“Small books can have big aims,” Jonathan Jarvis and Gary Machlis write in the first few pages of The Future of Conservation: A Chart for Rough Water (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Indeed, the National Park Service’s former director (and at this point also its last, as the current administration has yet to select a replacement) and his former science advisor have the ambitious goal to unite and guide conservationists in the wake of the election of President Trump—no small feat in under 100 pages.

The authors see the election and its consequences (the titular “rough water”) as a symptom of a larger problem within the conservation movement. Throughout the book, they reflect upon the ways in which the history of conservation—from its roots borne out of business interests to the systematic exclusion of certain groups—has brought the movement to what they see as a point of division and inaccessibility. Jarvis and Machlis warn against conservationists “stumbl[ing] from each defensive action to the next” and urge organizations to keep conservation “relevant.” This can be done, they argue, not necessarily through memes and hashtags (though the National Park Service’s centennial Find Your Park campaign was a smashing success), but by connecting all Americans to their history and the nation’s natural splendor.

Jarvis and Machlis write accessibly, focusing on real-world examples from their careers to illustrate the ways conservation efforts have succeeded (and failed) to get us where we are today. The warning about “rough water” may seem bleak, but in Jarvis and Machlis’s hands, the guide is at once prescriptive and hopeful.

Jarvis, who goes by Jon, recently came by the Sierra Club headquarters in Oakland, California, to discuss the book and his new position as  the executive director of the Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity. We talked about why he wrote this guide, how his experience as a ranger shaped his approach to the book, and what tools we need to make this vision for the future of conservation a reality. 

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Sierra: How did you come to partner with Gary Machlis to write The Future of Conservation in America?

Jonathan Jarvis: Gary is kind of a glass-half-empty kind of guy. I tend to be more of a glass-half-full kind of guy. Right after the end of the Obama administration, we felt that we should take the time to capture our thoughts, lessons learned, and combine our 80 years of conservation experience into a relatively small book about what we were already seeing in terms of the assault on the environment from the new administration and the rollback of so many of our accomplishments. And then to lay out somewhat of a strategy for response. We started writing in February [2017] and had it done fairly quickly. And we actually agreed on a fair amount of stuff!

Who do you hope will read this book?

Our target audience is broad. Obviously, anyone interested in conservation. But I think most specifically the millennial, younger generation, [to] give them some sense of hope and some strategy. There’s an awful lot of doom and gloom out there about the future in general, but also about the future of conservation specifically, and I think we wanted to show that you can win. But there needs to be a strategic intent behind it and there needs to be a greater coalition. I’ve always felt the conservation community spends too much time attacking each other and not working together very well. This is somewhat of a call—in these rough waters, troubled times—for a little more unity around these issues.

In the book, you make the point that “success cannot be measured by a lack of conflict.” What kind of conflict is good conflict?

I think my experience has been that the first place you need to find when you start out with conflict is to focus on where there’s common ground. A good example of [where] this is playing out well is in the Front Range of the Rockies, the Bitterroot-Glacier to the Yellowstone ecosystem, where an organization or an effort called the Bitterroot Challenge has been going on for probably 30 years. It’s brought together ranchers, the hunting community, the fly fishing community, the timber industry, even mining, to look to how to put all that together sustainably. Their success has been built on finding that common ground. Our nation does the best when there are crises. What Gary and I try to do in the book is to point out that we’re entering what we call rough water. But you can’t really blame it all on this current president. There’s been a trend, this sort of populist trend that we point out in the book, around climate denial, anti-science, around environment versus jobs. And that trend is very, very disturbing and we can see it manifesting itself in a lot of specific actions. But I think stepping back a little bit, it’s quite worrisome about the future of conservation, and the future of clean air, clean water, and our parks and public lands, and so we ask that the conservation community, that has somewhat been in their silos, to get out of their traditional silos.

I’m not picking on the Wilderness Society, but I was over at one of their meetings the other day and they had their latest publication. When you open it up, there was a map of the entire United States and it says “Where We Work.” The entire center of the country was blank. Well, there are a lot of people in that part of the country that care about conservation, but no one is working with them. I think that we need to task the environmental community, the traditional conservation community, to get out of their box and start thinking about it.

