THE FUTURE OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: MANAGING THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL

NOTE: This is a keynote speech delivered by former NPS Chief Historian Dwight Pitcaithley to the Intermountain Regional Resource Management Conference on May 21, 2008.

THE FUTURE OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE:
MANAGING THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL

A Conference for Comprehensive Resource Stewardship:
The First Regional Resource Management Conference of the Twenty-First Century

Tucson, Arizona

May 21, 2008

Who would have guessed forty-four years ago when I was cleaning toilets at Carlsbad Caverns that I would be addressing you here today on this important topic!

Being retired is a dangerous thing! When one works for the National Park Service there is never time to sit back and think deeply (or strategically) about the larger issues confronting the agency. All of you know this. The Service is so understaffed, you are all working flat out simply to keep your head above water. Once you retire, however, you have time to think; think radical thoughts. The following is a reflection of just how dangerous retirement is.

I have been a “watcher” of the National Park Service for over thirty years. Akin to watching politics; one tends to get emotionally involved, but at some point it is healthy to simply step back and watch. Whatever happens, it’s GOOD THEATER.

What an interesting agency you work for! What a strange agency you work for!

We are, as you know, approaching the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. Celebrations, if they are to be at all useful, should provide for a time of reflection and introspection and critical analysis that then results in a refined vision for the future. This is, of course, not always the case. The 100th anniversary of the Civil War, for example, encouraged none of the above. We can hope that history’s judgement of the Centennial of the National Park Service will be favorable, but that, of course, remains to be seen.

The Centennial should offer all of us, employees and public alike, an opportunity to think deeply and expansively about what kind of Service we want for the second century. The Centennial should be a time to have a wide ranging conversation about what we want the National Park Service to look like for its next century. How can or should the agency adapt to the changing social and political environment within which it operates? How can it position itself as a leading educational organization in the fields of environmental science and history? In short, how can it serve society (the tax payers) better?

The Service and the System are different today from the agency and small collection of parks managed by Stephen T. Mather and Horace Albright almost 100 years ago. We are closing in on 400 parks that now have to be managed through a multiplicity of laws and regulations un-envisioned by Mather and Albright. Our society is different as well, more complex, more diverse, more awed by electronic wizardry than by natural beauty or important stories from the past.

The Park Service faces, and will face, increased competition from a myriad of known and unknown sources.

If it wants to become relevant within American society, it will have to broaden its message and its appeal.

If it wants to fix what is broken within it, it will have to be more open about the problems it faces.

The face we present to the public, however, is always uplifting and optimistic and inspirational and never, never, never suggests that the National Park Service is facing major problems on multiple fronts.

Did you ever take a critical look at the National Park Service web page? Preparing for this talk, I cruised around both the national and park pages. I was struck by the “Did you know?” section at the bottom of almost every page. These contain interesting, but quite predictable & totally innocuous sound bites. They all encourage the viewer to envision the same park system that was being envisioned when I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver ruled television. They are designed to be happy and benign. They specifically are not designed to encourage the public to think more deeply (or at all) about these places. Information is there, but not education.

Superintendent Sarah Craighead will forgive me if I speak for a moment about Saguaro’s pages. It’s “Did you know?” pages are, not inappropriately, about wild flowers and rattlesnakes and cacti and javelinas. Well that’s just fine, but I found them rather bland and boring. Surely we can push our readers more than that; surely we can create greater interest in the park than that; perhaps we can even seduce the reader into investing more of herself or himself in the park and the Park Service.

In digging deeper into Saguaro’s web site I found its centennial challenge page. Borrowing from it, I combined the two and wrote a “Did you know?” blurb or two of my own.

Did you know that the interpretive exhibits in the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center are 40 years old; older than many of the visitors we serve, particularly the youth we need to target?

Did you know that invasive non-native plants, particularly Bufflegrass, have the potential to transform the Sonoran Desert into a flammable grassland causing the permanent demise of Saguaro Cactus and other key desert species?

