report, said it had two roles.
"It was an aspirational document, 'Here's where you're going to try to get to,' and you may not get to it, but that doesn't mean failure," he said. "It means you're attempting to strive, err, and strive again. But it also had some very specific things that could be done to advance science. And if you remember the political history, right before the end of the Obama administration, much of that report was converted into formal Park Service policy. An example, requiring superintendents for the first time to demonstrate scientific literacy, if you wanted to be a superintendent, and a whole range of other science promoting policies.
"I don't know whether to be disappointed or prideful, but it was the first policy that Secretary of Interior (Ryan) Zinke under (President) Trump rescinded without a word. Just rescinded it and got rid of it," continued Machlis. "That either suggests it was really important and they wanted it out of the way, or that it was a sideline. I think a lot of that report, and the ones that have come before, each one builds a layer of experience and wisdom that some of it still gets used. Have we achieved it? You're absolutely right, we haven't. Is that the main point? Not necessarily of any report, it's to guide you in the right direction. It's a navigational tool. It's not a port by itself."
To get the Park Service back on track, the two voiced the need for the agency to take a look at itself and, as Soukup put it, recognize and accept that it "has to be authoritative about what it is they're doing and what it is they're managing."
"It's very important that the Park Service not see itself as a caretaker, but more as an authority on what's important to consider when you're managing for long-term protection and also visitor access," he said. "You really have to know what you're doing in great detail in a very site-specific way. I think that's a key point that relates to the idea that superintendents have to feel comfortable with accumulating that knowledge over the long term. It can't be one enlightened superintendent followed by one that's not. I mean, you have to have a long-term practice and an accumulation over time of information and wisdom. If you're not doing that, and you're a caretaker rotating in and out, I don't see how the mission can be achieved."
But is that lack of authority the result of Park Service philosophy when it comes to managing the National Park System, or due to a lack of resources, both in human resources and funding?
"I don't think anyone in Washington really understands both the value and the costs of a National Park System. We're running it on, in many ways, on vapors. But there's also a problem of once we get money, what do we do with it?" Soukup stressed. "And it's often been the case, both Gary and I attended many, many meetings of the top leadership, where resources were never on the agenda. Everything else was, especially visitor services and potholes and campgrounds and septic tanks and things like that. That's so consuming. And if you layer on top of that, the political agendas that rotate in and out with the different administrations, the Park Service is always very much off balance. And if you looked at the budget, the budget reflected the priorities of that misbalance in my opinion."
"What Mike and I tried to do during our time together in DC," Machlis said, "is convert the understanding that science was a cost to it was an investment. And to try to make clear that, like he said, you got to keep track of what you know, your inventory and what's happening, and that scientists were not a cost. They were an institutional bank of memory that needed to be nurtured.
"The other thing is that what the last four years have done in the Trump administration has taught us how attitudes towards science among Congress, among the public, can whipsaw back and forth, back and forth. I'm shocked at the amount of damage that was done," he said. "Not so much that it was done, but how easy it was to do it. And so I think what we were trying to do in American Covenant is make the case that science and parks needs to be beyond partisan. Not bipartisan, but even beyond partisan, and they need to be treated as an investment in our nation's future, not a toy or a tool for political sides."
You can listen to the entire conversation with Michael Soukup and Gary Machlis here.
Comments
One way to solve this problem is to restore a sense of historical and scientific conscious within the employees of the National Park Service. The NPS needs to develop a long-range strategic plan to achieve this end . This plan should encourage park managers to be sure that every park has an up-to-date administrative history. Every employee of the National Park Service should know the history and literature of the National Park Service and parks. This information is easily available with a visit the NPS History Electronic Library (npshistory.com). This site is a portal to electronic publications covering the history of the National Park Service (NPS) and the cultural and natural history of the national parks, monuments, and historic sites of the U.S. National Park System.
Our parks represent the key turning points in our history. They help us to understand ourselves as a people and nation in today's complex world. All of our natural, cultural and historical sites teach important lessons in American history. If the National Park Service is to survive and be meaningful to the American people we need to continue to strengthen the base of knowledge in our National Parks. The failure to do so will result in a diminished National Park Service.
The legacy of Stephen Mather, Horace Albright, and Vern Chatelain as illustrated in the Ken Burns documentary on the national parks is in danger. It is easy to lose our historical and scientific memory and difficult to retrieve it. If the national parks are to have any meaning for the American people, they must be managed by able people and staffed by knowledgeable and articulate scientists, historians and interpreters of different disciplines.
Slowly but surely the great system of national parks is being eroded by the lack of historical and scientific knowledge. The decline can still be stopped, but it must be recognized and corrected. A good place to start is by taking the recommendations stated in Imperiled Promise, The State of History in the National Park Service (2011) and implementing them. Reports and strategic plans are useless unless implemented. Imperiled Promise was never implemented.