A good example of an organization that has done that is the Trust for Public Land and their focus on urban parks. It’s been a shift for them. They spent many years all about adding a piece of acreage adjacent to Yosemite or something. But more recently it’s about Hunters Point [shipyard in San Francisco] and Oakland and places like that with threshold experiences. That’s where you can find common ground and avoid focusing on the conflict that is so inherent in Washington. I think part of it is getting out of Washington, too, where everybody is fighting with everybody else.

In the book, “relevancy,” which is defined as a connection to history and nature, is considered essential for the future of conservation. How did you come to see relevancy in this way?

When I worked here in the Pacific region as the regional director [of the Park Service], I lived in the East Bay and I commuted on BART every day. So I get on BART in the morning, and I would probably be as a white male in the fifth percentile, in demographic terms. And then I get in my car and drive to Yosemite and I am in the 95 percentile. And you drive through the Central Valley: very large Hispanic population. And so it really struck me that there’s something going on here that I need to understand that is creating some sense of barrier to participation in the outdoors from all Americans. I want to know if I’m creating some of that barrier. I want to know what it is and how to fix it.

I’ve always been kind of a fix-it kind of person, so I’m looking for what kind of strategies can I apply to this to begin to change that paradigm. Admittedly, there’s a parochial interest in building constituency and support for conservation. But at the same time, I feel that there are inherent human benefits to being associated with the outdoors or having the opportunity to experience these places. If there’s a demographic or a segment of our society that is not experiencing that, then they’re missing out on something that’s common to all people. I mean you can take pretty much anybody to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and they’ll be in awe, right? It doesn’t matter what their socioeconomic or ethnic background is, it’s a powerful experience.

And then the other side of that, it’s clear that the American story is his-tory, not her-story. It’s written by predominantly male historians, and that the contributions of women and minorities to the American experience are underrepresented in both the collection of places that we honor as national park sites or national historic landmarks, and that also needed to be rectified. There is actually a correlation between those two, in that if the National Park Service begins to reflect the contributions of women and minorities, the agency itself would be more relevant to all Americans. So we began to hunt down these places and these stories because the Park Service is a manager of a physical asset. The Smithsonian, as I like to say, tells story through stuff; the Park Service tells story through place.

So we launched a scholarly analysis of the contributions of Latinos to the American experience, of women, of LGBTQ. I sat around the table with 10 LGBTQ scholars and said, “Tell me what the number one place is.” And they said “Stonewall,” that the gay rights movement is pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. So we said, “OK, let’s go get the Stonewall Inn in New York City.” For the Hispanic community, it’s Cesar Chavez, so let’s get Cesar Chavez National Monument. We began to identify these places and use them to begin to build story: Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality, Harriet Tubman, Pullman, Fort Monroe, Honouliuli, Freedom Riders, Birmingham—just down the list of places that broaden the story and make it more inclusive.

The second aspect is our experience of working at the entry threshold level, so we began to identify ladders of engagement with communities. So, Every Kid in a Park. We took that to the president and got that support and Michelle Obama’s support to launch the [free] pass for every fourth grader in the nation. We launched it beginning with Secretary Salazar and continuing with Secretary Jewell and the 21st Century Conservation Service Corps, with a lot of focus on groups that were focused on urban kids, kids that had not had traditional outdoors experience. So you’re reaching kids in the fourth grade, you’re reaching kids in high school, and then you’re reaching them in college, so you have this sort of ladder of engagement to build this next generation. They’re not all going to become park rangers. Our ultimate goal is that they’re just good citizens.

How did the park ranger’s “iconic role in American life” inform your voice in creating this guide?

Dayton Duncan, who is Ken Burns’s [writer and coproducer], said he learned more about geology from park rangers than he ever learned in school. If you go all the way back to the origins of the Park Service—starting with Stephen Mather, a Berkeley grad—Mather recognized that not only should you set these places aside as national parks, but the public needed to be informed about them. And actually Mather hired scientists, particularly with a focus on women, to be the first guides, the first interpreters of the parks and the story behind them. So the Park Service has always had at its core, its mission, this responsibility to help the public to have not only a safe visit, but to learn something from the place.

