Afternoon Plenary Address:
Natural Resource Stewardship

Dr. Peter Raven
Washington University
Tuesday, September 12

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

Thank you.

Director Ridenour. It's a pleasure to be introduced by you because many of us think of the Vail Agenda, which came out in your administration as starting the whole series of events that have brought us here today. It's a privilege and an honor to be able to address this group because there is no group of people, as has been said on numerous occasions, and with great justification, in whom the American public has greater trust. Why is that?

I want to begin with an allusion to Larry McMurtry's book, Lonesome Dove, which many of us enjoyed and saw in television in a great miniseries. As you recall, as captain Call and Angus McCrae herded their cattle north from the border, we were treated to the unfolding of an epic that taught us a great deal about what it means to get older, about our dreams-singular and collective-and how we could think and value those dreams, about our destiny and about a vision good enough to justify our lives. But as Call and McCrae headed northward, we were treated to a portrait of a frontier that was literally transferring as they went across. The disappearance of the frontier as both were getting older gave us the feeling of something passing through their fingers, something universal, and I think that's why so many of us were so impressed by the way in which as their lives were winding on towards their end. The frontier was being populated with settlers and the kinds of ways that had been known earlier was seen to be disappearing on the shortgrass plains east of the Rockies.

As that epic unfolded-the kind of a West that John Wesley Powell was one of the first to understand well, and that his biographer, Wallace Stegner, was able to understand so well-was changing in ways that people began to feel apprehensive. We still don't know very well how to live in harmony with the West. We still don't know what it has to offer us. The federal government is still very involved in subsidizing the West in a variety of different ways, but it's our frontier and it's a changed frontier. Yet that frontier, so many significant parts of which are preserved so well within our National Park System, collectively represents our dreams, and our memories, and our view of the future in ways that I think we don't always appreciate fully enough.

So here we are in the age of information technology, in the age of biological technology, in the age of rapid advances of all kinds as we churn our way into the new millennium and new century. Yet somehow deep within us we know that none of those technologies can take the place of wisdom. Of real understanding, of what our lives mean, and of what our country means, and what our planet means to us.

In Lonesome Dove, the aging friends and the frontier became interchangeable metaphors for one another. The challenges of the future, unknown but somehow acceptable, and yet still mysterious and challenging. Whether we recognize it or not in our day-to-day lives and in forming our own dreams and aspirations, we're still developing those themes individually and collectively. And we're just beginning-for reasons that I'm going to talk about-to take the first faltering steps. In learning about how at last we might be able to live at peace with the earth that nurtures all of us. In the same time that was portrayed in McMurtry's novel, Frederick Jackson Turner-who was later to become America's greatest historian-was announcing the closing of the frontier, an announcement that was echoed at the turn of the century by the Census Bureau. Americans through the latter half of the 19th century began to accelerate a theme that had begun in colonial times, and it was a theme of concern with preserving some of the kinds of wild spaces that they were just beginning to understand and enjoy.

Indeed, the visions of paradise that were painted by waves of Europeans starting in early renaissance times and pouring out to populate and accelerate population development in parts of Africa and parts of Asia, and certainly in North and South America, those waves of settlers confronted a paradise and began to destroy that paradise over the course of the past 500 or 600 years. In renaissance times, the population of the whole world was about 500 million people, less than twice the population of the United States at the present time. In the 1790s the Reverend Thomas Malthus was warning us that human population growth would surely outstrip food, our ability to produce sufficient food. The world population had doubled over several hundred years to a billion people. But Malthus' predictions did not come true-or at least did not come true quickly-because humans were busy at work exploiting the deposits of oil, gas, and coal that had been built up over billions of years by the activities of biological organisms-bacteria and land plants predominantly among them-exploiting them over the 250 year course of the industrial revolution to produce a world in which we were increasingly, and to degree that we understood only poorly, taking away much more than could be sustained.

