Keynote Address:
Natural Resource Stewardship

Dr. Edward O. Wilson
Author and Naturalist
Tuesday, September 12

[These remarks are a closed-caption transcription edited by the Discovery 2000 Web team]

Thank you very much. When I arrived I was given this very unusual ant. [Holds up toy ant]. I haven't learned which park it came from but as soon as I do, I'm going to apply for permission to do research there. Director Kennedy, … [looks toward Roger Kennedy] ... Roger; Director Stanton, other members of the national park community, colleagues, friends, I thank you all for the opportunity to speak to this potent audience in such a crucial time. For the National Park Service and for the environment generally, I take it as a great honor and opportunity to be here, and believe me, the benefit I see runs more strongly to my own inspiration and excitement for the future.

I don't need to tell you, I only need to stress it as an independent observer, that Americans love the national parks. They trust you. And you have enormous credibility, probably the greatest credibility of any part of the federal government. In 1983, the late poet naturalist Mr. Stegner correctly said. "National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."

Much of the appeal that Stegner had in mind has to do with what is called civic duty. Some major art galleries, archives, museums, harbors, and state and national parks are so important and unique and expensive to establish that they must be created by public discretion and then in a democratic society made available to everybody with free and equal access there to mingle without distinction from the richest to the poorest.

Deep within us, those national parks set aside for nature in the distinction from the cultural parks, satisfy an innate craving for a sense of wildness, a part of the world that we can see and enjoy whenever we wish. One dear to our hearts yet not part of us but instead one that exists independently of humanity that was here on earth before the coming of humanity and would stay much the same if we were to disappear as a species, to know that it exists, to have the freedom to go there and see it at its best, that capacity is surely one of the marks of high civilization.

It's also a part of the American heritage celebrating a continuous stream of existence that dates back not to 1775, or 1619, or 1492, or even before the coming of the Indians 12,000 or more years ago, but farther back in geological time. You of the National park Service are the stewards of what can be called America's deep history. There is a distinction in this Service between cultural and natural programs, but they are the same, in terms of long-term continuity, the natural deals, the cultural deals with a few centuries or at most millennia, the natural goes back and back through history 200 million years.

Little wonder that many of our national parks are overcrowded, given their essential and irreplaceable nature. We need additional national parks, so I'll make a comment now that is strictly as a private citizen and not representing or reflecting any particular organization.

There is a great deal to be said for converting more and more land from the public domain, including state and national forest holdings, into national parks. That's what was done in the past to create Bryce, Glacier, Great Basin, Olympic, Yosemite, and others. If all the forests and other natural, terrestrial habitats managed could be converted it would more than quadruple the size of the park system and it would also be consistent with the public needs and the current uses of these habitats as presently managed. Consider the national forest system's own estimate. For example, its contribution to the gross [national] domestic product in the year 2000 follows: Recreational programs, National Forest Service-$98 billion. Fish and wildlife programs-$13 billion. Mining-$10 billion. Timber extraction-a relatively minor $3.5 billion. At that, timber extraction is supported substantially by public subsidy.

Public lands, including the national forests, contribute only 6 percent of the U.S. timber yield. The picture seems too clear, at least to me, despite its more enlightened newer policies, such as no additional roads (except for the Tongass [National Forest]), for extraction to continue runs counter to the aims of the more important recreation policy. It is also economically counter-productive and contrary to the needs and desires of the American people as a whole who, let us not forget, own the land. America's timber needs can be met from the 94 percent of forests on private land, and from the burgeoning tree farms and the growing technology of woodland extension on already cleared lands. They should not be extracted from our national forests.

But there is another reason why the national parks, beyond what I have just stated, are destined to play an ever-larger role in this country, and as part of America's leadership role in the world. It has to do with a historical period we have now entered referred to, in fact, by Mr. Stanton and Mr. Kennedy that I believe can be properly called the century of the environment. The facts are very simple. Let me briefly recite them because they produce a bottom line very different from that recognized and promulgated by most economists and public philosophers. The world's population is now past 6 billion, and it's expected from United Nations projections to reach 8-10 billion before peeking and starting to descend in the second half of this century. Natural researchers suggest that this many people can be accommodated, but just barely. Per capita fresh water and arable land are descending steadily on a scale to levels experts agree are risky. The great majority of people are very poor and about 1 billion live in absolute poverty, suffering malnutrition. In fact they exist on the edge of starvation. All are struggling to raise the quality of their lives by any means at their disposal, including unfortunately, conversion of the surviving remnants of the natural environment. The great tropical forests where a majority of the world's plant and animal species live are half gone, and disappearing at the rate of about 1 percent of cover per year. In every way, with reference to the environment, Homo sapiens is moving very close to the edge. The planet is near the end of its human population explosion, fortunately, and is bracing now for what is likely to be the greater aftershock of the development.