It’s one thing to study the Civil War in a classroom, but to stand out there in Gettysburg in the cornfield and look up at Little Round Top and think about what it meant to rush across that field in canyon fire, that’s a totally different experience. Or to float that Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and see those layers of stratigraphy and understand geologic time, it’s a total difference experience. But the casual visitor might not sense that or see that, so the ranger becomes their guide, their interpreter. We take a lot of pride in being able to discuss complex issues—whether it’s climate change or civil rights or horrific incidents in our history or the role of nature—and interpret new ideas about fire or species migration and landscape level connectivity. The park ranger has been able to maintain that fairly high level of trusted ambassador to complex issues. We look to that as kind of our inspiration and guide in the book.

Are you worried about losing some of these important, relevant places in these “rough waters?”

Well, yeah. President Trump, under an executive order, requested a review of a bunch of national monuments, and we predicted that in the book. We predicted that Bears Ears National Monument would probably be on their hit list, and it turned out to be, and it was that one along with Grand Staircase–Escalante and a few others that have been scaled significantly back. Some of the marine monuments that President Obama set aside as well have been reduced. Depending on how the courts settle out on this, some of these resources will be subject to extractive industry impact that will be hard to unwind afterward. They can read the political leaves well enough that they’re not going to de-designate Yosemite or the Grand Canyon and the ones that are well established and beloved. But the ones that have been more recently established, particularly under the Antiquities Act, are all under some level of threat.

The current administration seems to define “patriotism” differently than you do.

They define it in a way that is exclusive rather than inclusive, that you have to meet a certain set of criteria in order to be a “real American.” I think that’s incorrect; it’s not historically accurate. While certainly our nation is imperfect in so many ways in terms of its civil rights and its history of slavery and Jim Crow and Japanese American confinement during World War II and Chinese exclusion and proposals for border walls, the ideals of the nation are much higher than that. Dr. King says the arc of the universe bends towards justice. That’s always been my goal: to get a hold of that arc and try to bend it more toward justice with the assets that we have in our portfolios to help Americans see that history and the ideals that we are all working toward. Unfortunately, I think that the current administration’s approach is more about dividing the nation into camps and saying some of you are not part of this nation or part of this future. That’s terrible.

How did the success of the National Park Service centennial and the Find Your Park campaign influence your perspective on conservation?

It was interesting. In 2009, we recognized that if President Obama served two terms, his last year in office would be the centennial of the Park Service. With our management team and with the National Park Foundation we decided to not miss that opportunity, to use the centennial of the National Park Service in a very targeted way to focus on the millennial generation, to invite them to find their park and to make a personal connection with their place. It was a very carefully crafted invitation. A couple points: We spent no appropriated dollars on this process. This was all philanthropically driven, much of it donated. All the media was earned; we didn’t buy a single ad for the entire time. It was all through our philanthropic partners through the National Park Foundation. We did about a year's worth of research before we even started the Find Your Park campaign. We did a statistical analysis and a survey to test millennial generation awareness, advocacy, potential to volunteer, support, all of that. Then we monitored it through the entire Find Your Park campaign with Google Analytics, and then at the end we resurveyed to determine whether or not we moved the needle.

The data does show we actually did reach one in four millennials; we converted a lot of their awareness to advocacy or willingness to volunteer. We went from over 240,000 volunteers to over 400,000 volunteers in that same window of time. Now, of course, it overwhelmed the parks with visitation. We had 320 million visitors last year, which is more than Disney, national football, national baseball, national basketball, and NASCAR combined. That has been overwhelming to the parks, but I think it’s met our hope. Its net effect is that you create a new generation of constituents out there that will convert that interest and experience into advocacy for conservation—and not just for the national parks. Remember it didn’t say, “find your national park.” It said, “find your park.” We invited the urban parks, the East Bay Regional Parks Authority, and the Massachusetts State Parks, and the City Parks Alliance to all use our materials and to advocate for their own work and capitalize on the centennial moment in time. A lot of them did; a lot of them did a really great job of that as well.

