Discovery 2000: No Core Message; Resources Favored

Reprinted from Federal Parks and Recreation News
September 22, 2000
Jim Coffin, Editor

There is no one all-encompassing message to be taken from the Discovery 2000 conference on the future of the National Park System, held last week in St. Louis, insist NPS officials.

Instead, the conference laid down a base for National Park Service officials and citizens concerned about the parks to build on in the future, they say. Each day of the conference was devoted to a different aspect of park management -- education one day, then natural resources, cultural resources and leadership.

Still, to some participants protection of the resources of the national parks -- be they natural resources or cultural resources -- should be the agency's overarching priority. Particularly when compared to managing the parks for visitor services.

Similarly, to these participants the Park Service needs to identify threats to natural resources before those resources can be protected. "One of the highest priorities is we can't wait any longer to find out what natural resources and cultural resources we have within the national parks," said Jerry Rogers, a career NPS official who served as general conference chairman.

That suggests the administration and Congress need to give more attention to a program designed to identify those threats called the Natural Resources Challenge. The challenge program received an unexpected boost September 13 when Texas Gov. George Bush (R) said he would attempt to more than double spending on the program if he were elected President.

The program now receives about $18 million per year. Bush said he would increase that to $38 million. The extra money, he said, would be used to "help every national park with significant biological resources to complete basic natural resource inventories by 2010, covering such things as soil, vegetation, biological diversity, geological quality and water quality."

It is not clear at this point if conference attendees will produce a definitive report on Discovery 2000, as they did a decade ago after a similar conference in Vail, Colo. While some said the Vail report just gathered dust, others note that Congress used it to justify major reforms in Park Service operations.

"As of today no report is planned," one NPS official told us this week. "But if I were the director, I'd want something on record." The NPS official said he assumed that Rogers, who has four months to go before retirement, would coordinate the writing of a report. But in a conversation with FPR, Rogers appeared to be of two minds about the need for a report. At one point he said, "There definitely will be a report." But later he said, "We have no advance plan to publish a report that takes after the Vail report."

"There are two camps," said one NPS official. "One says let's do a Vail agenda-type document. Then there are the people who say this is a living, breathing conference, let's keep it alive on the web (http://www.nps.gov/discovery2000). I don't think that has been resolved."

In the end, said Rogers, "I want to be sure we don't foreclose any options for an incoming administration. I want them to have the opportunity to pick up on Discovery 2000 rather than have Discovery 2000 be something that ties up their hands."

Rogers said the success of the conference depends not just on the actions of Park Service officials. "I certainly hope we understand that we can't save the national parks because of somebody in the National Park Service taking an action," he said. "Participants outside the Park Service are people with whom we work. We've had a habit of thinking of those participants helping the national parks do something that the national parks want to do. We must work with the participants."

In emphasizing protection of the natural resources the Park Service and its friends run the risk of getting crosswise with Congressional Republicans who oversee the agency's budget. As one key Congressional staff member told FPR just before the conference, "If it is the intent of the sponsors to match up their conference with their Strategic Plan 2000, that is somewhat of a concern to us. Among other things the Plan 2000 elevates protection of resources far above the enjoyment of the resource by the American people. And that is not in the statutes. The policy supersedes the intent of the law."