To me, those are far more interesting than learning that javelinas are not pigs!

A few more then I’ll stop this digression.

Selma, Alabama is one of the most powerful historic places in this country. It was the site of “Bloody Sunday” in March1965 that quickly led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The events of Bloody Sunday were compared by Lyndon Johnson to Lexington and Concord and Gettysburg. Yet the “Did you know?” entries play it as safe as possible. Did you know, one reads, “The Trail commemorates the events, people and route of the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama?” [This is somewhat akin to stating: “Did you know the Titanic only made one voyage?”] This banal blurb makes the event sound more like a parade than a march for constitutional rights. Another tells the reader, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed the requirements that voters in the United States take ligeracy [sic] tests to qualify to register to vote and provided for federal registration of voters?” Not only is this statement historically incorrect, it purposefully takes the edge off the fact that black American citizens through the South were denied their rights guaranteed under the 15th Amendment.

These are the kinds of statements Walt Disney would write if Disney did history.

How different might the affect be if one of these read:

Did you know that one hundred years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution black citizens were denied the right to vote throughout most of the American South?

Did you know that the U.S. military was segregated until 1948?

Did you know that white supremacists in Birmingham, Alabama bombed a black church and murdered four black children in 1963?

Why don’t we ask more of our visitors?

Why don’t we ask more of ourselves?

A case can be made that the National Park Service has managed itself for so long in an environment of declining funding and increased political interference that it doesn’t know how to envision a different future. Most or you, perhaps all of you, have developed your careers within a pronounced culture of organizational poverty. The last time the National Park Service witnessed a major infusion of funds was during the Bicentennial of the United States. For many of the years that followed, the budget of the agency did not even match inflation. We have become so used to a parsimonious Congress we cannot envision a different reality.

The Centennial of the National Park Service might be a time to consider what adequate funding for this agency should be. It might be a time to ask Congress for adequate funding. That would require, however, the leadership of the agency to step up and formulate a budget that emphasized the reality of the three-legged stool upon which management responsibility sits.

It seems to me that any informed observer of the agency will see that the core mission of the National Park Service rests upon its responsibilities in three areas: preservation, research, and education. A three-legged stool, if you will, or an equilateral triangle with each point having a symbiotic relationship with the other two. They work in concert with each other....or should in the best of possible worlds. But we live in a real world, don’t we, an environment were each of the points must compete with the others for table scraps.

Envision a National Park Service where each of these important/critical/fundamental responsibilities are fully funded and work in complete professional partnership with the other two. Preservation and Research and Education working together as the core mission of the National Park Service.

Envision a Park Service that does not carry a $5 to 8 billion dollar maintenance backlog.

Envision a Park Service that does not manage its parks with an average of 68% of the funds it needs to meet all the demands Congress requires.

I feel a “Did you know” moment coming on for the Washington office’s web page!

Did you know that the National Park Service has a maintenance backlog for its facilities and historic structures that totals $8 billion dollars?

Did you know that the National Park Service receives only two-thirds of the money it needs to professionally manage your parks?

[Do you think Director Bomar and Dr. Matthews might hire me to write “Did you know?” blurbs for WASO?]

If we envisioned an optimum budget for the National Park Service, what would that budget be?

In an article in the George Wright Forum (see www.georgewright.org) last year I suggested that the optimum operating budget for the National Park Service would reasonably be between 5 and 6 billion dollars! Not an unreasonable figure, I observed, to manage and preserve properly:

20,000 buildings,
1,000 campgrounds,

1,600 wastewater systems,
1,300 water systems,
115,000,000 natural and cultural objects,
67,000 archeological sites, and
26,000 historic structures.
Not to mention the natural resources in every park you manage.

Not an unreasonable figure to ensure that no visitor center has interpretive exhibits that have been in place for 40 years, or even 30 years.

Not an unreasonable figure if our educational programs are to keep pace with ongoing science and research.

Not an unreasonable figure if the agency were to develop continuing educational opportunities for its employees as the Department of Defense does.

