Can you imagine a zip line attached to Half Dome in Yosemite National Park?/Rebecca Latson file

National parks probably have never been entirely immune from political influences, whether they came out of Washington, D.C., or close to a park’s boundaries. But there’s an argument that can be made, one backed by evidence, that the past 50 years have seen the most egregious attempts to subvert the mission of the National Park Service to preserve and protect natural resources unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

That argument is clearly laid out in National Parks Forever, Fifty Years Of Fighting And A Case For Independence, a just-released book by Jonathan Jarvis, the 18th director of the National Park Service, and his brother Destry, who long has worked in the conservation movement, first for the National Parks Conservation Association and then in the Interior Department during the Clinton administration. In it they call for the National Park Service to be broken out of the Interior Department in a bid to reduce political interference on the agency.

On its face, the book is a rich collection of institutional knowledge from within the machinations of government and from within the National Park Service. Destry Jarvis provides the insights from government through his roles as a lobbyist and from positions in the Interior Department, while Jonathan Jarvis provides insights from his days as a ranger in the field, as Pacific West regional director, and as NPS director.

But of greater interest are the efforts, first by Interior Secretary James Watt and Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks Bill Horn during the administration of Ronald Reagan and later by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the adminstration of George W. Bush, to not just revise the Management Policies, the desktop authority park superintendents refer to if they're uncertain how to handle an issue that arises, but to reverse the management directives the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 gave the Park Service. To those men, the Park Service's main function was to boost visitation, recreational pursuits, and private-sector business opportunities, not, as the Organic Act directs, to manage parklands "in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired" for the enjoyment of future generations.

"I debated James Watt on the Today Show at one point, and he sort of brought the most extreme, for his time, point of view about what the parks were all about," Destry Jarvis said during the National Parks Traveler's webinar with the brothers. "He was out in a couple years, but Bill Horn came in as assistant secretary with the same views, and Horn was the one who really bore in. Frankly, the only way the Park Service survived was Bill Mott fought them tooth and nail every step of the way."

Mott, the 12th director of the National Park Service, survived the battles because he had overseen California's state park system when Reagan was that state's governor and they had a strong, and long, working relationship, Destry said.

"The Management Policies in that period went through about 20 iterations with Horn going one way and Mott going the other. There's one quote in the book that I can't resist reading, talking about the definition of impairment. The sort of non-impairment standard, and Horn says the revision to Management Policies should be guided by the principle that resource protection and providing visitor enjoyment are co-equal mandates," Destry said. "Even a rational interpretation of the Organic Act says they are not co-equal mandates. Preservation comes first, and use that is compatible, or does not cause impairment, comes second."

In the end, "all of the most egregious changes that [Horn] had pushed Director Mott for had been removed or diluted, so that this edition did not differ philosophically from the previous edition of 1978," he wrote in the book.

One provision that Horn had inserted but which fell by the wayside was his insistance that "the parks had a responsibility to protect the visitor enjoyment, so therefore things like protecting the scenic qualities of Yosemite Valley were important, but the health of the mule deer herd wasn't," Destry said during the webinar. "That was an explicit statement, and it went downhill from there, very rapidly throughout their time in office."

It was roughly during this same time period that efforts to preserve large swaths of Alaska were being pushed in Congress, with various forces at work to either increase or decrease the number of acres that would be placed under the Park Service's purview. In the end, the legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter brought 43.6 million acres into the National Park System, a sizeable number, but 30 million fewer than former NPS Director George Hartzog had sought.

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act [ANILCA] was not popular with Alaska residents, which put Jon Jarvis in an occasionally uncomfortable position when he arrived at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve as its superintendent.