And so our numbers grew to 2 billion over 130 years; in 1930, to 2½ billion. In 1950, just 50 years ago, and in the past 50 years have grown further from 2½ billion to 6 billion and counting, somewhere pointing for a future when we hope the world population may stabilize at a level something like 9 to 10 billion people. That's if we keep paying attention worldwide to the need for limiting our numbers in our effort to win sustainability in a world where increased consumption seems to be everyone's ideal and yet a world in which, as my distinguished colleague Ed Wilson pointed out this morning, it would take about four more copies of this planet to support us if we were going to be supported at a level like that to which we've become accustomed in the United States. If the whole world population were to enjoy the kind of life that we enjoy here, four more planet Earths would have to be found somewhere to do the trick and that's not very easy, not even for the can-do National Park Service, I believe.

Now against this background, this kind of disappearance of the frontier and lamenting values passed in the images of Eden that we're so comfortable with that members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition gathered around their campfire near Madison Junction in Wyoming on September 19, 1870, and laid the plans that brought congressional action just 18 months later to create Yellowstone as our first and one of our most wonderful national parks.

Consider the fact that when they were around that campfire in 1870, it had been just 24 years since the survivors of the Donner Party had staggered down from the Sierra Nevada into the spring sunlight of the Sacramento Valley in California, and just one year since the golden spike was driven at Promontory Point opening the country to coast-to-coast rail transportation at that time. In fact, it had been only 66 years since Lewis and Clark set out from here-from St. Louis-on their way west. If we look back 66 years from the present we find that's right in the middle of the Depression: WPA, Civilian Conservation Corps times, times that don't seem so distant pass to us. If you view the time perspective in that way, you can see how pioneering and how novel the spirit was to begin to preserve these lands such a short time later.

Lewis and Clark, of course, were inspired by a truly visionary man, Thomas Jefferson, who really had a conception of the West, and earlier a political and a democratic conception, laid the foundations for our country, truly as we know it at the present time.

With all that going on so rapidly-and again just for underlining, 23 years after the Donner Party-you could have gotten on a train and ridden out to Sacramento without taking a deep breath. With all that going on rapidly, you can see why Americans were longing to preserve some of what they were discovering and developing, and they wanted to be able to show future generations, their children and grandchildren, something about their collective history, the consciousness that they had then of what was happening, and to preserve some of their memory.

We Americans are profoundly affected and molded in our national character by that history, as Wallace Stegner put it, and I think this could almost really serve as a slogan of what the National Park Service is all about and why it exists and why it is so important to all of us. While we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment busters in history and slashing and cutting our way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land. If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity becomes in America something more than an abstract dream, mark it down at least partially to the fact that we were in subtle ways subdued by that wilderness. In the light of that statement, it becomes clear why we Americans have such faith and belief and confidence and good wishes for the National Park Service, and we have entrusted so many of our greatest cultural and national treasures to you, proudly, confidently, and in the spirit of real joy, and you have not disappointed us.

When I first thought of addressing you, I thought it was in terms of encouraging the National Park Service members here in the job that you're doing for our common benefit. But the more I thought about it, I realized that although you are our representatives in doing that job, it's a job that we're all doing together. We're all members of your team and you're members of our team, representing us in specific actions, but confidently drawing on the support that you deserve and that we freely give you in getting on with the job of preserving these extraordinary treasures for the benefit of all of the people our country and of the world.

Now, as America moved forward into the 20th century, environmentalism … began to grow. We can mention the foundation of the National Audubon Society in 1905 or the controversy over Hetch Hechy Valley, which was a sensitivity exercise and resulted in the damn being built and water supply being turned over to San Francisco in 1913. John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot [were] among the leaders of the early conservation movement, and of course the Organic Act [led] to the formation of the National Park Service in 1916. Through that act, in ways that you have to wonder as so often with our major legislation, people really understood fully the promise and the commitment that had been made by the passage of that act. In a sense, the history of the National Park Service for the past 84 years has been a history of struggling with the meaning of that act and wrestling with what it was that we all were charged to do and how Americans would realize the benefits of the congressional act that was passed at that time.

