As a long-time friend of America's national parks, I am pleased to report that according to recent opinion surveys National Park Service employees rank among the most trusted people in our society. But who, exactly, are these friendly men and women? And what is the nature of their challenging work? Such questions are rarely posed, much less answered.
The typical book about America's national parks is a lavishly illustrated travelogue: in essence, it provides the reader with a scenic tour from the Everglades to Yosemite, with other stops along the way. In these pages, however, my longtime friend Dwight Rettie takes on a less well-trod and in many ways much more interesting path. His book offers an insider's tour, not of the parks themselves, but of the national park system and the National Park Service, the agency responsible for its care.
One could not find a better guide. As a Park Service and Department of the Interior employee, Rettie's career spanned momentous years; by his retirement in 1986, he had served under six presidents and nine Interior secretaries. During the sixties and seventies, he witnessed the addition of more than sixty new units to the national park system. In 1980, he saw its gross acreage double overnight with President Carter's signing of the Alaska Lands Bill. And during the decade that followed, he saw the system under siege as Interior Secretaries James Watt and Donald Hodel unsuccessfully tried to turn back the clock on conservation.
This book reflects the devotion of someone whose adult life has been inextricably intertwined with conservation and parks. It is obvious that Dwight has thought long and hard about the national park system over many years. He is intimately familiar with its tremendous strengths, as he is with its troubling shortcomings. He understands the challenges of the future as well as he does the lessons of the past.
When Yellowstone, America's first national park, was established 122 years ago it was in many ways a fluke. Those who first articulated the national park idea did not understand its full implications. In particular, they did not understand that the park concept would, in time, come to be a crucible in which America began to forge a more tender relationship with the land.
Today, however, it is abundantly clear that the national park idea has indeed been a wonderful contribution to humankind. America's parks are living reminders of the ultimate power and ordered beauty of the natural world. Tens of millions of people travel endless miles to see them. Our park system has inspired 125 other nations to set aside parks of their own; about 3 percent of the Earth is now in parks, nature reserves, and other conservation areas. Dwell on that, for it is a miracle of sorts and becoming more so each day.
One of the great ironies of the American park system is that it was assembled without benefit of a blueprint. What we enjoy today has been stitched together over more than a century like a giant quilt--park by park--by the loving hands of thousands of people who wanted to save something precious for their children and grandchildren. In the words of former Park Service Director Russell Dickenson, "It is hard to imagine how even a conscious plan could have achieved so much so well." If each park is, as someone once said, an "island of hope," then the American archipelago stretches from northern Alaska to the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean to Guam in the Pacific, half a world away.
Fortunately, Rettie's love for the parks does not blind him to the challenges they now face. Certainly, no one is better qualified to diagnose the park system's troubles and prescribe a cure. Lacking an ideological ax to grind, he discusses, in meticulously balanced fashion, the highly politicized (and often bizarre) process by which new parks and monuments are established; the monumental intricacies of park planning and budgeting; the dramatic evolution of the ranger corps; the dangerous belief held by some Park Service administrators that more roads, visitors, and campgrounds are always better; the troubling deterioration of park system infrastructure; looming environmental threats; and the difficulties posed by skyrocketing visitation.
The concluding chapter is a précis describing how to make the agency more effective. In Dwight's view, "the greatest shortcoming of the national park system is that for all its majesty, for all the irreplaceable wonders it contains . . . for all the love that is bestowed upon it . . . it is not yet a real system." A unified mission and better management could help make the park system immune to assault from any quarter--a laudable goal all park lovers can embrace.
Dwight's book is a clarion call to action, a message that our park system is a living legacy, entrusted to the care of the National Park Service. Now, perhaps more than at any time in its history, the agency needs strong leadership and adequate funding to meet the challenges it faces. But even more than that, the system needs the vociferous and steadfast support of conservationists and other lovers of history and wild places and wild things.
So read this book, and then bring, if you haven't already, the national parks into your life. Seize every opportunity to visit them. If experience is any guide, they will enrich beyond measure, for they are a great gift, one of our nation's most inspired and enduring creations.