Not an unreasonable figure if the National Park Service were to embrace, seriously embrace, and professionally design its preservation, research, and education programs.

The chronic under funding of the National Park Service is not now and has not been for past 50 years a matter of money — it is a matter of priorities! Five billion dollars amounts to 0.002% of the president’s 2008 proposed budget.

Let’s put the $2.4 billion current budget into perspective.

Let’s compare it to Department of Defenses’s $550 billion budget.

One B-2 bomber costs $2 billion. Do you really think the American people would notice if this country’s military industrial complex held one less bomber than it does today and that those funds were transferred to the National Park Service?

The President and Congress took less than ten minutes to determine that the economy needed an economic stimulus package totaling $150 billion. Do you think anyone would have complained if it were $148 billion? And the resulting $2 billion saving were given to the National Park Service?

We hang on to our Fee Demo program as though it were a lifeline; this entrance fee program that generates $150 million annually. No small figure, I grant you, but a figure that should be simply added annually by Congress to the Service’s operating budget. Perspective: The Osprey aircraft developed by the United States Marine Corps cost $110 million each! They are current being sent to Iraq even though military analysts believe they don’t work as designed. Here’s the punch line: several branches of the military are planning to purchase 400 of these flawed aircraft! 400 times $110 million equals $44 billion!

It’s not a matter of money; it’s a matter of priorities and the National Park Service over the years has not developed a constituency that will lobby on behalf of it. The National Park Conservation Association is simply not enough and clearly no match for other park interest groups. If you doubt that in any way consider the recent successful effort by the National Rifle Association to change decades-long NPS policy on guns in parks. A goofy idea by any measurement, but one that went unopposed except by a handful of editors. In the world I envision for the National Park Service, the forty congressmen who endorsed the proposal would have been instantly balanced by forty congressmen and women who opposed it – delegates in Congress who had been cultivated over the years to support various pieces of legislation that benefit the national parks and through the parks, the American public. Where are those Congressmen and women? Why don’t we do that? The Department of Defense passes up no opportunity and spares no expense in cultivating congressmen to support its programs. Why doesn’t the National Park Service do the same?

We have become complacent as our society has changed. We assume the American public views the parks and the Park Service the same way we do. We see and understand how the National Park Service has changed and evolved over the past fifty years; many Americans, intelligent Americans, see the parks unchanged over the same period. The National Geographic picture books published during the 1950s and 1960s on the National Park Service remain the central and guiding vision of the national parks for most of the public. Yellowstone and Yosemite and Crater Lake and the Grand Canyon are what the public thinks of when it thinks of the National Park Service. When Ken Burns envisions the National Park Service he thinks of the large, traditional national parks - Yellowstone Yosemite, Crater Lake, and the Grand Canyon, etc. His multi-eveninged romp through the National Park Service due out next year will not include the interesting and edgy historic parks that have been added over the past thirty years. Topeka and Selma and Manzanar and Women’s Rights will be side notes to his story if they appear at all.

The blame for not promoting the richness and the diversity of this incredible collection of parks rests with us. We claim to be a system, but conduct ourselves otherwise. For example, how many of your parks prominently display the Map & Guide of the National Park System? All of you sell it to the public, but how many of you have framed the map and prominently display it for your visitors? What easier way is there to encourage the visiting public to think of our parks as a system rather than a nice place to have a picnic?

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

WE NEED TO:

BE MORE INTROSPECTIVE

THINK BIGGER THOUGHTS

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

ENVISION A FUTURE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE UNFETTERED BY THE PATTERNS OF YESTERDAY

WE NEED TO WORK AT BECOMING RELEVANT TO A LARGER, A MUCH LARGER, PERCENTAGE OF TAX-PAYING AMERICANS

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

As frustrated as I become at times over the future of the National Park Service, I remain hopeful that the National Park Service will achieve a kind of renaissance during its centennial. But to do so, it must expand, greatly expand, its vision of itself.