As the century went on, I would note the influence of Ding Darling and his environmental cartoons, which began to appear in 1916. If you go back and look at those cartoons, as many of you know, you will see in many ways that he was way ahead of his time in uniting themes of conservation and sustainability in ways that were meaningful to Americans. Of course, he eventually became the director of what was then called the National Biological Survey-the Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1930s-[and] was able to charm President Roosevelt and moved us forward in ways that were very substantial.

Now after the war, Americans were pretty tired of all of this and were delighting in the prosperity that comes from controlling about 40 percent of the global economy, which is something that we did temporarily. Now we have to get by with 4½ percent of the world's people controlling only 25 percent of the global economy, which is still a pretty generous serving. The next time somebody tries to hoodwink you in thinking we can go back to the real values of the 1950s and what they stand for, that would involve America capturing 40 percent of the world' economic output, and that's not likely to happen.

[Other] things followed that brought us into a fuller realization of the environment [after] World War II. Among other leaders, Aldo Leopold appeared in 1949, and Leopold talked eloquently about changing the role of Homo sapiens from owner of the community to plain member of the community and citizen. He excited further dreams and more worthy visions on the part of many Americans.

And then Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, collaborating on This is the Earth in 1960, [and that] was a profound step because here for the first time, poetic language and beautiful photographs were combined in something that really helped Americans to understand what it was that they had. Silent Spring in 1962 was a further step in that direction.

And of course Earth Day-April 22, 1970- [was] a real landmark in American environmentalism. Do you know that 20 million people actually physically attended Earth Day celebrations in one community or another. One out of ten Americans was actually physically out at an Earth Day celebration in 1970. Quite remarkable. I think that's more people than were watching "Survivor" even being able to sit on their easy chairs in their living rooms, which is some kind of record.

How did the parks respond to all of this environmental fervor in the United States and all of the key environmental legislation that passed from '69 to '73? Not really very well. Not really very well in a very, very confused way. As things like Mission '66 came forward, your agency was obviously not sure what it was, exactly, that it was supposed to be doing and where the was balance between receiving visitors in good facilities, integrating activities with private industry, getting it together, or preserving the values that were in the parks, but as numbers of visitors to the parks began to as well, the mission became more and more challenging and more and more complex. The overall culture of your Service began to change as more and more people began to wonder what was really involved and that's really what gets us here today.

But let's step back for a minute and look at the big picture. The big picture in a way for people started about 10,000 years ago, only about 400 generations ago. I'm sure you're all aware that 10,000 years ago when crop agriculture was beginning to be developed for the first time at several widely scattered centers around the world, the entire population of the whole world was about like the population of greater St. Louis at the present time-2-, 3-, 4-million people. The density of people throughout the world-throughout Eurasia and North and South America-was like the density of aboriginal people before the Europeans got there. Those people learned how to burn off big patches of real estate to encourage game and had gotten pretty good at sticking big spears into the sides of large animals and birds for a ready supply of meat and they drove a few of them to extinction before the invention of crop agriculture. But it was only with the invention of crop agriculture and the ability that people had to build up large numbers, in villages and towns and ultimately in cities, that allowed people to specialize in different professions, to evolve ruling classes, and scholarly classes, and artisans, and all the other kinds of specializations that gradually over the course of the last 400 generations, a tiny period in human history, allowed the kind of population growth that I was talking about earlier.

Human impact on the Earth intensified as our numbers grew, and as our expectations grew. To illustrate that clearly, let's look at the last 50 years. Let me pose this a little bit on a personal level. I got interested in collecting insects like my friend Ed [Wilson] when I was very young, in fact about six years old in San Francisco. I didn't have a good enough transportation to get up to the national parks and sneak them out there, so I had to content myself with the vacant lots around my house.

I joined Sierra Club in 1948 at the age of 12. The Sierra Club was mostly an outing club then. It wasn't so very concerned with conservation. It was kind of in a lull. It certainly had it for a theme but it was more interested in skiing and hiking and so forth, and I joined it mainly for reasons of going on outings.