Is providing science in the public interest still helpful in the era of anti-science and anti-facts? How do we convince people who are resistant to conservation, for example, to conduct citizen science campaigns?

Across the nation there are weather observers, there are people that report the weather with little weather stations in their backyards, thousands and thousands of them. One of my staff back in Washington was an official weather observer. Over the last four or five years we’ve conducted these bio-blitzes in partnership with the National Geographic Society, a public event where you go out and count stuff. It wasn’t like it was all Democrats that show up to that. First of all, it’s fun. It’s interesting. Kids learn a lot. It’s an opportunity to do something with their parents in the field and do something to contribute to science, and I think there’s new apps coming out like iNaturalist and others that allow them to participate. That it will inadvertently build additional support for engagement with nature because there’s an opportunity to use technology to learn something, to maybe see that you contributed to greater knowledge.

I think that this era of post-fact fake news is very concerning, and it’s another indicator of kind of this populist approach. That’s why Gary and I are not ready to throw in the towel yet either. We say, “OK, so where do we start to re-engage kids in science?” There’s a lot of little interesting trends that are fascinating. One is organizations that are greening schoolyards; schoolyards have been designed by the attorneys. They take down everything and they asphalt it and put down rubber and that’s it. But there’s a whole trend of bringing nature back into schoolyards. They’re finding that when you do that, kids play more in a friendlier atmosphere, kids are more creative in those spaces, and then those places can be places where you observe nature and incorporate that right back into the classroom. So I think a reinvestment in getting kids outdoors could have a long-term benefit to STEM education and conservation.

What role can scientists play as communicators?

The scientists that are teaching scientists also need to teach them how to write. Gary Machlis at Clemson actually does teach a class about communication of science, and we talk about that a little bit in the book, about teaching our scientists to be more articulate. I did a talk a number of years ago and the title of the talk was “With Apologies to Al Gore, the Inarticulate Truth About Climate Change.” I juxtaposed a scientist writing about the Arctic plain of Alaska and the breeding birds with Barry Lopez talking about the exact same location. They were literally the same site, and you could not understand what the scientist was talking about at all. But Barry Lopez talks about the fecundity of this plain, that he took to bowing with hands in his pockets when the birds were breeding, as opposed to the guy who was telling you how many eggs per nest. Again, I think the book is calling for a bridge between these, that people are motivated to act through emotional response, and getting out into nature can evoke that kind of emotional response. Powerful prose or poetry can evoke a similar response, and that’s where we need to bridge the scientific work and the individuals out there that can influence that.

How do you see your role having changed between being a private citizen and public servant?

Other than failing at retirement miserably? [laughs] I think I’ve devoted my entire adult life to conservation, mostly through an agency and as a public servant, and now I don’t wear the uniform anymore, but my goals and my mission hasn’t changed any. On one hand, I am a lot freer to say what I think and to act on things that I really, really care about and to be critical when I need to be. Obviously, when you are in the executive branch of the federal government, you have to be careful about those kinds of things. I think the opportunity to work at the University of California, Berkeley—which has this storied history of its work in conservation, particularly around national parks all the way back to Mather and Albright, who were Berkeley grads, to Leopold to George Melendez-Wright—is an opportunity to really focus on these big questions. How are we going to manage [public lands] in light of climate change? How do we attract new audiences? What are the new models of parks? What is the government infrastructure that we need to manage at the landscape level? How do we manage for multiple futures? How do we manage climate adaptation strategies? What models are being applied around the world, and whether or not they’re sustainable, ecologically or socially? We’re making that stuff up. So it’s an opportunity to sort of play in that field. Probably last but not least is this whole concept of the intergenerational handoff of power and that’s sort of my ultimate driver. My generation has carried the stewardship responsibility and leadership for a generation, and it needs to transition to the millennial generation, but not just walk away: to mentor, to guide, to encourage, then to be ready to let go at some point.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.