Jim Stiles’ article about the state park ranger
who shot a tourist over a camping fee hit a nerve (HCN, 10/17/05:
Blood spills over a $14 camping fee). You see, I’ve been
reading and re-reading the new National Park Service’s
management policies draft.
In the past, as Stiles said,
rangers used to range. To get to know a piece of land was the
greatest reward of rangering and led to a kind of dedication to
place that I believe is the reason park rangers were not ordinarily
perceived as cops. Rangers cared enough about their place to pick
up cigarette butts, even on their time off.
The new draft
management policies, among several other grievous errors, are
poised to remove rangering from the park ranger and leave him as
nothing more than a traffic cop, fee collector, and paramedic.
Before the new draft, the NPS explicitly required its law
enforcement officers to participate in a variety of duties to
fulfill the direction of Congress that “park law enforcement should
be viewed as one function of a broad program of visitor and
resource protection.” The new draft policy no longer suggests (let
alone requires) that law enforcement rangers ever get out of their
patrol cars except to arrest people.
These men and women
will no longer feel they’ve been “paid in sunsets” or that
rangering is the highest calling of the park ranger or that their
park is a special place deserving the dedication of their hearts
and souls. Goodbye, park ranger; hello, cop.
This is but
one of many pernicious changes in the new draft that will
fundamentally change the character of the National Park Service.
The new draft policies are open to public comment until
mid-February at http://parkplanning.nps.gov under “Washington
Office.”
Name and location withheld
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Goodbye, ranger; hello, cop.
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