Let me give you the bottom line now that matters. It's the ecological footprint, the average amount of productive land and shallow [oceans] appropriated from people by bits and pieces around the world for food, housing, water, energy, transportation, commerce, and waste management comprising a bit of Saudi Arabia for your oil, for example, a small piece in Costa Rica for your coffee, and so on. That ecological footprint is 2.5 acres per person in the developing world and 10 times that much-24 acres-in the United States. Here then is the bottom line that counts for the future. For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption would require four more planet Earths. Let me repeat that. For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption, and I should add with existing technology, would require four more planet Earths. The 4 billion people of the developing nations may never wish to attain our level of profligacy, but in trying to achieve a decent standard of living they have joined the industrial world in destroying most of the last of the natural environment and driving to extinction a large part of the world's fauna and flora. If present trends continue unabated, the planet could easily lose a quarter of its plant and animal species within the next 30 years and half by the end of the century. Meanwhile, Homo sapiens has become a geophysical force. The first species in life to obtain that dubious distinction, we have driven carbon dioxide to the highest levels in the last 200 thousand years, unbalanced the nitrogen cycle, and contributed to a global warming that will ultimately be bad news everywhere, including incidentally, creating severe pressure on the national parks, probably within a matter of just several decades.

I've burdened you with these projections that are, I assure you, solidly based on the best data and consensus of environmental experts in order to put in context what I and many other scientists see as the inevitable growing importance of the national parks in this country and other countries-for parks of other countries, for scientific research, and education vital to the future of society. Science and technology have led us into the present bottleneck of over-consumption and environmental deterioration, a bottleneck that we must pass through, and come out the other end as the population begins to subside, with as much dignity and as high a quality of life and with [as] much of the rest of life accompanying us as possible.

Now science and technology, guided by a sound environmental ethic, must see us out. The national parks are our treasure houses of the remnant natural ecosystems. They protect much of the nation's biodiversity. They are the baselines of our relatively undisturbed environment, and they need to be thoroughly understood, not only for their beauty and their wildness and deep history, but also to realize their unique and vital contribution to science and education, particularly of the future. So let me now, in support of this proposition, mention several key facts and concepts about biological diversity or "biodiversity" for short.

May I have the first slide, please? What is biodiversity? Quickly, a primer, it is the sum total of all the hereditary variability of organisms on [earth]. Biologists study it at three levels as shown in this Australian example. [Refers to slide]. At the top are the ecosystems. Then below, in the great variety of marsh, rain forest, lakes, river basins, and the likes, [are the] species. Species diversity is our focus, most of the time, because we can distinguish species, and we can study them as units. And then the species are composed of genes that vary; so genic diversity is the third and the lowest, fundamental level of biodiversity. And as illustrated in this slide, too, we have to consider, in looking at the ecosystems and down to the species, the enormous diversity in ecological roles and in biology of these species. Our focus is typically on vertebrates and plants in the national parks and other reserve concepts, but we're coming to realize how terribly important the great population diversity of small organisms are that are the foundation of the ecosystems, and these are the little things that run the earth. They are the invertebrates, they are the fungi, the microorganisms, and these are treasure houses of their own that have not even begun to be explored.

I'm told that already substantial numbers of new species are turning up of insects, for example, in the Great Smoky [Mountains] National Park survey, and I can assure you that you're carrying new species of bacteria on your shoes. It's just a matter of our penetrating down to that level with the new techniques of genomics and informatics, and this is happening as I speak, to begin to throw the first full light on this foundation of the biosphere that should be a major concern of the national parks' future research and education insofar as those activities address the needs of sustainability of the world environment.