Our vision is fundamentally inward, isn’t it. We promote ourselves, to the degree we do, to strengthen the condition of our parks as though that were a goal in itself. The recent Education Program Business Plan (2006) carries this subtitle: “Helping People Enjoy, Care About, and Care for National Parks.” That’s fine, I suppose, but rather self serving. We need to help visitors enjoy the parks, it says, so they will care more for the parks. The education programs in the parks are all about parks...not our society.

Both the Vail Agenda and the Advisory Board’s Rethinking the National Parks for the 21st Century, however, argued for a much broader purpose for education in the National Park System. They envision educational systems in parks that encourage the visiting public to be better stewards of the land, to increasingly think in sustainable terms, to envision solutions to local and global environmental problems. The desired action they envision is not within park boundaries, but outside park boundaries; parks are exemplars, in their view, of environmental stewardship that will encourage increased environmental stewardship in backyards and city parks and public places where we live, not just visit.

These reports envision historic parks where educational programs promote a better understanding of our nation’s history which will in turn lead to better citizenship.

The study of our nation’s history, formal and informal, is an essential part of our civic education. In a democratic society such as ours, it is important to understand the journey of liberty and justice, together with the economic, social, religious, and other forces that barred or opened the ways for our ancestors, and the distances yet to be covered....Our nation’s history is our civic glue. Without it, our national character is diminished.

The Advisory Board’s report concludes with a challenge to the National Park Service....a challenge we should all be aware of.....a challenge that has been largely forgotten (or perhaps purposefully ignored) only seven years after it was laid down.

In the twenty-first century, it pronounces, the National Park Service has a responsibility to proclaim anew the meaning and value of parks, to expand learning and research and share the resulting knowledge broadly.

As a people, our quality of life–our very health and well-being–depends in the most basic way on the protection of nature, the accessibility of open space and recreation opportunities, and the preservation of landmarks that illustrate our historic continuity. By caring for the parks and conveying the park ethic, we care for ourselves and act on behalf of the future. The larger purpose of this mission is to build a citizenry that is committed to conserving its heritage and its home on earth.

By conserving natural parks, parks become exemplars for better environmental stewardship outside parks.

By preserving historic places and sharing the stories inherent in those places, we become better citizens.

We preserve these places not as a means in itself. We preserve these places because they have stories to tell and we have thing to learn from those stories!

How can we embrace this larger purpose of building a citizenry that is committed to conserving its heritage and its home on earth?

When it wants to, the National Park Service can be quite effective in designing programs and gaining Congressional approval for them. Witness Mission 66 and the Natural Resource Challenge. Although quite different, both were Park Service initiatives; both were funded by Congress; both resulted in a strengthened Service and System.

The employees of the National Park Service are inventive and creative when encouraged to be so. Discovery 2000, the last large gathering of NPS personnel, was remarkable for its creative presenting of critical ideas and the degree to which it encouraged creative thinking on the part of its attendees. Prose and poetry were abundant in St. Louis.

Parks can and should be forums for contemporary issues through lectures, symposia, and discussion and book groups.

Parks have larger purposes.

Over the past several years, this country has focused on immigration as a major problem. The topic of immigration today is perfect for places like Chamizal and Ellis Island to host public forums aimed at improving public understanding of that important issue. If they held such events, they are to be commended; if they did not, another opportunity to serve the public was missed.

Today, this nation is finally beginning to have a conversation about race. If Senator Obama becomes President, this conversation about race in America will become a part of the national pastime. National park sites like Martin Luther King, Topeka, Little Rock, Selma, and a host of other Civil Rights Sites could (and should) become neutral ground for the discussion of this still sensitive subject.

In a few short years, our society will mark the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Because of good work done by your Civil War superintendents over the past decade on the interpretation of the causes of the war, I believe our Civil War-related parks will embrace the idea of parks as public forums.