"I liked to say that while the conservation community, much of it led by Destry, established ANILCA through Congress, then we [the NPS] had to figure it out, how to implement it on the ground," Jon said during the webinar. "We used to joke we were like Talmudic scholars, trying to reinterpret what they meant in ANILCA, on issues like subsistence and access and the role of the state and others. It was complicated. Plus, I had the three amigos up there, [Sen.] Ted Stevens, [Sen.] Frank Murkowski, and [Rep.] Don Young, all of whom had adamently opposed the establishment of the parks in Alaska, and had their own view of how things were to be managed, and were frequently on the phone with me or dragging me before a hearing or whatever. Ted Stevens would beat us up in the hearing, and then sneak us money behind the scenes to do projects he was pretty supportive of. Frank just liked to fight, as did Congressman Young."

Particularly interesting were the meetings Jon had with local residents on how Wrangell-St. Elias should be managed.

"Whenever I talked to my staff when I was director, I said, you know, you haven't really done a public meeting unless it's in a bar and everybody is armed and they're not happy about your message," he recalled. "I did a lot of those in Alaska and actually, in a bit of masochism, I enjoyed them. I actually really enjoyed interacting in those situations. At the core, what we sometimes forget, is local people like that really do care about the place. They care about it in many similar ways that we do. They just don't necessarily like the federal government telling them what they can and can't do."

When the second Bush administration came to Washington, another run at weakening the Management Policies was made, this time by Paul Hoffman. By now Jon Jarvis was the Park Service's Pacific West Regional director, and when the draft revisions were circulated among top NPS managers he didn't hold back in his critique.

This draft document is the largest departure from the core values of the National Park System in its history, posing a threat to the integrity of the entire system. These policies, if implemented as proposed, will weaken the management of parks, threaten critical resources, reduce the visitor's ability to experience nature in a form as close as possible to natural, and move the National Park System from its position as the conservation leader in the world to just another average public manager. If our goal is mediocrity, then this document is our road guide. -- Jon Jarvis August 5, 2005, memo to the deputy director of the National Park Service.

"What Paul was doing was every time a decision that a park suiperintendent was making, particularly to deny an activity that was maybe being proposed by a supporter of that [George W. Bush] administration, to do something in a park, if the superintendnet cited chapter and verse and line of Management Policies, Paul would pull that up on his computer in Word, and revise that section to make it possible for an individiual to do these kinds of activities," explained Jon during the webinar. "For instance, the way the policies are written now, and were written then, is that the onous on a proposal, the onous falls on the proposer to prove to the National Park Service this would have no significant impact. And Paul flipped that, and he put it on the Park Service, and so anybody that proposed anything, from a zip line in Yosemite to the top of Half Dome, it would fall on the Park Service to prove that it had a significant impact, otherwise it would be allowed. So he was basically opening the door, through a rewrite of policies, to all kinds of inappropriate activities.

Fran Mainella, the agency's director at the time, was livid with Jarvis' memo.

"I got called back to Washington by Director Fran Mainella and her deputy, Steve Martin, and I got my butt chewed and threatened with removal from my position," Jon recalled.

That 2006 battle over the Management Policies gave rise to today's Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, which today counts more than 2,000 Park Service retirees among its membership.

But efforts by politicians and political appointees to open the parks to more and more commercial ventures weren’t the only threats the brothers cite in their book. There also was the matter of science and battles over the mention of climate change. In August 2012 a report requested by Jon Jarvis as the Park Service's director, Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks, was an effort to update a report on wildlife management that A. Starker Leopold had written a half-century earlier. The report, written by a committee outside the Park Service, strived to bring the agency's approach to climate change, biodiversity, and the current state and understanding of ecosystem management into the 21st century.

Though just 23 pages long, the report envisioned both vast consequences and exciting possibilities, depending upon how much to heart the report was taken by not just the Park Service but also the Congress and Americans in general.

Potential consequences were profound: continued habitat fragmentation, loss of species to climate change, loss of groundwater resources, increased pollution.

Exciting possibilities were just as striking: climate-change proof habitats that could serve as refugia for species, species made sustainable through protected and maintained "migration and dispersal corridors," the National Park System "as the core of a national conservation network of connected lands and waters."

