Letting Priceless Treasure Slip Away

If you’ve ever been to a national park, you don’t need me to tell you that they are our nation’s treasure. But I have had a closer view of the parks than most Americans.

I was 3 months old in 1941 when my dad accepted a permanent ranger’s job at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. A couple of years later, he was given the chief ranger job, and he remained in that position at the park until he retired.

Growing up in Mesa Verde, I took wilderness for granted. It wasn’t until I’d spent a couple of years in the Army that I realized how much the parks were a part of me. That’s when I decided to follow my father’s lead and join the National Park Service.

It was ingrained in me by my first superintendent, John Townsley at Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington state, that our mission was to see that the parks were protected and available to all and that we were to keep them “unimpaired” for generations yet to be born. In the decades that followed the 1872 establishment of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, successive generations of Americans added to the system those areas they felt deserved the highest degree of reverence and protection. Now it was my job to help preserve them.

Ours was a nonpartisan mission that had been strongly supported and strengthened by Republicans (such as Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon) and Democrats (such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter). But our job was always to serve the parks and the public, not the politicians. We stayed away from political battles, which was easy most of the time because the national parks enjoyed enormous political support from all administrations and both sides of the aisle in Congress. As a friend of mine used to say, we were “on the side of the angels.”

When I retired in 1997, after 32 years, I assumed the parks would continue to be well loved by politicians of all stripes. But soon after the election of 2000, things began to change. The Bush administration and its appointed leaders in the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service have made clear that the days of unwavering support for parks are over.

It has become painfully obvious that this president doesn’t value our park system’s priceless natural and cultural legacies and that he responds more to the pressures and influence of powerful business interests than to the needs of the parks.

Examples abound:

* Clean-air protections have been rolled back in ways that jeopardize Sequoia, Shenandoah and other national parks. Things will get even worse if the president’s absurdly titled “Clear Skies” initiative is passed.

* Intense budget pressures have reduced the Park Service’s ability to care for the parks and serve visitors.

* Training has been cut back drastically, and now the administration is threatening to outsource crucial jobs that require specialized training and skills, including those of naturalists, resources managers and scientists.

* Regulations formulated after much research and debate -- such as Yellowstone’s limits on noisy and polluting snowmobiles -- are being undercut.

* Expanded oil and gas drilling are disturbing Padre Island National Seashore and Dinosaur National Monument.

* Local developers have triumphed in getting the federal government to grant its water rights in Black Canyon, in Gunnison National Park to the state of Colorado.

I could go on and on. But these and many other actions on the part of Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, National Park Service Director Fran Mainella and others in the Interior Department have compelled a few former Park Service employees -- an ordinarily apolitical bunch -- to establish the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees. In the year since we started the group, our numbers have grown to more than 250 retirees. Included are half a dozen former directors and deputy directors of the Park Service, 15 former regional directors and deputy regional directors and nearly 90 former park superintendents and assistant superintendents. Every one of us wishes there was no need for such a group.

I take inspiration, though, from Newton Drury, director of the National Park Service from 1940 to 1951, the man under whose leadership my father began his service. He once said: “If we are going to succeed in preserving the greatness of the national parks, they must be held inviolate. They represent the last stands of primitive America. If we are going to whittle away at them, we should recognize, at the very beginning, that all such whittlings are cumulative and that the end result will be mediocrity.”

Today, the fundamental mission of the national park system is threatened as never before in its history. This is why I, and other members of the coalition, have decided to speak out for the national parks. We fear that the whittling is well underway, and we hope that the public will stand with us to defend the national park system against mediocrity.