Call of the Wild Led to Park Job

His home stamping grounds, the wilds of Wyoming, didn’t inspire Arthur Eck to appreciate the environment.

Instead it was urban Washington, D.C., where wild life usually means the roiling world of politics inside the Beltway.

Walking through lush Rock Creek Park, a jewel in the nation’s capital, Eck was struck by a flower he’d not seen before. It was a dogwood. Another time, a bat darted up the creek, flying almost smack into the then-college freshman.

Today, as the fourth superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Eck, 52, sees many city dwellers who may suddenly be struck with that same profound awareness of the outdoors.

The biggest threat to the area, Eck said, is not development, overuse or its proximity to the second-largest metro area in the nation.

It is ignorance.

“If you continually get more people who don’t know about it, you’ll get people who don’t care,” he said. “If you get large numbers of Americans who don’t know the parks, then the future of parks is threatened.”

Eck, who came to the job in 1995, is a wiry 6-feet-4 with hazel eyes and a soft-spoken manner. At work he is gently persistent, with a penchant for evenhanded analysis partly honed during years as a Washington bureaucrat.

Raised an only child in Thermopolis, Wyo., home of the “World’s Largest Mineral Hot Springs” and where antelope far outnumber humans, Eck didn’t fully appreciate his state’s raw beauty until 1967, when he left for American University in Washington.

There, he considered a career in education or the foreign service. But while working toward an American studies degree, he took a staff job with then-Wyoming Sen. Gale McGee.

That first position--one of many in the capital--taught Eck lasting lessons, including one from a fifth-grade class in tiny Lander, Wyo.

Eck had almost settled on a name for a new Idaho forest area. But the fifth-graders passionately lobbied McGee’s office for Fitzpatrick Wilderness, after a well-known explorer. That name was chosen.

“A small number of people can have a considerable amount of influence,” Eck said. “And if you care and stick with it, it’s surprising how much influence individuals can have in the legislative process.”

He took his first job with the National Park Service in 1977 in the Office of Legislation.

The job forced the self-described shy Eck to meet the passionate voices pushing for new parks.

He drafted bills creating the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta and the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

His first Park Service field job in 1982 at the Ozark National Scenic Riverways in Missouri was “like being dropped in a foreign country.”

In the insular Ozarks, Eck found himself in a town of 800 where federal employees were often met with disdain and distrust, he said.

As assistant superintendent, he learned how to approach reclusive local people just as ably as he dealt with the blind salamanders and colonies of brown bats.

In 1988 Eck was named deputy superintendent of Redwood National Park in Northern California.

Loggers were no longer being allowed to remove old-growth trees, and hostility was running hot against the federal government, recalled John Reynolds, Eck’s boss at the time and now a regional director of the National Park Service.

Eck had to forge trust among loggers, environmentalists and park staff, Reynolds recalled.

“He wears down the least,” Reynolds said. “It’s the result of people generally recognizing his honesty. They treat him with respect even though he couldn’t always solve their problems.”

In the Santa Monica Mountains, Eck’s challenges include overseeing a staff of 80, an annual budget of about $7 million and an estimated 30 million visitors a year.

A draft long-range management plan for the park proposes that 80% of the 150,050 acres in the recreation area be devoted to low-intensity use. Low-impact use would ban overnight camping and pets. Hiking, biking and horseback riding would be limited to designated trails.

A final plan is expected in December, but critics have already spoken up.

“I think he needs to be more sensitive to the fact that this is a recreation area,” said Ruth Gerson, president of the Recreation and Equestrian Coalition. “His job is not just to preserve the land for years but for people to be able to use the land.”

Eck understands such concerns and said the draft plan for the park--a patchwork of state and national lands, private property and cities--is to preserve the Mediterranean-like ecosystem that is home to hundreds of animal species, 25 of which are rare, threatened or endangered.

In addition to more land acquisition--since his arrival, about 600 acres have been purchased--Eck’s goal is to go full throttle on education outreach. He wants to double, maybe triple, the four school programs at the park and establish at least one learning center.

As a steward of the mountains, Eck has the difficult challenge of balancing a huge neighboring urban population with efforts to preserve habitat, said Suzanne Goode, a state parks senior ecologist at Malibu Creek State Park. Chaparral-covered lands often don’t get the same respect as parks with redwoods or geysers, she noted, but Eck is trying to change that.

Eck delights in rattling off facts about the Santa Monica Mountains. As a cool coastal breeze swirled around the 2,825-foot Boney Mountain at Rancho Sierra Vista in Thousand Oaks, he explained that part of the legislation establishing the park protects the area as airshed for Southern California.

“This is the lungs of the land,” he said. “And it can look like a weed lot, but underneath is one of the richest biodiversity resources.”

As if on cue, a trio of California quails skittered past coastal cactus and a towhee perched on Mexican elderberry. The scene, Eck admitted, sure beats office meetings.

“This is what fills our lives,” he said. “It has to do with something that makes life worth living.”