The Beacon recently ran Christian Science Monitor writer Todd Wilkinson’s timely story on President Obama’s new National Park Service (NPS) director, Jonathan Jarvis. Jarvis has a tough row to hoe, leading an agency that can’t even agree on why it exists.
The debate centers on a philosophical question: Are parks for people, or do parks exist for their own sake? Some take guidance from the law that established Yellowstone in 1872, as inscribed on the Roosevelt Arch at Gardiner: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.”
Others follow guidance from the 1916 Organic Act creating the park system. NPS was instructed to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same” in ways that would “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
What is Director Jarvis’ philosophy? Retired former NPS Acting Director Denis Galvin praised Jarvis to Wilkinson. But Galvin’s praise has another context, his current position as trustee of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), a heavy preservationist player in Park Service politics.
Jarvis’ appointment of University of Idaho social ecology professor Gary Machlis as his science advisor also matters. Machlis’s work includes, among other things, a paper on how 80 percent of wars happen in “biodiversity hotspots,” and a book calling on NPS to assert its interests in regional planning efforts, without which “parks will likely become ineffective islands of seminatural habitat surrounded by a sea of development.”
Compare that with Jarvis’ comment to Wilkinson that “parks were ‘bigger’ because the landscapes around them were more rural and wild,” and that development is “encircling our crown-jewel nature preserves.”
Next, at the environmentalist website Grist, Jonathan Hiske writes Jarvis feels “the park service has not done well managing at an ecosystem level by working with nearby landowners.” Perhaps the Blackfeet, who had their ground burnt by fires that started in the Park, and BNSF Railway, which is unable to protect itself from avalanches originating in the Park, might agree. But Hiske writes further that, for Jarvis, the “exception” and a possible “model” has been bison in Yellowstone Park.
So, Jarvis feels NPS’s decades-long failure to deal with non-native infection of bison, plus the spill-over effects now that elk are infected, is a “model” for working with “nearby landowners?”
Surprised? Don’t be. Jarvis, and his approach, is a product of his environment: 32 years in the agency. As with so many bureaucracies, NPS leadership and staff are forgetting whom they really work for: Not “the government,” but rather the American people who support NPS programs through their fees and taxes.
Just like our formerly great U.S. Forest Service, NPS offers less and less “Benefit and Enjoyment” to Americans with each passing year. Both agencies are riven by morale and funding trouble, fast becoming, yep, “ineffective islands” in a sea of conflict.
Director Jarvis hopes to correct all this. He may, but only by addressing the root cause of his agency’s woes. Jarvis may personally believe that NPS should operate independently, or according to expert science, for the sake of the parks. But belief isn’t always correct.
Americans are told that park funding trickles down and drives local economies. But when Jarvis asks for funding, he will need to explain NPS’s systematic squeamishness about what controversial Yellowstone Park superintendent Mike Finley infamously derided as selling “rubber tomahawks” – what normal folks call a “local economy.” If NPS wants to drive local economies, please, don’t drive us out of business.
As for morale, well, as one tiny example, Glacier Park staff seem dismissive about the physical well-being, much less morale, of railroad crews or the traveling public on Marias Pass. Should either, or anyone at all, give a rip about ranger self-esteem?
Director Jarvis must acknowledge that the American people still matter to the Park Service, then act accordingly – for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. If he does not, he will fail us all.