"Destry and I are not scientists. We have a background in science, so we understand its value to the management of the National Park System," Jon said during the webinar. "Destry led the effort to get a science mandate in legislation, something the Park Service did not have, and we began the process of really infusing that directly on issues of climate change,  more park-specific issues like bison in Yellowstone and so many of the other issues at the same time. And all of that sort of culminating in Director's Order 100, and the Revisiting Leopold Report."

When President Trump came into office, DO100, which spells out the Park Service's scientific stewardship responsibilities, was quickly jettisoned.

"It was officially rescinded, but I would suggest that it's laying around on a few desks out there," said Jon. "They couldn't rescind the Revisiting Leopold report. That's an independent report coming from a citizen's body, so that still stands out there."

Politics also impacted the Park Service during the Obama administration when Jon was its director. There was the matter of plastic drinking bottles in the parks and the back-and-forth over whether superintendents could ban them and charges that Coca Cola influenced the administration’s position on that. There was the case of 40,000 acres in the "Addition Lands" at Big Cypress National Preserve that at one point had been deemed suitable for wilderness designation, but when the final GMP came out those 40,000 acres were opened to ORV use, a plan then acting NPS Director Dan Wenk approved. And then there was the still simmering situation at Point Reyes National Seashore where then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ruled an oyster company operating in Drakes Estero near the Phillip Burton Wilderness Area had to go, while dairy cattle operations that critics maintain are both polluting and overgrazing parts of the national seashore along with placing the native Tule elk at risk were given lease extensions.

Politics stood in the way of a no-take fishing area at Biscayne National Park/NPS

"They do play a role in all of these decisions, and that's politics with a big 'P' and a little 'p.' Big P meaning members of Congress, senators, congresspeople, weigh in," said Jon, who added that when the Park Service proposed a no-take fishing area at Biscayne National Park in Florida, "every member of Florida's congressional delegation called me personally to ask that we not do it. Certainly, in the Point Reyes situation, a senior Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein, called me repeatedly, her husband called me, basically requesting that I fire [Point Reyes Superintendent] Don Neubacher so that the oyster farmer could continue. So, you pick your battles."

Against all these examples, the Jarvises conclude their book with the call for the Park Service to be removed from the Interior Department to fend for itself as a freestanding agency. As such, they suggest it be modeled after the Smithsonian Institution, with a board of directors that selects the agency director. The brothers agree that such a move wouldn't entirely take politics out of the Park Service.

"You can't avoid it," acknowledged Jon. "An independent agency is not removed from the politics. They're not removed from, certainly, the oversight committees, the appropriation committees, all of the oversight responsibilities of the U.S. Congress, just like the Smithsonian is subject to that as well. It does remove you, the agency, from the small 'p' politics of the Department of Interior. When an administration changes -- the Department of Interior is about 70,000 employees, roughly -- they bring in 100 politicals [appointees]. They are all aligned to the secretary, to the White House, and it's a mixed bag. Assistant secretaries, deputy secretaries, management assistants, and all those. Their knowledge of the mission, the value of the National Park Service, they may not know the Park Service from the Boy Scouts."

Added Destry Jarvis: "We don't expect or intend to get rid of politics. There's no question about that. But I'll use the example of the first mid-term in the Clinton administration when there was a complete sweep of control from Democrats to Republicans in Congress. Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House and issued his contract -- that I called 'Contract on America,'-- 'Contract For America,' and Congressman Jim Hansen [R-Utah], the chairman of the parks committee, introduced legislation to establish his park closing commission. They were going to set up a process to get rid of every unit of the park system that didn't have a real purpose from their point of view, or enough visitation to justify their existence."

The bill failed.

"The support of the American people, the popularity of the national parks, it's a great bulwark against excessive politics being successful," said Destry. "Bill Mott could have been one of the greatest directors in Park Service history, but he had to spend all his time fighting the petty politics of the department. And so, the Park Service needs to get away from some of that."

You can watch the entire webinar conversation at this site.