The same can be said of Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks, the 23-page report Director Jarvis outlined how the Park Service approaches scientific study and management of natural resources. This report cast the National Park Service as the agency that could best rescue, protect, and preserve America's natural resources but unfortunately the agency has not lived up to the promise of that report. It has been forgotten
Is the National Park System threatened by the lack of resources or knowledge? While resources are finite, knowledge is not. Educated park managers who are familiar with the scientific and cultural history of our parks are essential.
Well said, Harry. You and I talk about this all the time. We write the books and point out the problems, but how many people read the books? Or even watch Ken Burns? Or read The Traveler, as Kurt laments? Our dear friend, the late Richard West Sellars, offers another example of a book "unread": Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. Does American Convenant say anything new? Well, Gary Machlis does blame Donald Trump. The point is: No way can this be laid on Donald Trump. The problem goes all the way back to 1916 and Stephen Mather's appeasement of visitation. The railroads were happy; the concessionaires were happy; Detroit was happy. And science suffered. And it will suffer even more if this latest article in The Atlantic becomes policy: David Treuer, "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." (The Atlantic, May 2021).
You once prepared, Harry, a list of ten books that should be required reading of everyone hired by the National Park Service. Perhaps you would repeat that list here. It would certainly be a start, since again, the problem is nothing new. The Park Service just does not demand an institutional memory as a requirement of employment. And who does, now that the country is "woke?" If you can't have a country in the first place, what good is writing a history of that country? The problem then becomes ignorance for its own sake, and yes, the country is well on its way.
It is no wonder that rank-and-file members of the Park Service are drifting, too. An educated workforce is a confident workforce, but where are the materials supporting that education? Fortunately, there the future is somewhat brighter, thanks to historians from inside and outside the agency. But again, employees must be given incentives to read their books.
Did I say books? You bet I did. Now that would be an 'initiative' capable of making a difference tomorrow morning'and without asking Congress for additional support.
Every employee needs to read those books. Of the six or seven books I would assign, one tops my list. That would be Alfred Runte's National Parks: The American Experience, the best book written on the national parks of all time. Think, then, of the thousands of employees in the Park Service who have never read it. A director who reads for effect would never be making the mistakes we see today. As one reviewer said of National Parks: The American Experience in an article for The Washington Post, 'At Interior, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House, National Parks is a must.'
A must does not mean a choice. Of course, some employees choose to read; my point is that all should made to read as a prerequisite for employment. My other titles would include:
1. The relevant administrative history'or its equivalent'of the employee's current park.
2. Alfred Runte, Yosemite: The Embattled Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
3. Lary M. Dilsaver, editor. America's National Park System: The Critical Documents. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997
4. Polly Welts Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, updated ed., 2006.
5. Horace M. Albright as told to Robert Cahn. The Birth of the National Park Service: The Founding Years, 1913-33. Salt Lake City: Howe Publications, 1985).
6. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
The Park Service should make it simple and provide these books on employment, with the appropriate 'testing' as each employee advances. A test? Yes again, a test. These are government jobs subject to Civil Service approval. And even the Director should not escape. The public deserves to know that the Service knows what it is managing. The problems that the National Park Service faces today did not emerge just out of the blue.
Even without any ' new' history, we have a rich mother lode of information about our parks in both print and electronic format. This information represents the accumulated wealth and experience of generations of national park employees. I would like to see nothing better for 2021 than to make this heritage of information easily available to all. Much of it can be found now on the web (npshistory.com) but no one knows where to look or what to look for. Many capable and hardworking people are trying to correct the issue. Let us support them and get the job done.
These are all books I read early in my career and I couldn't agree more. They should be read by all employees and certainly agrncy leaders I would add Battling for the Parks - the one by George Harzog.
Good siggestion
What's particularly discouraging is that so many so-called leaders (superintendents) have never read or heard of many of these books. They got in their positions by avoiding controversy and being willing to support agendas from above, often ones hostile to science, resource protection, and policy. It's a culture of political expedience instead of defending the parks. As the NPS has become politicized, the more compliant move up farther and faster. Defence of the parks is lost. One need only look at what's being done to the sea turtle program at Padre Island to see how resources suffer from this trend.
Also Mountains Without Handrails by Joseph Sax.
I just read all the comments submited by the seemingly well educated, at least well read guests. I spent 30 years as a wildlife biologist for the MD DNR. It makes me feel as though, I had never worked for 3 decades alonside what I assumed were some of the brightest people in our country in terms of Natural Resources. I worked with our agency personnel, USFWS, Forest Service, Chesapeake Bay Society, and the National Park Service. I guess unfortunately my headquarters was in Annapolis, MD and were were within easy driving distance of our nations capitol. They all lied, so it now seems and just played politics to protect their jobs and do "what their boss told them to do, say and believe. I have traveld and visited many of our countries great public lands, in the mid 2000's and it was not what I had exspected to see while reading Aldo Leopold and President Roosevelt's works. I ask you all to continue to follow this mission and try to do the work that the average American seems to longer care about (as long as their cell phone is working).
"All this science I don't understand
it's just my job five days a week"
Elton John