New Release of Preserving Nature
Dr. Richard West Sellars, who worked as a historian in the National Park Service for thirty five years before his retirement, undertook the Herculean task of synthesizing the various threads that comprise the history of natural resource management in the National Park Service. The result was his book Preserving Nature in the National Parks. After publication of this groundbreaking history, the book received an Eastern National Author's Award. A new version with an updated preface and epilogue brings the history up through recent / current presidential administrations. This new version is available at www.yalebooks.com, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Borders.
A Santa Fe, New Mexico native, Dr. Sellars was awarded the CNPSR George Hartzog, Jr., award in 2008, primarily for his invaluable and thoughtful work on this book.
An extended excerpt from the Epilogue follows:
"Surely very few human institutions have survived for more than a millennium or two. Taking a long view, the National Park Service was created only in 1916, with its mandate to leave the parks “unimpaired,” which suggests in perpetuity: ageless and everlasting But over almost a century since the Service was created, its natural resource management seems usually not to have been thought of in truly far-reaching time spans. Rather, resource concerns and initiatives seem to have been broken into various short, overlapping, truncated blocks of time: a presidential administration, a new Congress, the tenure of a director or a secretary of the interior, the tenure of particularly influential regional directors or superintendents who come and go, as well as the lifespan of the Services official management policy documents. All of these are of course driven by different and sometimes conflicting individual or collective perspectives on what is appropriate regarding park preservation and its managerial counterpart, public use. For carefully and knowingly tending invaluable, irreplaceable ecological systems in the national parks, such shortsightedness is not a good thing. "[In] over almost a century since the Service was created, its natural resource management seems usually not to have been thought of in truly far-reaching time spans. Rather, resource concerns ad initiatives seem to have been broken into various short, overlapping, truncated blocks of time: a presidential administration, a new Congress, the tenure of a director or a secretary of the interior, the tenure of particularly influential regional directors or superintendents who come and go, as well as the lifespan of the Service's official management policy documents. All of these are of course driven by different and sometimes conflicting individual or collective perspectives on what is appropriate regarding park preservation and its managerial counterpart, public use. For carefully and knowingly tending invaluable, irreplaceable ecological systems in the national parks, such shortsightedness is not a good thing."