The first outing I can remember was one of the several over the road over Tioga Pass [in Yosemite], and the first question I can remember-and this is as a teenager-[about] the park [had to do with] reading about Tuolumne Meadows and the fact they had been preserved to be a meadows and the trees were growing up and what should people do [about] it? Sound familiar? I think you all have something like that going on in the parks that you're most familiar with.

One thing that really brings the current world crisis to mind very vividly for me was at the age of about 14, in 1952, I discovered a new species of [bush] in the Presidio in San Francisco and it was named after me. It was one bush the size of this table, and I walked up and grabbed [unintelligible] and slapped it in my plant press and left. When we convened a meeting on biodiversity in Washington two years ago, we saw a presentation by Middleton and Litchwager on Don't Say Goodbye. You may have seen the film. There was my plant and here were people walking up to it on planks that they had put down to avoid stepping on the earth near it so they wouldn't put fungi in the soil, wearing gloves so they wouldn't infect it, all very [neatly], all very cognizant of the fact that this is the only individual of this species in the whole world.

Some of you are old enough to know-but others may not be-that the idea of biological extinction really didn't get rolling until the late 1970s. For example, when I first went to Colombia in South America in 1959 for two months, nothing could have been farther from my mind than the idea that the forests I was looking at were being destroyed or that there wouldn't always be a supply of plants and interesting things to look at there, that the world was really changing very rapidly.

From the mid 1970s onward, I along with a number of other colleagues have been an active proponent of the need to preserve biodiversity because the facts have become all too clear. What happened in the 50-year period in 1950 to 2000?

Well, one quarter of all the topsoil in the world was lost in that 50-year period while the world population grew from 2½ billion to 6 billion. One quarter of all the topsoil in the world. Twenty percent of all the agricultural land in the world-and we cultivate an area collectively about the size of South America-20 percent of all the agricultural land in the world was lost so that actually we're feeding 6 billion people now on 75 percent of the topsoil and 80 percent of the agricultural land that we had available 50 years ago.

Now we justifiably take pride in the fact that we're more or less feeding that number of people, but on the other hand, think about it. We can't go on losing topsoil; we can't go on losing agricultural land. Americans between 1945 and 1973 paved over an area about the size of the state of Ohio. Where does it all go? The Central Valley of California, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys-one of the prime agricultural sites in the world-is going to be a sprawling suburb as the population of California gross from 30 to 40 to 50 million to who knows where. It's a very desirable place to live but where does the productivity come from?

During that same 50 year period, we added 1/6 to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, spurring on global warming that's already widely understood by scientists to have caused about a two-degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperatures. It is going on into the indefinite future in climate models. I hope-if you haven't looked at it-you will look at the Administration's global change report, which was based on three years of very careful study and is available on the web. [You will] see what some of the impacts are likely to be for the United States over the next 100 years and we, as I've already said, controlling 25 percent of the world's economy, can do a lot better in adapting to that global change than can most people in the world.

We also managed to get rid of, through the CFCs that were mentioned this morning, about 8 percent [of the] the atmospheric ozone layer, which raises the incidence of malignant skin cancer in the latitude of the United States by a fifth, and the biological effects are poorly known. We cut down about a third of the forests in the world that were around then without replacing them. And we've driven rates of extinction-historical rates of extinction since the last great extinction 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, the dinosaur era, when the last dinosaurs went out in the last 65 million years in fossil records. The average life of species compare[d] with known extinctions of vertebrates and plants over the last 300 years [shows that] we're hundreds of times above the background rate. Hundreds are becoming extinct for every one that evolves, and because of the habitat fragmentation and other issues that Ed outlined so well this morning, we expect…, depending upon what actions we take and there are always actions that we can take. That's what I want to leave you with. We expect that the extinction rate may go up to between 1,000 and 10,000 times the background rate. [In the] worst case we could lose 25 percent of all the kinds of organisms on land during the course of the-sorry 2/3, two out of every three kind of organisms on land-over the course of the century that we've just entered.

We can manage to do better than that, and that's where you all and we all come in and I'll get to that in a minute.