We are already seeing an expanding public conversation about Global Warming. Virtually every natural park can and should host ongoing public programs for the discussion of this vitally important subject. Many parks are already pursuing research on this phenomenon. We should share that information, in multiple ways, with a public that will become increasingly interested in climate change.

There are endless opportunities for parks to become relevant to local and national audiences; endless opportunities to create opportunities to share and explore science and research-based management and interpretive issues. We can play a much larger role in the civic and environmental affairs of our society. We will be effective in that endeavor, however, only if we extend our view beyond park boundaries.

A note of caution: Being a voice of reason and logic in today’s society exposes one to attack from any and all sides, and sometimes even from within. Just recently, Senator Obama declined to endorse the idea to waive the automobile gas tax for the summer as recommended by Senators McCain and Clinton. To justify his decision, he cited a number of distinguished economists who had argued waiving the tax would do more harm than good. Obama was quickly labeled an elitist.

Taking the high scholarly ground and arguing for the relevance of parks based on a thoughtful and intellectual approach to the stories found in the parks may open us up to charges of being elitists. It’s a risk I am willing to take; I hope it is a risk you are willing to take. We encountered a similar attack when the National Park Service decided to start interpreting the causes of the Civil War at its battlefield parks. States’ rights was the cause of the war, not slavery we were repeatedly and hotly informed. When we countered that the best historians in the country had concluded over the past thirty years that issues revolving around slavery were indeed the core cause of the war, the scholarship upon which we based our claim was promptly dismissed as having been developed by “Yankee” or “Scalawag” historians. We prevailed, however, by sharing with the public primary historic sources about the secession movement, sources that undeniably support the centrality of slavery to the coming of the war. Scholarship trumped “history as personal opinion.”

Anti-intellectualism in American society is on the rise and we are certain to encounter it if we challenge traditional views of our parks or promote thinking about our parks and their values that rub up against, or challenge, assumed truths. Susan Jacoby has explored this uncomfortable side of American life in her recent book titled, The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).

Memory loss has made us bad stewards of our intellectual inheritance, and the dissipation of our cultural storehouse gives rise in turn to new cycles of forgetting. Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an educational system, that does a poor job of teaching not only the basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.

You are obligated to manage your parks and resources through research and with intelligence in an environment that combines anti-rationalism with apathy and, sometimes, entrenched ignorance. Roger Kennedy termed it “militant ignorance.” Yet there is a role in this democratic society of ours for leadership. There is a role for the National Park Service as an exemplary steward of “our intellectual inheritance.” With the problems this nation faces and will face in the coming years throughout your careers, there is the opportunity - even necessity - for the National Park Service to rise to that larger purpose envisioned by the Advisory Board’s report to build a citizenry that is committed to conserving its heritage and its home on earth.

The choice, to me, is clear. The National Park Service can continue on the path it is on of becoming increasingly irrelevant to a larger percentage of American citizens; believing itself unworthy of funding from Congress that will allow it to manage effectively the resources under its care; on a path that narrowly defines its role in American society.

OR,

The National Park Service can, during its Centennial, re-envision itself and its mission; it can proclaim anew the larger purpose of parks and the inherent values within those parks that strengthen our democratic traditions; it can assume a leadership position throughout the country and, indeed the world, in the areas of resource stewardship and heritage education.

I am hopeful that this beloved agency of ours will expand its horizons, will re-think its role in our society, and will rise above itself and become an intrinsic part of hope for the future of our human community.

I am hopeful that we, collectively, can solve the environmental problems that confront us and that the National Park Service will be a major player in that effort.

I am hopeful that we can achieve a more enlightened understanding of ourselves, of our past, and of our relationships to one another.

I am hopeful that the National Park Service:

will became a major facilitator of the conversations we must have if we are to improve our “home on earth;”

will become a major player in this nation’s educational system; and

will become a respected exemplar of resource research and stewardship.

Wallace Stegner once wrote that the national parks were “the best idea we ever had.” Let’s hope he was right.

Dwight T. Pitcaithley
National Park Service
Chief Historian (Retired)
College Professor
New Mexico State University