Chapter 7
A House Divided: The National Park Service
and Environmental Leadership (continued)
Building an Environmental
Record
One of the significant changes repeatedly recommended in the reports
was for the Service to inventory the parks' natural resources and
monitor their condition over time. Without such data, a scientific
understanding of the parks could not be achieved and any Park Service
claim to leadership in environmental affairs would be seriously
undermined. Virtually every report emphasized the need for this
informationand the Service accrued a considerable history of
promises, each followed by resistance and procrastination.
Long before the external reports began to appear in 1963, the Park
Service had declared its intention to inventory and monitor species.
Made official policy in 1934, Fauna No. 1's wildlife recommendations
included the charge to undertake for each park a "complete faunal
investigation . . . at the earliest possible date." Although making
little progress, the Service repeated its commitment to this task
through the 1930s and during World War IIfor instance in a
February 1945 report on research. Such declarations became more common
in the environmentally conscious 1960s. The 1961 internal document "Get
the Facts, and Put Them to Work" recognized the need for a "continuous
flow of precise knowledge" about park resources. Two years later,
Director Conrad Wirth stated that the insistence of the National Academy
Report on inventorying and monitoring in the parks was a "basic
recommendation"that it would "be implemented as rapidly as
possible." And in October 1965, the Service reiterated its commitment to
prepare "an inventory of existing biotic communities" in the parks. [4]
Fifteen years later, the Service issued its first State of the Parks
report, aimed at gaining congressional support and funding for the
Service's resource management and science programs. The report admitted
that there was a "paucity of information" on park conditions and called
for "comprehensive inventory" and "comprehensive monitoring." Several
large parks, such as Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, Everglades, and
Yellowstone, did begin to make some headway. Responding to 1980
legislation for Channel Islands National Park that called for an
analysis of species to determine "their population dynamics and probable
trends as to future numbers and welfare," Channel Islands developed an
ambitious inventorying and monitoring program. In addition, the Service
substantially increased its monitoring capabilities for air and water
quality in the parks.
This progress was offset by widespread neglectin spite of the
need for data to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and
especially with the Endangered Species Act. In a 1988 commentary on
inventorying and monitoring, journalist Robert Cahn, awarded a Pulitzer
Prize for an earlier analysis of national park issues, reported that
"possibly the greatest failure" in Park Service history was the bureau's
not having gained "solid knowledge" about park resources through
"systematically identifying them and regularly determining their
condition." A similar charge appeared in the 1989 National Parks and
Conservation Association report on park management. And the same 1991
Vail conference draft document that exhorted the Park Service to
"embrace a leadership role" in environmental affairs noted that more
often than not the Service knew "little about the actual resources parks
contain, their significance, degree of risk, or response to change." As
had others before it, this document urged a "comprehensive program" to
inventory and monitor park resources. In 1993, six decades after Fauna
No. 1 and three decades after the Leopold and National Academy reports,
this entreaty was repeated in the Vail Agenda. [5]
Such vacillating, sporadic support as was given the inventorying and
monitoring programs mirrored to some degree the Service's overall
response to the State of the Parks reports, the principal attempt of the
1980s to bring a scientific, ecological perspective to national park
management. By 1982, only a year after the later of the two reports
appeared, the Service's response had begun to "lose its focus," as
William Supernaugh noted in a detailed study of the State of the Parks
results. Reorganizations and shifting priorities in the Washington
office reflected a weakening of resolve by the Park Service directorate.
Supernaugh, who was in Washington during the early 1980s, recalled that
the professional staff there had been "transferred, restructured, given
contradictory assignments and unclear instructions, ignored, rewarded,
had their jobs abolished, transferred or redescribed, served under three
Associate Directors in two separate organizational lines, [and] served
through a succession of Division Chiefs." He stated that the "end
result" had been "an overwhelming lack of consistency of purpose and
continuity of direction."