Just to put another emphasis on the little things that run the earth, in passing, this [referring to slide] is a cross section of leaf litter, in a German forest. It could be eastern deciduous forest in the United States. This is actually as you see it [from] above; it shows the leaf litter as we see it, as we walk along it. It seems two-dimensional to us, but we have to appreciate that we're among the largest organisms on earth, certainly animals, and as we walk across leaf litter we are sort of like Godzilla walking over New York City. So [we need to] get down to the scale of this enormous biomass and diversity of organisms that live there and look at it in cross section, which is the next slide.

[Referring to next slide]. This is a couple of centimeters of cross section of that same environment. We see that in fact it is a three-dimensional world and that for the small organisms that live there, it varies from the surface where we see at the top dry leaves, down through the fragmenting leaf material and other woody and plant material to the creation of humus and on down we go through steep gradients of temperature, of light, and humidity, and space in which organisms can live and move. It's even a greater gradient than one finds in descending into the sea, and it is that little gradient of a few inches down to a foot or two that is going to be a major focus of our studies of terrestrial life in the future, both with biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems and the maintenance of the remnant natural systems.

When you go to that scale, you find that what we consider properly as big mammals [to be] a transient and relatively insignificant part of the environment, such as a rotting stump in the middle of a forest, is in fact a whole world to these organisms that's equivalent, say, to Puerto Rico, and these organisms, the species that occupy them, often by the thousands, in a single microenvironment of this kind, in fact have divided it up into different stages of decay and different segments of the rotting stump. It's a world in itself, and in this case we just show the micro-distribution of different species of fly larvae that are involved in decomposition and on feeding on one another. You add enormous arrays of fungi and other small organisms and you have what it takes to reduce a piece of wood, a large piece of wood in a healthy forest, properly through the right stages with maximum efficiency and minimum disturbance to the rest of the environment, reducing it to the basic nutrients that enter the streams of the material and energy cycles that sustain the ecosystems and ourselves.

When we separate out all these very small organisms, in this case one square foot illustrated, and just show the ones that are up to 10 millimeters in size down to 1/10 of a millimeter in size, even in that segment we see the enormous diversity that can be found on the floor of a healthy forest. This would be the total population for one square foot and even in that small amount of space, you will find thousands of these small organisms, not counting the bacteria, and they may contain hundreds of species just within that little sample area.

Now the exploration of the world's biodiversity, to the surprise of many people when they first learn about it, has just begun. The current number of species that we know in the world is between 1.5 and 1.8 million. That's how many species have been described, given a scientific name, and characterized at least to the point of some sort of set of diagnostic traits, with a specimen in a museum. Of the 1.5 to 1.8 million, it has been estimated that about 204,000 are known that are native to the United States, but there are large numbers of undiscovered species still in the United States. For example, I've just finished a monograph of a major ant group in which I'm covering about 20 percent of all the known ant species of the Western Hemisphere, including some 325 new species of which about 50 are from the United States. This is just one sample of a relatively well-known group, to give you a sense of how far we have to go.

In this pie diagram [referring to slide], as you can see, the known species are dominated by insects at the present time, and our own group, the mammals, are relatively insignificant in representation in terms of biodiversity. This can be illustrated by the species-scape in which that diagram you just saw is translated into representative organisms of each of those major groups and the size of the organism is made equivalent to the numbers of species known in that group. For this reason, the insects represented by this beetle are enormous. The beetle is enormous. It looms like a Goodyear blimp [above] that tiny elephant, I don't know if you can see it, which represents the 4,000 plus species of mammals, and they are sheltered underneath some 60,000 species of fungi. Incidentally, one estimate by an expert [is that] there are in the vicinity of 1.6 million species of fungi, to give you an idea of how much. There are in the vicinity of 1.6 million species of fungi to give you a sense of how little we know of that important group, and so on.

And then coming back, I just wanted to kind of give you a gestalt here of the enormous diversity of one of the groups that is the most diverse in the world, the beetles, and the knowledge that evolutionary biologists are getting out of those was illustrated by this. As you learn more and more about these individual groups, from mammals and flowering plants down to the most obscure groups of organisms, in this case we have beetles, you uncover the deep history, in this case, the remarkable patterns in which beetle species have been associated with plants of different kinds, all the way back to the Paleozoic. Over hundreds of millions of years they have split and crossed host and grown up, so to speak, co-evolved with, in this case, in most recent geological history, the flowering plant; so this is just part of the grand story of the world that has been worked out by the study of this kind of biodiversity.