George Shaller the great conservationist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York stated it this way, and I think this is an important take-home line, "We cannot afford another century like the last one." Think of the world, think of we Americans as being in the position of a family that just inherited a million dollars. It's been getting by on $40,000 per year before that so it inherits a million dollars and begins spending $250,000 a year. Great, we're having such a great time. We're rich. $250,000 this year, $250,000 the next year, $250,000 the next year, and then you begin to look at the bank account and it's not there any more. In other words, they would be living off the principal and not living off the interest and that's exactly what we collectively are doing. We're living off the principal. We're not living off the interest. That is a definition of sustainability.

Sustainability is a place to which we will get, and I'll have a little bit more to say about it. It's a condition to which we'll get, whether we plan to do it or not. But in your individual parks, in your individual states, in America as a whole and in the world as a whole, what we are doing collectively is defining what the condition of the world will be when we reach sustainability. Obviously, or [we're defining] what the condition of your park will be when you reach sustainability. Obviously, we can expend only so much and at some point you get to the point where there's less there, less scenic value, less forest, less vegetation, fewer creepy crawlies in the soil like Ed showed us.

And that's the way it will be. So, what we're making [is] a decision collectively-but you really are making this decision individually for your parks-[as to] what kind of a park is going to last? The whole history of the industrial revolution has happened so rapidly. Things have changed so [fast]; they're changing so much faster now that we are living in a time of unparalleled challenge. We're living in a time when our actions will make more difference than any other actions in the future [or] any other actions in the past. We are deeply challenged. We must stop living off the principal, and start living off the interest.

In the world as it exists at the present time, there is great inequality. One out of four people are getting by on less than $1 a day. One out of eight people are malnourished in terms of getting less than 80 percent of the recommended calories that they need per day for their brains to develop properly when they are children or for their bodies not to waste away when they are adults. If you take a broader definition of malnutrition-like that espoused by Brundtland, head of the World Health Organization, and take malnutrition into account in vitamins and necessary minerals-one out of two people in the world are malnourished at the present time.

In the poorest segments of the world, women and children spend their whole time going and getting water and firewood to supply their families. There is no way that the women and children in those families can express themselves as part of the society or contribute their brainpower or their imagination or their vision to the collective good of their areas or [to] the world as a whole.

I used to debate Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland that used to say, "The more people there are in the world, the better off we'll be because the more talent there will be in the world." To that I used to say, all very well and good, but if you have the talents of Beethoven and you're starving to death in Port-au-Prince, you're going to have a hard time demonstrating your talent to anybody. It doesn't work.

What we're really engaged in, whether we want to appreciate it or not, is a lack of social justice. And discrimination on a world scale, whether we appreciate it or not, is wrong for the same reason that discrimination is wrong in the United States or anywhere else. We not only are doing something that is unjust and immoral-plain and simply, an unacceptable form of behavior-we are denying ourselves the creative abilities, the joy, and the different philosophies that people have to contribute to the kind of rich life that we would really justifiably like to have for ourselves and our children and everyone else's children. In other words, discrimination, whether overt or covert, whether active or passive, is not only immoral and just plain wrong, it's incredibly stupid. That's the kind of discrimination we engage in.

[Applause]

That's the kinds of discrimination we engage in when we allow our representatives in Congress to pretend that America has no interest in foreign countries. We can't support our appropriation of 25 percent of the world's goods for 4½ percent of the world. People without stable, sustainable, strong countries around the world and every single thing we do to strengthen them, to nurture them, and to recognize them as members of a community, which along with us, is managing this incredibly beautiful, wonderful planet Earth along with us, we simply can't do it alone. The Apollo 10 images that came back from space should have taught us for once and for all that we couldn't do it alone, but it seems to be a lesson that is very hard to learn.

Kai Lee … in a book called Compass and Gyroscope, dispenses sustainability this way. He said, "How much misery will it take to make a global norm of sustainability first visible, then credible, then feasible, then inevitable?" We do not know and we do not know if the lessons of environmental disaster can be learned in time to ward off still more suffering. However bleak that prospect, we in the rich nations must bear the certain knowledge that our societies are both historically responsible for many of the circumstances that imprison the poor, and that we will, on average, fair much better than they.

