The “Unnatural Preservation” article, like nearly
everything else in HCN, is generally excellent
(HCN,
2/04/08). However, the authors miss, I think, an
important element of the National Park Service management
philosophy, and thus distort their conclusions about the agency.
While the Park Service still holds onto the general thrust of the
policy toward its natural areas articulated first officially in the
1965 Leopold Report, which, oversimplified, stated that national
parks should be “vignettes of primitive America,” the agency has
also always had it in its power, and in its management policies, to
directly intervene in nature (through natural resources management)
when the influence or consequence of man’s actions interferes with
or disrupts the opportunity for natural process to dominate
otherwise.
If you agree, as I do, that the rapidity of
global climate change that the Earth is currently experiencing is
due to human activity, then it is well within the Park Service’s
current management policies to take direct action to respond.
Except for the matter of scale, this is not different than what the
Park Service has done in managing the parks throughout its modern
history.
This natural resources management intervention
can take many forms, from live capture and reintroduction of
extirpated native animals to removal of introduced non-native
species, by shooting or trapping if necessary.
The
multi-hundred-million-dollar restoration of the Redwood National
Park additions of 1978, and the multi-billion-dollar ongoing
restoration of Everglades National Park represent even larger-scale
direct interventions through natural resource management,
necessitated and justified by man’s destructive activities in and
around these parks.
There are literally hundreds of other
examples of Park Service direct management of nature and natural
processes that have been undertaken in our national park system
over the past four decades.
The National Park Service,
acting alone, won’t stop global climate change, but it can apply
the best science available to its resource managers and take direct
action. Some may call that gardening and pet care, but to do so is
a gross exaggeration and distortion of the sort of professional
natural resource management that dedicated career employees carry
out every day in our national parks.
T. Destry
Jarvis,
President Outdoor Recreation & Park Services,
LLC
Hamilton, Virginia
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The park service has the power.
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