Moving on quickly, I call your attention to the bacteria. No one has the faintest idea of how many bacterial species or other microbial species, including the newly separated group of the archaeons, how many exist on earth. There are, within one pinch of woodland soil, say deciduous forest, 1 gram, somewhere around 4 or 5 thousand species typically, almost all of which are unknown to science. Similarly in marine deposits, no one knows; not only do we not know what these species are or how many there are on a global scale, we know almost nothing about their functioning. Yet surely, they are right at the foundation of the ecosystems that we so ardently desire to preserve and understand. Fortunately the technology to identify bacterial species is now coming to hand, and this will be rapid genomic mapping.

I recently had the privilege of spending several days on a trip with Craig Venter who was one of those who brought the race to do the human genome mapping to completion, and we talked about these issues. Clearly, as the time and the money required to identify the genome of a species is continually shrinking by advancing technology, not only in molecular biology by the shotgunning method but also by Moore's Law and the exponential increase in information gathering capacity and dissemination, surely we will be able to break and identify individual bacterial species by their genome and break the whole thing open. He said much better than that. Let me tell you with the shotgunning techniques, refining of it, we should be able to take a pinch of soil, and process it automatically and read out the species that are in it, much in the same way as you walk through a woodlot with a pair of binoculars and the field guide and read out over a period of time the bird species that are in that woodlot. So this is part of the prospect of the spectacular advance that may be ahead of us, is ahead of us, I believe, in the study of biodiversity.

Then dare we even mention diversity of genes? Suffice it to say that the amount of information in each species of which I speak is enormous. In the case of the human genome, what you see looks like a massive micro-spaghetti [referring to slide] and is one 2,500th of the human genome. In other words, to show all of the DNA in a single human cell would require 2,500 panels of this kind, to give a feel for it.

Another way of getting a feel for it is if you were to take all four strands of DNA from a single cell of your body, one cell of genetic instructions in it, the DNA, the strands of DNA in the nucleus of that cell, and then you stretch them out (you can't unstretch the double helix but you can stretch out the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary spiraling packets [of] the DNA strands), you stretch those out and put them end on end, you would have a molecule, about a meter long, about two nanometers-2 millionths of a meter across. You couldn't see it at all but if you could magically magnify it until you got a strand about the size of a wrapping string, which is clearly visible, then your string would be-that's one cell, now you can see it, just barely-would extend from Washington to Omaha. As you walked along it, reading off the genetic letters, you'd be reading off about 100 of these base pairs every inch. That gives you the amount, an idea of the amount of information. Only a small fraction of that differentiates species, but nonetheless this is what is produced by a million years of evolution, in every species, in a span of a thousand or 10,000 [years] for the most fast evolving species, to species that have remained relatively unchanged for millions, or even tens of millions of years, that reside in our national parks.

That is what you lose when you let a species go to extinction. We haven't even begun to read these books, and understand what they all mean in terms of the whole collectivity of life, much less read the entire library. That's what lies before us.

Moving on, you are all aware that worldwide, not just in the United States, we are losing a great deal of the national environment and biodiversity. The most important cause of species extinction is habitat destruction. You can remember what the factors are that are eliminating the biodiversity of the world, these treasure houses that each species represent. Remember it by the acronym h-i-p-p-o. That that stands for habitat loss, like the rain forest being cut over in Brazil. H for habitat loss. I for invasive, something we're becoming aware of more constantly, the introduced species that are causing enormous damage, even in the national parks themselves. P the first p for pollution, the second p for this primary driver of it all, population, overpopulation. And the o is for overharvesting.

The news that you may have seen in the paper this morning is that the first primate species has now been declared officially extinct. That's Miss Waldron's [colobus] monkey of west Africa. After years of looking for it, it has been recognized as having gone extinct, and the thing that undoubtedly drove it down, the two factors were habitat destruction, but then the coup de grace was administered by the bush meat trade, the hunting of these monkeys for meat.