Against this background, it is possible to see that sustainable development is not a goal, not a condition likely to be attained on earth, as we know it. Rather, it is more like freedom or justice, a direction in which we must strive, along which we search for a life good enough to warrant our comforts.

What does this all mean to the National Park Service? Well Ed pointed out this morning there are about 204,000 species, give or take a few tens of thousands, that are actually recorded in the United States, and if you do, try to see how many species there might be in the United States by proportional representation of groups that are relatively well known, you probably say about 600,000, of which then we know about one out of three. It's kind of a striking illustration of the fact that the elements that make up the functioning of the ecosystems that we're trying to manage are themselves very poorly known, and of course the grinding away of ecology in the development of models, an area to which Ed Wilson has contributed significantly, is proceeding very slowly and is basically itself a post-World War II phenomenon as ecology has developed during the 20th century and become a real science during the latter years of the 20th century.

Well, the Park Service, which is such a bellwether in playing the most important role in preserving America's cultural and natural heritage, has a very significant role to play from here on out. I'd like to make eight … recommendations or points or things that I think are needed to be able to do this. I would like to say, not really as one of these points but as a given, I just exhort you to go on doing what you're doing and to make our national parks and monuments as welcoming and accessible for every segment of our society as they could possibly be.

Americans pay the freight. The [parks] are not always fully accessible for one reason or another. I would just urge you, really not as one of my recommendations, but I would urge you, with your greatest degree of creativity and your most finely tuned moral sense, to find ways to make this whole system as accessible and as meaningful to every segment of the population of the United States as you possibly could.

Now with specific reference to biodiversity, as I said I have eight points.

First of all, I believe and I've worked on these questions for a long time in the formulation of various reports, that you need a combination of a well designed, a well thought out, and an appropriate scientific staff in every park. You cannot possibly manage the natural resources of individual parks without having an adequate staff in the park. I think it is entirely appropriate and I'm on record as saying this in writing, that BRD [the USGS Biological Resources Division] should provide a very strong framework for your activities. And of course I would like to see their activities adequately funded, and I would like to see them be the centerpiece of a government-wide and beyond the government into the private-sector effort to deal with and understand our national biodiversity. But I repeat, and this is a very important point for me, and it's something that has gone back and forth in the history of the Service, I would repeat that there is no way in the world that you can adequately manage the resources in your individual parks without an appropriate and well selected scientific staff on the ground to deal with the problems that you confront. And I'd like to see those parks used as places for the development of ecological models and as places where we can go on testing continuously the relationship between individual knowledges developed and the application of that knowledge.

Secondly, I would like to see the National Park Service adopt clearly and unequivocally, a goal of managing all of our parks for the maintenance of the greatest amount of biodiversity possible. And I think that that is a worthy national goal. Biodiversity, which in your … individually, collectively, and certainly spiritually and esthetically is the proper patrimony of Americans. The parks have an indispensable role to play in helping to preserve biodiversity and that ought to move right up to the top of the list as a clearly articulated, understood, and acceptable goal for the Service.

My third point is-and Ed did mention this briefly, but I think it deserves to be underlined-you're going to have to pay special attention to alien invasive species because you are just not going to be able to manage the parks without paying attention to them, without doing research on them, without understanding them. I just have to mention tamarisk and sheet grass in the West and honeysuckle, privet, in the East, or tall low trees or passionflower veins in Hawaii, to make it clear for all, of course it's well known in the Smokies and elsewhere, to make it clear that without understanding, and working on, and having considerable resources going into the matter of controlling alien invasives, the goals of the parks, in terms of preserving biodiversity cannot be met.

A fourth point I would make, and this is sort of preaching to the choir but I think it's important to make as an individual point, is once you've figured out what to do, you've got to receive adequate funding to be able to do it. It's all very well and good to make theoretical prognoses about how to promote sustainability of natural resources in the parks but you've got to do this in such a way with all of your political strength that the funds will then be forthcoming to let you do the job.