This situation was exacerbated by the lack of support from Interior
Department officials under Secretary James G. Watt. Progress reports to
Congress and other internal follow-up reporting procedures recommended
by State of the Parks were soon abandoned. In the face of opposition
from Secretary Watt, a National Academy study of science in the parks
(also called for by State of the Parks) was postponed, not to be
undertaken until the close of the decade. [6]
Other elements of the State of the Parks reports were in fact
addressed. Prompted by the reports, the Service developed a variety of
training courses in the 1980s to improve its natural resource
capability, providing superintendents and other employees with a better
grasp of ecological management principles and environmental law. This
effort remained strong into mid-decade; then, with decreasing budgets
and competition from other programs, the variety of courses and the
number of trainees declined markedly between 1987 and 1993.
Most ambitious of the training efforts was a long-term course
designed for the parks' natural resource managers. Begun in 1982 and
modeled on training developed in the Southwest Region in the 1970s, this
course initially extended over a two-year period, during which the
students divided their time between training and their regular
assignments. But, like other natural resource training, it was soon cut
back. In 1986 the program encountered stiff resistance from the regional
directors, who sought to shift the funds to other uses. In reaction,
Director William Penn Mott resorted to different funding sources and
scaled down the course. With the concurrence of many natural resource
managers who wished to improve the course, the Service began a
reevaluation in the early 1990s. Soon, however, this effort was subsumed
(and the long-term course was suspended) in an extensive reevaluation of
all training programs. [7]
State of the Parks helped prompt increases in funding and staffing
for scientific research and natural resource management. The
decentralization of these programs, the lack of a Servicewide system for
detailed tracking of funds, the perennially vague distinction between
research and resource management, and park management's frequent
shifting of funds all serve to make calculation of increases uncertain.
However reliable they are, budget data from the time of State of the
Parks through the early 1990s indicate that the overall natural resource
management budget (including research) quadrupled between fiscal years
1980 and 1993, from approximately $23 million to just over $95 million.
During the same thirteen-year period, the research portion of that
budget doubled, from about $10 million to $20 million. (These figures do
not reflect the declining value of the dollar.) By 1993, natural
resource activities amounted to about 9.23 percent of the Service's
operating budget of $1.03 billion, while scientific research remained
quite lowjust under 2 percent (not in addition to, but included
within, the 9.23 percentage).
Between fiscal years 1980 and 1993, Servicewide natural resource
management staffing increased more than fivefold, from just above 200
positions to 1,164. Throughout this period many of the positions were
part-time and entailed duties other than natural resource management.
Also, a large number were filled by "technicians"individuals who
undertook many resource management activities but generally did not
direct them. There was little increase in the number of research
scientists: among the total natural resource management positions for
1993 were 100 researchers about the number estimated by State of
the Parks for 1980. [8]
Thus, by the 1990s, attempts to improve the Park Service's scientific
resource management through training, funding, and staffing had met with
only partial success. Even with the increases in funding and staffing
since State of the Parks, the National Academy in its 1992 report
asserted that the Service's science program was "unnecessarily
fragmented and lacks a coherent sense of direction, purpose, and
unity"an echo of the academy's statement thirty years previously
that the science effort was "fragmented" and lacked "continuity,
coordination, and depth." In 1993 David A. Haskell, chief of resource
management at Shenandoah National Park, commented that the "critically
needed focus on science as the basis for park management has not
occurred." He added that there was "no definite signal" that the Service
had "made the commitment to become a resource stewardship agency." [9]
Yet Haskell himself, working with Superintendent John W. (Bill)
Wade, had built up Shenandoah's natural resource management program to
include a sizable contingent of ecologists, biological technicians, and
data management personnel. The park's inventorying and monitoring of
flora and fauna, begun in the mid-1980s, made steady progress; so did
its air and water quality programs. Among the ecological processes that
the park began to monitor were stream aquatic habitat, watershed
acidification, forest response to gypsy moth infestations, and deciduous
forest watershed dynamics. Integrated into park operations, Shenandoah's
natural resource program became one of the most effective in the
systemand the kind of expertise and inquiry it utilizes today is
mirrored by that of Channel Islands, SequoiaKings Canyon, and
Yellowstone, among other parks.