With the reduction of area, we get an almost canonical, highly predictable decline in the number of species that can be maintained sustainable, no matter what we do, unless we get deeply involved in the remaining area, like gardeners in introducing species from elsewhere when they go extinct, and cultivating the land really to maintain diversity in some manner. As you reduce the area of a habitat, the number of species come down roughly between the third and sixth root in most cases and typically around the fourth root of the area. We can see this illustrated in this classic case of the number of species of reptiles and amphibians in the West Indies. As we go from Cuba with its substantial mass through Hispaniola and Jamaica, Puerto Rico, to the lesser islands of the Lesser Antilles, we are dropping according to about a fourth root of the area in the number of species that have been sustained for long periods of time on each of these islands in turn. The rough rule of thumb is that when you reduce the area of a natural environment, say a forest or a tributary system by damming, [and] you reduce it by 90 percent down to 1/10 of what it was before, the number of species that can be maintained sustainable is dropped by half.

And this applies not just to the true island or typical islands of lands and the sea but also habitat islands that you are all intimately familiar from the arctic alpine mountain tops of our highest mountains [referring to slide], to the lakes that are essentially islands in a sea of land, and in the case of very small organisms, as much as a single tree that can sustain the population of, say, insects for a long period of time, an island separated by, say, grassland or agricultural land from the forest that it originally was part of.

Now an excellent illustration of this principle is our national parks, the national parks of western North America. Presented in this manner, you see that they are islands and they're increasingly insularized by conversion of land all around them. They differ in size and they differ in degree of isolation from other islands that can serve as source areas for reinvasion of species that go locally extinct. During the past 100 years, we find that the mammal species have been declining in these parks, automatically, that this is the curve showing overall local extinctions. No species of mammal has to my knowledge become completely extinct, globally extinct, but they have been diminished greatly in their distribution and abundance. And in the smaller parks, a fair number of mammals have gone extinct, and in the largest parks, like Glacier, there has been no extinction so this is a basic principle that I just mentioned, illustrated in the case of those parks. And when we go around the world, we see the desperate need, even more desperate than in North America, for preservation of land, and it's a base of an argument I'm going to come to in just a moment.

The degradation of the great rain forest, the last remaining wilderness areas, is accelerating where almost half of the species of organisms that are found nowhere else-endemic species-are located in the so-called hot spots. These are smaller areas that are under intense pressure. This is illustrated, for example, by the decline of forest in Indonesia where there's a virtual holocaust going on, in Borneo for example. The deforestation and fires have reduced the orangutan population from a couple of hundred thousand individuals to 1/10 of that number, about 26,000 estimated existing, and many believe that the orangutan on Borneo and Sumatra will be extinct in the wild in 20 years. The same fate awaits other very famous animals such as the Sumatran rhino and vast arrays of other species.

Let me give you quickly in passing portraits of these species to remind us all that only when we recognize species-we know what they are, starting with the charismatic, the most prominent, and the fuzzy, the most popular on down to these obscure organisms that we step on without even being aware of their existence-the more we become familiar with them. And we are becoming more familiar with them. It's inevitable [to] drive science to make it that way the more we care about them.

And among those that have disappeared-the recent departed and the soon to be departed can be mentioned-I'll just give you quick examples in passing. The Hawaiian bird fauna, which is down since the first Polynesians put ashore and then with damage carried on by the Americans and other colonists since the 18th century, has declined from about 150 species to about 25. Land bird species. And of those, more than half are in danger, and they include the famous honeycreepers that had radiated to fill many niches and take many spectacular forms. Most are extinct or right on the edge of extinction.

For the most threatened American species we can return to Hawaii, for the banded tree snails are being wiped out by the uglandina or the rosy wolf snails. Half are gone and the others are endangered. Hawaii incidentally-I don't want to embarrass anyone-but Hawaii is known as the extinction capital of America and is one of hottest hot spots of the world.

Coming to America as a whole, we see the status, now, of the 200,000 American native species and find that on the basis of our knowledge of so-called focal groups-the flowering plants and vertebrates primarily-that we have lost 1 percent completely globally, all gone in the last 100 years, mostly in the last 100 years. We find critically imperiled-on the brink of extinction-7 percent of American species, and so on, for a total of roughly 1/3 of all American species [being] endangered or at peril at some level as illustrated in these data recently put together by The Nature Conservancy National Heritage Program. And here is the scorecard for different states. We see that the red, those where the largest number of species have gone extinct, include Hawaii, California, and I'm a little ashamed to say my native state of Alabama. Alabama has a serious problem because of the massive extinction of aquatic forms there.

May I have the lights please?