My fifth point is that the National Park Service, and this is really obvious but it's something that we have had a very difficult time doing in the United States, although we're beginning to get on to it, there must be increased coordination with all of the other land management agencies and with the private sector. I know that in the Department of Interior, collectively there's a great willingness to do this, but a general feeling that the funds are just not there to be able to do it.

Well I'm here to underline what you all know from your own experience. There's no such thing as managing a part of the United States adequately without the cooperation of many agencies and the private sector. You got a pretty good start in the Yellowstone region. The Everglades are a very good example of collaboration with the Corps of Engineers, National Marine Fishery Service, and so forth, but those examples need to be multiplied many times over because where the rubber really hits the road with private landowners wondering about their own biodiversity and what the laws mean to them, it is really only a coordinated view or coordinated managing and understanding of the biodiversity, the ecosystems, and the challenges facing them that can lead to a winning strategy.

Sixth point is something I've already mentioned. In order to deal with the parks and other protected areas in the long run, I highly recommend that the Park Service and the Department of the Interior generally begin investing further in understanding global climate change as the biggest example, but many other kinds of pollution that arise outside the parks, because again, you can't manage the parks if they're going to be sliding away under you. One climate model has the whole southern United States as an open, arid, grassy plain by the end of the next century. That's a model. It may or may not be a reasonable prediction, but if that goes on it's going to change the nature of the parks that you are trying to preserve in that area [where] the pinelands have moved north into Ohio and Pennsylvania. It's something that you have to take into account and on a more local basis. I'll just symbolize it by Grand Canyon air pollution problems and say, or acid rain problems in the Smokies, and just say those are all things that are going to need a lot of attention in the future.

My last two points are a little bit on a different wavelength. I simply feel it necessary to endorse the fact that the greatest value of the national parks in producing a healthy and a sustainable future for Americans is going to be in the educational arena. Your role as educators of the tens of millions of visitors that you receive annually is the most precious commodity that you have in the way in which you really can make the greatest difference. Again, let's go for linkages.

I would like to say finally in line with some of the values that I have outlined earlier that specific authorization to deal even more comprehensively than is being done now with foreign countries in helping them to understand the analogous problems that they're confronting is highly desirable and will be one way in which the United States can contribute using some of its best brains and best models to the creation of a better world. As the future goes along, and even now, it has become increasingly obvious that the basic conditions of change, the basic conditions of vision, the basic root to achieving the kinds of things that you want to achieve and that we all basically in our hearts want to achieve, have to come from within us. With the United States being a small minority of the world's population consuming a large fraction of the world's productivity, consuming at a level on the average 10 times higher than people in developing countries, and with no way for those people to come up to our standards, we've got an unstable world situation, but we can confront that unstable situation only if we change within.

As Bill Cronin put it, "If wilderness can stop being just out there or also be in here, if it can start being as human as it is natural, perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world, not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both."

In the spirit of that statement, and in the spirit of the other great thinkers who have touched our spirit and helped to make our progress possible, I would like to offer a prediction. I predict that by the time your wonderful Service, such a cherished asset of the American people, reaches its centennial in 2016, just a short 16 years from now, you and your successors will be incredibly proud of your accomplishments over the next 16 years, entering this century with the same kind of justifiable pride that those who gathered around the campfire on the Madison River must have felt in 1870 or those who crafted the Organic Act must have felt in 1916. And I know that you will all leave this meeting filled with feelings that promise great accomplishments for the American people, and vision and leadership for the future. The American people trust you. The opportunities and challenges that you're facing are great, and we place our trust in you, based on a long and mutually satisfying history, and I am positive that we [will] continue to work together to address the important problems that we face together, that you will not only not disappoint us, you haven't done that yet, but that we will be celebrating a very great anniversary in a very short period of time.

Thank you very much for the privilege of having addressed you.

Proceed to Question & Answer session with Raven and Wilson