While these parks made substantial advancement, many did not. Despite
gains in recent years, a 1995 Washington office report noted a need for
properly trained natural resource management specialists throughout the
park system. Overall, the Service had an average of just over one per
park; but the report added that, in truth, "there are a few specialists
in a handful of parks and no specialists in many parks." [10] Trained resource managers were distributed
unevenly throughout the system, and programs as strong as Shenandoah's
were the exception rather than the rule.
This unevenness was but one factor accounting for the variability in
quality of the Park Service's resource management during the 1980s and
early 1990s. At Carlsbad Caverns, for instance, after the 1986 discovery
of the vast lower regions of Lechuguilla Cave, the Service took a strong
preservation stance, rejecting proposals to open the cave to tourism.
Instead, it determined Lechuguilla's pristine natural habitat to be
worthy of scientific exploration and study rather than subjecting it to
the kind of intensive public use permitted in other of the park's caves.
Exploration revealed a variety of rare geological, paleontological, and
biological features, plus more than eighty miles of passages, making it
the seventh-longest known cave in the world and the deepest limestone
cave in the country. Well before the discovery, the park had established
a special cave resource management position, the first such position in
the Service. The incumbent, Ronal C. Kerbo, gained the park's support
for having Lechuguilla officially designated a wilderness cave, which
would have been the first designation of this kind. The effort proved
unsuccessful, however, owing to both internal and external doubt about
separately designating subsurface wilderness beneath an existing
wilderness designation on the surface. Lechuguilla's prominence and the
management debates it engendered helped prompt the Service to create a
national cave management specialist position to assist park managers
across the system with similar issues. [11]
On another front, continuing well into its fourth decade, the study
of wolves and moose at Isle Royale has become the longest-running
research ever conducted on mammalian predator-prey relationships in a
national park, and perhaps in the world. Begun in 1958 by Purdue
University biologist Durward Allen, the study (conducted mostly during
winter) has been continued by his former doctoral student Rolf O.
Peterson, a professor at Michigan Technological University. One of the
most highly regarded research efforts in the national parks, the program
has endured mainly because of the initiative and determination of Allen
and Peterson. Although it never established a wildlife biologist
position at the park, the Service at times provided significant
logistical, funding, and political support. To prevent disturbance of
both wolves and moose, and of the research itself, management officially
closes the park each year from November 1 to April 15. And following a
decline in the island's wolf population in the 1980s, the park made an
important shift in policy. Anticipating considerable public scrutiny, it
abandoned its long-standing adherence to natural regulation of the wolf
and moose populations, which prohibited direct interference with either
species (the researchers' observation of the wolves has always been
conducted principally from aircraft during the winter months). Instead,
the park approved a blood-sampling and radio-tracking program for the
wolves in hope of determining reasons for their population decline. [12]
In Yellowstone, the natural regulation policy for the northern elk
herd has never been rescinded, and it remains the source of recurring,
heated controversy. Following the 1967 moratorium on reducing the number
of elk, extensive research on the northern range got under way,
addressing a broad variety of ecological questions. With some
exceptions, Park Service biologists have maintained that natural
regulation is working. Other scientists, mostly outside the Service,
have asserted that the policy is destructive of range habitat; and in
the mid-1980s, writer Alston Chase made a stinging attack on the
environmental consequences of the park's natural resource management,
particularly with regard to elk. Similarly, the National Academy in its
1992 report on park science criticized the Service for the
"deteriorating condition of the northern range." The academy pointed out
that the controversy over range condition "stems in large part from the
lack of longterm data." Enlarging the perspective to the national parks
in general, the academy observed that "substantial and sustained"
research efforts were necessary to detect changes in habitat. [13] The Park Service's long neglect of science
had crippled its recent research efforts and thus the credibility of its
natural resource programs.
Somewhat like Alston Chase in his critique, in 1993 ecologist Karl
Hess, Jr., charged that the failure to control Rocky Mountain National
Park's elk population and to implement an approved prescribed fire
program had caused serious modification of that park's ecological
conditions. Both Chase and Hess believed that the ecological problems
they discerned were a direct result of traditional management attitudes.