Let me tell you from a biologist's perspective, the kinds of fundamental and environmental research for which the national parks are ideally suited as seen by biologists most active in the studies of biodiversity and conservation. Ideally suited, that is, in their role, these parks, as the country's stronghold of baseline ecosystems. First, we need a census of the fauna and flora that extend beyond the vertebrates and flowering plants to the teeming populations of smaller organisms, in minute detail from insects to fungi and eventually microbes, a substantial fragment of which still, as I said, even lack a scientific name, and the vast majority of which has not been studied in any way biologically. Any one of those species, I should emphasize, could be a keystone species, or any small set of these species, upon disappearing, some of them, even before they had been discovered as a species or at least studied biologically, could cause an important shift, usually in the way of reduction, in what exists within the park, up to and including the level of the familiar flowering plants and vertebrates.

The initiation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park of an ATBI or All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory that aims to learn the identity of every one of thousands of species in the park is an exciting pioneering concept. It's admired by biologists and I think it will be-I know it will be, because the talk is already buzzing-one of the first of its kind in the world and it will be widely imitated.

Go back to the slides, I find I do have a couple more.

Building up from this baseline of exact knowledge, ecologists will be in a better position to understand in detail how ecosystems such as forests and grasslands and lakes work. How the species composing them are assembled, how they interact, as in this depiction of the [unintelligible] cycle, and then what maintains the biodiversity at all levels and what causes it to fall apart. We're nowhere close, ecologists are not, of being able to do that now.

To accomplish this difficult task, ecologists also need the opportunity to monitor natural systems that are protected over many years, to see how cycles of predators and prey evolve naturally to control the numbers of animals, as in the classic Isle Royale National Park study. We are just at the dawn of this particular era of long-term studies for which the national parks are ideally suited. Furthermore, we need the kind of knowledge that we do not now have that allows us to predict which of the thousands of alien species in the United States are most likely to run amok in our environment. Like the balsam wooly adelgid, the small insect that devastated, as indicated in this diagram, the spruce-fur forest of the southeastern United States, and the horrifying brown tree snake of the South Pacific, which in the past 30 years has extinguished all of the native land birds of Guam. And in turn, the practical knowledge gained will serve the Park Service's role as steward and guide of America's ancient heritage.

In sum, I can only endorse the Natural Resource Challenge launched last year by the Director, Robert Stanton, to revitalize the scientific arm of the Service, a large step into the century of the environment. It meets the provision of the National Parks Omnibus Act of 1998, and addresses the "house divided" issue raised in Richard Sellar's history of the National Park Service. I am happy that Congress has appropriated funds this year for biodiversity censuses.

In so doing I speak for a growing number of scientists who look to the National Park Service as a major force in fundamental research on biodiversity, ecology, and conservation, in much the same way that medical scientists look to the National Institutes of Health and space scientists [do] to NASA. Many scientists will be glad to form partnerships with the National Park Service. They will welcome access to the parks, and collaboration with the staff. They will help you further the primary aims of the Service with support and solid information of the kind needed to solve the complex and accelerating problems you face in this century.

The National Park Service can further the country's needs, even more than in the past, to promote science education, a high priority now as seen by more and more of our political leaders. There's no better classroom than our national parks, no more respected teachers than their guides and experts. Its educational potential alone, quite apart from the scientific potential, is a persuasive argument to Congress to provide badly needed support for the growth and the strengthening of this absurdly underfunded Service. The National Park Service can help this country provide an example to the rest of the world, which is desperately needed to protect and make full use of the natural environment. If we don't expand our national parks, if we don't make them centers of research, if we don't develop the scientific capability of fulfilling a global environmental ethic, who will? We can't expect Ghana or Paraguay to do it. You are, whether you planned it that way or not, natural leaders on a broadening front whose actions will have growing influence in the United States and elsewhere, especially in the developing countries and far beyond the traditional venue of the national parks.

Almost 50 years ago, in the summers of 1951 and 1952, as a young graduate student at Harvard, I first visited some of our parks. The Great Smoky Mountains, Glacier, Yosemite, and Yellowstone to conduct research on my favorite group, the ants. I collected specimens in violation of the law and I made confession directly to Director Stanton yesterday, and was provided provisional absolution.

The parks are magic still. They're a potential new source of strength in a rapidly changing and still dangerous world, a world that is becoming dangerous in a new environmental way. We're all looking to you for that kind of leadership and inspiration, added to the noble service you already give.

Thank you.