by Caroline Pufalt
Ozark Chapter Conservation Chair, ExCom
If there is any American agency, tradition, or idea that Sierrans closely identify with it’s the National Park system. We know our roots go back to John Muir and his cohorts who viewed Yosemite and other spectacular places as American treasures which deserved special protection. We know that from its formal inception in 1916, the National Park Service (NPS) has striven to protect those parks and provide visitors with quality visiting opportunities. That history has not been without its problems, as the NPS has struggled with conflicting pressures from the public, from politics, from budget limitations and from within its own bureaucracy. Through it all our National Parks have remained an invaluable contribution to our national identity and to the conservation of our natural resources.
Thus I felt especially privileged to attend Discovery 2000, a NPS conference held in St. Louis this Sept. The NPS holds a major management conference only about once every decade. The 1200 attendees at Discovery 2000 included primarily NPS employees from all levels of operation. A major theme of the conference was meeting the challenges of managing and protecting natural resources amid many other duties and pressures.
I have visited several National Parks and Historic Sites and approached this conference with what I thought was little more knowledge than the average citizen regarding the NPS. But I was still amazed and inspired by the diversity of their challenges and the talents and experience of their employees. The agency includes employees working in remote outposts of Alaska to historic tenement sites in New York city. In Missouri the NPS manages the Ozark National Scenic Riverway, the Arch grounds and exhibits and Truman historical site in Independence.
I attended a workshop regarding historical interpretation which dealt with how to present sometimes controversial truths to visitors of varied backgrounds and sensibilities. And those “truths” sometimes change. One park employee working at an historical site in the south asked: What do we say now about Thomas Jefferson? Other items I heard discussed at the conference were issues surrounding budget limits, fire policy, fee demo projects, appropriate technology for park facilities, working with concessionaires, transportation problems, concerns of neighboring communities, relevancy of exhibits, requests for inappropriate recreational activities and just what is inappropriate anyway?
Sierrans would have been especially interested in the NPS’s recent program called the Natural Resources Challenge. This is an attempt to apply good science to resource management in order to restore and retain the natural heritage of the parks. Legislation passed in 1998 was designed to provide more resources for scientific study. Over its 84 year history the NPS has sometimes placed more emphasis on visitor and recreation issues than on protecting and understanding resources within parks. In recent years the agency has desired to take a more proactive role in resource protection and this initiative is part of that effort. Included in this program will be efforts to inventory park species and habitats, protect endangered and rare species, control non native species, and restore habitats. Readers may have heard of the inventory in Great Smoky Mountain National Park that has already discovered two species, the eastern spadefoot toad and mole salamander, not previously recorded in the park.
Conference participants had the benefit of hearing from noted entomologist, naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Dr. E. O. Wilson and from our own distinguished Dr. Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Both stressed the importance that National Parks can play in preserving our natural heritage and in implementing the principles of conservation biology. One of the tenants of that discipline is that in general larger areas provide better conservation opportunities and security for biodiversity. National parks need to work in concert with other public lands and private lands to achieve this. Parks, as large as some of them are, still need to be supplemented by good conservation practices in neighboring lands. Dr. Wilson even went so far as to state opposition to commercial logging in our National Forests and to suggest that those lands would be better managed as National Parks. Both Dr. Wilson and Dr. Raven recognized the difficult political and social changes needed to achieve such ambitious goals.
As a citizen and user of National Parks I left the conference with a renewed appreciation for the agency and a renewed sense of responsibility to help support the NPS and keep in on the right track.