In Chase's view, managers were so focused on visitor safety and
protection and so indifferent to science that they embraced destructive
resource management practices. Hess found parallel circumstances in
Rocky Mountain, and both writers argued that the dominant park
management culture had co-opted the scientists' independence and
initiative. [14]
The impact of elk on habitats in Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain, the
monitoring of air and water quality in Shenandoah, and the decline of
Isle Royale's wolf population reflect not just the plight of park
resources, but also the fact that parks are part of larger ecological
systems and are readily affected by external influences. Even as deep
beneath the surface and seemingly isolated as Lechuguilla Cave is, its
exceptionally pristine qualities face potential external threats such as
contamination by oil and gas development on nearby lands and unregulated
entry and use should the cave be found to extend to areas outside
Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Parks like Redwood, Big Thicket National
Preserve, and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which have small,
fragmented land bases, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of
nearby land uses.
With ecologically disastrous activity immediately adjacent to many
parksfor example, clear-cutting next to Olympic and Redwood, and
agriculture and hydrological manipulation upstream from
Evergladesthe Park Service has long been in situations badly in
need of broader, more cooperative solutions to resource management
issues. External threats highlighted in the State of the Parks reports
to Congress were prompted by the National Parks and Conservation
Association's 1979 study of adjacent lands. These reports sought to
create a greater sense of urgency, systemwide, regarding uses of
neighboring lands; subsequently, the Service made efforts to improve
cooperation with local and regional land managers, both public and
private. As this broader, more inclusive approach to resource management
began to take on more specifically scientific aspects (such as the
interest in preserving gene pools and biological diversity), it became
subsumed under the term "ecosystem management." This phrase, employed by
the Service's biologists since at least the 1960s, was adopted by
management as a concept for addressing local and regional resource
issues jointly with other land managers. Still loosely defined, it
remains more a concept than a realitythe focus of frequent
rhetorical flourish as well as serious deliberation. [15]
Perhaps the most prominent ecosystem management effort is in the
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystema vast area (also not precisely
defined) surrounding Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, and
including national forests and wildlife refuges, as well as lands under
the control of state and local governments and the private sector. The
Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, consisting of the chief
federal land managers in the area, has sought to establish common ground
in the management of grizzly bears, elk, wolves, fire, and tourism,
among other concerns. [16] As fires swept
vast expanses of Yellowstone and surrounding lands in the summer of
1988, the committee coordinated suppression activity; subsequently, it
coordinated rehabilitation efforts. It also undertook a postfire
assessment and review of fire policies in and around the park (a review
was mandated not only for Yellowstone but also for those national parks,
forests, and other federal lands with fire management programs). At
issue were the appropriateness of Yellowstone's existing policies and
the degree to which they had been implemented. Like other parks,
Yellowstone had to update its fire management plan. Ultimately, although
the revisions refined the tactics of fire programs in Yellowstone and
other parks, they mainly vindicated existing fire policies and left
their principles largely intact, including use of both natural and
management-ignited prescribed fires. [17]
Greater Yellowstone is the scene of another highly controversial
ecosystem management issuethe reintroduction of gray wolves,
eradicated long ago from the park through aggressive predator control. A
recovery effort for threatened and endangered species under the
authority of the Endangered Species Act, the reintroduction project was
conducted by the Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with
active support from other public and private interests. It culminated in
the initial release of wolves in the park in March 1995. The basic goal
of the program is to establish wolves in the Yellowstone ecosystem
sufficiently that they are no longer listed as an endangered or
threatened species in the area. []
Widespread public interest in the recovery is engendered not only by the
controversy invariably surrounding wolves, but also by the wilderness
symbolism of the wolf and the effort to restore a key element of
primeval Yellowstone.
As with fire policy and wolf recovery, ecosystem management relies on
cooperative arrangements to influence regional land planning and
usean exceptionally difficult enterprise in an era of highly
polarized debates over land use. Also involving complex working
relationships with outside interests, the Service's "partnership"
programswith their roots in the parks and recreation assistance
provided during the 1920s, and under Conrad Wirth in the
1930sbecame particularly prominent (and acquired the "partnership"
designation) in the 1980s. Through promoting parks and recreation
projects to be developed and managed jointly with other public entities
or with the private sector, these programs represent another Park
Service effort at local and regional cooperation. [19]
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