As the U.S. population expanded westward in the late 19th century, the idea that everyone, wealthy or not, should have access to undeveloped land found a new outlet: national parks. The 1916 law chartering the National Park Service directed it to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and . . . leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But that triggered debates about how best to do it. In 1919, several NPS founders set up the National Parks Association as an independent advocate for parks.
Within months, the association was fighting proposals to build dams for hydropower and irrigation in Yellowstone. Other campaigns followed—opposing logging and grazing livestock in national parks during World War II, and later against erecting dams in the Grand Canyon. It lobbied to create new parks, from Florida’s Everglades to the Alaskan tundra. Now known as the National Parks Conservation Association, it’s headed by president Tom Kiernan, MBA ’89, and supported by 325,000 members as well as philanthropists, foundations and corporate partners.
The job of chief parks watchdog is a big one: There are 391 units in the system, including historic sites, battlefields, monuments, seashores and 55 large “natural resource” parks like the Everglades and Yosemite. NPCA works closely with park officials, helping with their goals and speaking out when officials’ status as federal employees constrains them.
For example, when lobbyists pressed the Bush administration to issue regulations allowing park visitors to carry loaded guns, Kiernan denounced gun advocates for using national parks as a political vehicle. “Overturning Reagan-era rules that struck the right balance between the rights of gun owners and the safety of families and wildlife is a blow to the national parks and the 300 million visitors who enjoy them every year,” he said in a February 2008 press release.
Kiernan, who calls his work “a dream job,” is a lifelong kayaker and hiker whose love of the outdoors steered him toward a career protecting wild places. Before joining NPCA in 1998, he was president of the Audubon Society of New Hampshire. As a senior official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, he brokered a 1991 agreement resulting in a $450 million pollution-abatement project at a coal-burning power plant that was clouding Grand Canyon vistas.
Kiernan is equally passionate about protecting historic and cultural sites—and with good reason. His father’s name is one of the more than 58,000 etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
On Kiernan’s watch, NPCA has implemented new management tools to scrutinize park conditions and finances for the chronically underfunded system. The National Park Service runs an operating deficit of about $750 million each year and has a $9 billion backlog of one-time maintenance and preservation projects. Last spring it received more than $900 million in federal stimulus funds to start winnowing this list.
Since 1998 NPCA has helped place more than 200 graduate students in Park Service internships to develop business plans that apply private-sector standards and benchmarks to determine adequate staff and funding levels.
Through its Center for the State of the Parks, NPCA also creates metrics for assessing the health of cultural and natural resources. Each year it rates 12 to 15 parks with scorecards that pinpoint where attention is most urgently needed. In 2008 it graded the overall health of the system. For natural resources, the parks rated a 70; for cultural resources like historic buildings and museums, the system scored only 61.
“Tom’s able to zero in on the most important impediments, and he recognizes how the business and academic worlds can help the parks,” says Pamela Matson, dean of Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences, who served on the NPCA board from 2001 through 2007. “He’s also very evenhanded and approaches the issues in a nonpartisan way.”
One such issue is “inholdings”—privately owned land within park boundaries that could be used for activities like mining. NPCA is helping the Park Service raise funds to purchase 1.8 million acres within parks such as Gettysburg and Valley Forge, where commercial development has been proposed.
There are a number of other problems. Regional air pollution reduces visibility by 50 to 80 percent at Joshua Tree in Southern California, Rocky Mountain in Colorado and Acadia in Maine. Some Everglades fish contain high levels of mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources. Researchers at Glacier National Park in Montana predict that all of the park’s signature glaciers may melt by 2020.
“You can’t fence the parks off from global environmental challenges, so we need to address them through coalitions of like-minded groups, and Tom is a leader in doing that,” says Matson. For example, NPCA lobbies for tighter air pollution controls alongside national and regional environmental groups and the American Lung Association.
Kiernan sees the run-up to the National Park Service centennial in 2016 as a key opportunity to boost public support, and to consider broadening the parks’ future role. “Maintaining biodiversity wasn’t a goal when the park system was created—we were shooting large predators, not protecting them. Neither was protecting cultural resources, or symbols of diversity in U.S. history. But the Park Service is getting better at interpreting controversial historical sites and showing why they mattered,” he says. For example, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail commemorates the forced removal of 12,000 Cherokees from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma in the 1830s, and the Manzanar National Historic Site in California preserves remains of a camp where thousands of Japanese Americans were interned during World War II.
Kiernan would like the federal government to create a process for prioritizing additions to the park system. “Expansion is ad hoc right now, and there hasn’t been much growth in the past decade,” he says. But Kiernan is optimistic. “We’ve got metrics in place, funding is increasing, and we’ve got a big focusing event to help us think about what kind of resources we want the parks to be.”
JENNIFER WEEKS is a writer in Watertown, Mass.
