Commentary
New U.S. Parks Chief Puts Gloves On, Might Need Them
The new National Parks chief has huge challenges and a wise-use foe? The scenery just got ugly.By Amy Linn, 10-29-09
Jonathan Jarvis, new chief of the National Park Service, speaking in Utah. Photo by NPS.
An enormous job awaits Jonathan Jarvis, the man who became chief of national parks this month, according to a fine feature story by Todd Wilkinson for the Christian Science Monitor (and reprinted in the Flathead Beacon).
The new director of the National Park Service, a 32-year veteran of the agency, kicked off his job by visiting the home of conservationist John Muir and taking his family to Yosemite National Park, Wilkinson writes. If Jarvis got some extra energy from the trips, that’s good, the story notes. Because he’ll need it.
Among the jobs ahead, Jarvis said his number-one challenge is climate change, “the greatest challenge ever to face national parks,” he told Wilkinson. As if that’s not overwhelming enough, the nation’s parks also have an $8 billion maintenance backlog and there’s “sagging morale among some 22,000 grayish-green-clad civil servants out in the field,” Wilkinson writes.
How does Montana fit into this picture? Jarvis told Wilkinson he thinks Glacier National Park (among other things) could be used to educate the public about global warming, which is expected to melt all its glaciers within decades.
The story also mentions a name that a lot of us haven’t heard in a while: Chuck Cushman, a right-wing anti-environmentalist whose virulent activism was once linked to the anti-government militia movement in the West. (To read more about Cushman and his colleagues, click here.) Cushman isn’t pleased with Jarvis’s ideas, Wilkinson writes. If Jarvis and the rest of us are lucky, no one will care.
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You say "anti-government like it's a bad thing.
I've been writing about national parks for 25 years. I speak with park employees on a weekly basis. One of the most common complaints voiced from 2001-2008 was the silencing of dissent toward political directives handed down from Washington, D.C. Consequently, many veteran people who had spent their careers in government service left the Park Service. The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees (whose membership includes most of senior career management over the last 30 years and who collectively have thousands of years of experience working for the Park Service) can give you a long list of individuals who left and a list of reasons why morale has cratered. Among them (unrelated to maintenance issues): Budgets that have not keep pace with inflation resulting in many parks being shorthanded of interpretative and ranger positions despite rising visitation; pushes to privatize job positions; and the lack of a backbone in making decisions (or having them overridden by political appointees in D.C. by people like Paul Hoffman who attempted to single handedly rewrite park policies). Another complaint voiced by Park Service workers is that they went to work afraid to do their job and voice their pride and belief in the Park Service as a conservation agency. One of the people I spoke with fairly regularly was the late George Hartzog who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. He was featured in the recent Ken Burns series. Before he died two summers ago, he told me that morale was the worst he had seen in 40 years.
Thanks for filling in the blanks, I found some interesting reading as a result.
Bob
John Muir is well known as a radical, so that little pilgrimage as opposed to the Roooooooosevelt Arch ("For the People") is indicative of the sort of initiatives we will see.
As for park "morale," the Park Service, like most insular bureaucracies, has been unable to understand that it has clients. The clients are not the government, but the American people who are being asked to support NPS programs fiscally. But the NPS offers less and less with each passing year, kind of like the Forest Service.
It kind of amazes me to hear time and time again about how park system units are economic drivers, yet NPS does nothing to support associated economic activities...unless, and only unless, those activities are approved by NPS as appropriate.
This is going to be interesting.
By the way, Amy, an article by an anti-corporate web site, funded by entities such as Greenpeace, just a skosh less left than Media Matters, written by Dave Helvarg (I read his book and it was as polemic and poorly written as Mein Kampf) is rotten source material for anyone wanting facts about the so called evil Wise Use movement. I know Chuck Cushman, not all that well, but he's not "militia." He focuses on the First amendment right to petition for redress. Not that there's anything wrong with the Second Amendment. I like that one equally as well.